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Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

Alfred J. Kahn, Police and Children: A Study of the Juvenile Aid Bureau of the New York City Police Department (New York: Citizens' Committee on Children of New York City, 1951), 12-14.

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Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted 166 plain 2024-02-23T22:14:27+00:00
When Charles Hurley, a floorwalker, and a Kress' store detective confronted Lino Rivera, an unemployed sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy, about stealing a pocketknife in Kress’ store, and started pushing him out of the store, the boy bit the hands of Hurley and a white window dresser who came to their aid, Steve Urban. After initially indicating that they wanted Rivera charged with assault, the two men ultimately did not ask police to arrest him. The incident is treated here as an assault as the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York American, and Daily News listed the two men among the injured.

As the incident between Rivera and the store staff triggered the disorder, it was widely reported in the press and investigated by the MCCH. This analysis relies on testimony given in MCCH public hearings as that was by far the most complete and detailed evidence. Newspaper narratives varied in detail, consistently reporting only that a boy had been grabbed by store staff for taking merchandise, and later released, but omitting most other details. Several white newspapers also published separate stories based on statements made by Rivera at the West 123rd police station during the disorder or at his home the next day that included additional details of why he was in the store and his encounter with the store staff but not of subsequent events in the store.

Rivera had begun the day by taking the subway to Brooklyn, in pursuit of job as an errand boy, he told reporters for the New York American and New York Herald Tribune. Finding the job already filled, he returned to Harlem. Getting off the subway at West 125th Street, Rivera decided to go to a show or movie at one of the theaters that lined the street, perhaps at the Apollo Theater opposite Kress' store, as a story in the New York Evening Journal claimed. When the show ended, Rivera went into Kress' store, a detail also reported in the New York Sun. He said he did so because he had "nothing to do," according to the New York Post, "just to look around I guess," according to the New York World-Telegram, "to walk through to 124th Street," according to the New York American, and "to take a short cut home," according to the New York Herald Tribune.

Testifying in a public hearing of the MCCH, Hurley, a twenty-eight-year-old white resident of the Bronx, said he was with the store manager Jackson Smith in an office overlooking the rear of the store when he saw Rivera take a pocketknife from a counter around 2:30 PM. Calling down to the store detective, he pointed out Rivera and then headed to the floor himself. Rivera later admitted to reporters that he did take the knife, after it "caught his eye," according to the New York Post or "attracted" him according to the New York World-Telegram and New York American, or because it "matched a fountain pen set he had," according to the New York Herald Tribune. (The New York Sun mistakenly reported that it was chocolate that Rivera had taken.) When Rivera denied having the knife, Hurley took it from the boy’s pocket. Both Rivera and Hurley testified that the men started to push him out of the store. According to Hurley, near the front door Rivera became scared and started to lash out at them. Rivera reportedly told journalists from the New York World-Telegram, New York Post, and New York Evening Journal that he had told the men he could walk out on his own, and tried to shake free of their hold, "really started fighting" when, as he also testified in a MCCH hearing, Hurley said, "Let's take him down the cellar and beat hell out of him.” Hurley denied making that statement; he told the MCCH hearing that he held Rivera around his shoulders while the store detective tried to calm the boy. As a struggle developed, another store employee, Steve Urban, a thirty-nine-year-old white window dresser, also grabbed hold of Rivera, according to Hurley. Once the group was through the front door and into the store's vestibule, a recessed area of the street surrounded by display windows, the store detective went to get a Crime Prevention Bureau officer. That police agency provided an alternative to having children arrested; its officers instead undertaking investigations of their conditions in order to refer them to social agencies to better prevent “juvenile delinquency.” Kress store staff turned most of the boys they caught shoplifting over to the Crime Prevention Bureau, according to Hurley, and had police arrest only one or two a week.

Sometime after the store detective left, Rivera bit both Hurley and Urban on the hands and wrist while "trying to get away," he told a public hearing, reportedly explaining to journalists from the New York World-Telegram and New York Post that "I didn't want a licking." The struggle in the vestibule attracted the attention of Patrolman Donahue, who was the nearest of several police officers on West 125th Street at the time (identified in some newspapers as a traffic officer and by Rivera in a MCCH hearing as a mounted patrolman). Donahue took Rivera back into the store, to near the candy counter at the front, to get away from a curious crowd gathering on 125th Street, and sent an officer to get an ambulance to provide treatment for Hurley and Urban. (He told the MCCH hearing that the officer was his partner Keel, or another patrolman named Walton; the call log records the man's name as Miller, who was later identified by the store manager as a Black officer.) The telephone call to Headquarters was logged at 2:30 PM, followed by one from Police Headquarters to Harlem Hospital at 2:35 PM, with the ambulance bringing Dr. Sayet recorded in the hospital records as having arrived at 2:40 PM. Those records provide better evidence of the timing of the incident than Donahue’s testimony that he witnessed the struggle at 2:15 PM. Soon after the ambulance arrived, the manager, Jackson Smith, came to the front of the store, he testified in a public hearing, after being told a crowd had gathered by a staff member. Informed that a Crime Prevention Bureau officer had been called, Smith decided there was “nothing further for him to do,” and he returned to his office. A few minutes later Alfred Eldridge, a Black Crime Prevention Bureau officer, arrived. Usually the store staff would have turned Rivera over to Eldridge, who would have taken Rivera with him. However, on this occasion Hurley and Urban told Eldridge they wanted the boy arrested and charged with assault. Hurley told a public hearing he had gone to the rear of the store before Eldridge arrived, and did not want Rivera arrested, but the officer was clear that he spoke with both Hurley and Urban. The store manager similarly told a later public hearing that “Hurley wants to press charges for biting.” Eldridge could not take Rivera with him if he was arrested: “The job and purpose of our bureau is not to arrest a child," the told the MCCH hearing. He telephoned his superior, and told him that “the 5 & 10 wanted the boy arrested.” In response that officer told him to “let the patrolman take care of it due to the fact that he was first on case.” So after about twenty-five minutes at Kress, around 3:15 PM, Eldridge left the store.

However, Eldridge testified he later found out that soon after he left, “the store officials changed their mind.” Donahue simplified those events in the public hearing, testifying that “The boy was not arrested, but was taken through the basement to 124th Street and sent home.” He did not mention Eldridge or who reversed the decision to arrest Rivera. Hurley’s self-interested statement that he did not want him arrested made Urban responsible. Urban himself was not among those who testified before a MCCH public hearing. It does seem that it was Urban who Donahue said was with him when he released Rivera; the officer referred to him not by name but as “the window dresser.” They took Rivera out the rear rather than on to 125th Street as there was a crowd in front of the store and Donahue “didn’t want to start something,” he told a public hearing. He was clearly anxious enough about the situation in the store to ignore another option that Eldridge had given him, “that in the event that Kress Store did not want to press charges, that the boy could be handed over to us for supervision,” according to the Crime Prevention Bureau officer’s testimony. After releasing Rivera on to 124th Street, Donahue left the store, at around 3:30 PM. Many of the fifty or so mostly Black women shopping in the store observed these events, after their attention had been attracted by the struggle between the two men and Rivera, and the appearance of an ambulance. None of these women testified in a public hearing. A Black man named L. F. Cole told a MCCH public hearing that he saw Rivera being taken to the basement by two men. As they had not seen Rivera leave the store, groups of women concerned to find out what had become of him remained in the store until Smith closed it and police pushed them out sometime around 5:00 PM or 5:30 PM.

Bites are a relatively minor injury, and the hospital record indicates that both men received treatment at the scene and were not taken to the hospital. Hurley did still have a scar when he testified at a MCCH public hearing on April 20. Arthur Garfield Hays, the member of the MCCH chairing the hearing, examined it, announcing that “I should say enough [of a scar] to indicate there was a bite,” adding in response to a question from the audience that he saw four teeth marks.” Only one other individual in the disorder was described as having been bitten, Arthur Block, a Black man. He appeared among lists of the injured in only three publications, with no details provided of the circumstances in which he was assaulted.

The significantly less detailed narratives of what happened between Rivera and the store staff published in newspapers largely reflected what Inspector Di Martini told a journalist working for the Afro-American and others in front of the store around 7:30 PM: "A boy stole some little article here this afternoon. The manager caught him, grabbed him by the arm, and was taking him in the back when a woman screamed. The crowd gathered. The manager did not press charges, and let the boy go home through the back.” (Di Martini’s information at that time came only from interviewing Jackson Smith and Hurley, as both Donahue and Eldridge were off duty and would not learn of the disorder until the next day.) Missing from his narrative was Rivera biting the men, a detail that was also missing from stories in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York World-Telegram, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Worker. However, the assault was mentioned in the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, Daily News, New York Post, Atlanta World, New York Age, Philadelphia Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, La Prensa, and in Time magazine and the New Republic. Only the New York American, Daily News, and New York Herald Tribune included language that gave a particular slant to the assault. The New York American and Daily News describing Rivera as “hysterical” in his response to being grabbed by Hurley and the store detective, while the New York Herald Tribune labelled him pugnacious. The New York Age reported that “someone” had hit Rivera, the New York Herald Tribune and Brooklyn Daily Eagle that Hurley or Urban “slapped him," or “slugged him” according to the Pittsburgh Courier, with the New York Age mistakenly reporting that he was being treated at Harlem Hospital. That story was in a special edition of the New York Age published in the midst of the confusion early in the disorder. Two stories, in the New York American and New York Sun, had Rivera leave the store rather than being released. A story in The New Republic by white journalist Hamilton Basso included dialogue, almost certainly invented, between Rivera and the two men who grabbed him and comments from a crowd around him (Basso also mixed up the sequence of events inside and outside the store after Rivera's release).
- Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted (Part 2)
- Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted in secondary sources
2:00 PM to 2:30 PM

Just after 2:00 PM, Lino Rivera, a sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy, walked through the front doors of the S. H. Kress 5-10-25c store on West 125th Street. Earlier in the day, around noon, he had taken the subway to Brooklyn, having heard about a job opening for an errand boy. The position had been filled by the time he arrived. It was not the first time he had unsuccessfully visited Brooklyn looking for work. Rivera had stopped attending Textile High School six months earlier to work on a delivery truck, but had to leave that job after a month. His mother, Anna, had a job at a powder-puff factory, but his father had died soon after the family arrived in New York City in 1923. Mother and son shared an apartment with another woman and her child on the 7th floor of 272 Manhattan Avenue. Returning from Brooklyn, Rivera had exited the subway at 125th Street rather than continuing two more stops to his home fourteen blocks further south. He had then gone to a show or movie at one of the theaters that lined the street west of the subway station, the main entertainment and commercial district north of Central Park.
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Rivera would have been far from alone in coming to 125th Street (as this photograph taken a month later showed). As well as the subway station on Lenox Ave, a bus route on 7th Avenue and an elevated train line on 8th Avenue also stopped at 125th Street, and a street car line ran its length. In the 1930s, the residential districts south as well as north of 125th Street had filled with Black residents, who had become a majority of the district’s customers. As a result, Rivera would have had his choice of theaters, no longer having to avoid several because they admitted only white patrons. To the contrary, theaters had begun to change as their patronage did, with the Apollo opening the previous year with theatrical shows catering to Black audiences as well as movies and a Black staff. That theater may have been Rivera’s choice; it was opposite the Kress store. With nothing to do after the show ended, he wandered into the store to look around; it also offered a shortcut to 124th Street on his way home.

In going into the Kress store, Rivera was visiting another attraction that drew people to 125th Street, the large stores of various kinds that, like the theaters, spanned the entire width of a block. A 5-and-10-cent store, Kress, like the Woolworth’s store to its east, offered cheaper merchandise than the street's department stores, Blumstein, Koch, and McCrory. Small counters displaying different types of merchandise were scattered throughout the store, behind which stood white staff. The lack of Black sales staff in stores on 125th Street, all of which were white-owned, had been the target of boycott campaigns and pickets for the previous three years, although the Kress store had not been one of those singled out. Around fifty other people were in the store when Rivera walked in, almost all of them Black women, a clientele to which the boycott campaign had drawn attention in making the case for hiring Black staff. Rivera made his way through the store to the rear half, which was twice the width of the shopfloor at the front. A pocketknife on a counter caught his attention. He reached out and put it in his jacket pocket without anyone behind the counter seeing what he had done. His action, however, did not go unnoticed. In one of the offices fifteen feet above that section of Kress’ store, Charles Hurley, a twenty-eight-year-old white floorwalker who supervised the sales staff, was watching the counters with the store manager, Jackson Smith, and saw Rivera take the knife. He called out to the store detective, pointed out the boy, and headed downstairs. Catching boys shoplifting was a regular part of the men’s work. Petty theft was one of the responses to unemployment, poverty, and lots of time to fill in that led to boys from Harlem appearing in the Children’s Court, although far less common than violating regulations against shining shoes on the street, selling newspapers after 7:00 PM, hitching on street trolleys, and riding the subway without paying – the last of which Rivera had been arrested for just a week earlier. Without a nickel to pay for a subway trip back to Harlem after another trip to Brooklyn responding to a job ad, he had used tinfoil from a cigarette packet to make a slug to put in the subway turnstile. He later told a magistrate in the Brooklyn Adolescent Court he had used slugs twenty-five times before without being caught. On that day, a railroad police officer saw him. When he took the pocketknife, Rivera was on parole, due back in court the next week.

Arriving on the shop floor, Hurley grabbed Rivera and demanded the pocketknife. When Rivera denied having taken the knife, Hurley took it from his jacket pocket. Telling the boy to leave the store, he pushed him toward the 125th Street entrance, joined by the store detective. Rivera tried to shake off the men walking on either side of him, telling them he could walk out on his own. As they neared the front entrance Hurley said, "Let's take him down the cellar and beat hell out of him.” Scared of being beaten, Rivera began to “really fight,” throwing his arms around. In response, Hurley put his arm around the boy’s shoulders to restrain him, helped by a window dresser, Steve Urban, a thirty-nine-year-old white man, who also put his arms around Rivera. Once out of store, in the vestibule, the store detective left to get an officer from the Crime Prevention Bureau. That police agency provided an alternative to arrests of children, with its officers instead undertaking investigations of their conditions in order to refer them to social agencies to better prevent “juvenile delinquency.” Staff at the Kress store referred most of the boys they caught shoplifting to the Crime Prevention Bureau and had police arrest only one or two a week. A referral meant that Rivera would not face a trip to court after being caught in the store like he had when caught putting a slug in the subway turnstile.

However, at that moment, Rivera, was more worried about a beating from the Kress store staff than what he faced from police and the courts. Continuing to try to get away after the store detective left, Rivera bit Hurley and Urban on the hands with which they had hold of him. Standing on the street outside the Kress store, Patrolman Donahue saw this struggle and came to investigate, as did at least two other police, his partner Patrolman Keel and a Black officer named Miller. That there were that number of officers near the Kress store reflected both how busy 125th Street was, and the additional police stationed there after the picketing of businesses the previous year. Donahue sent Miller to call an ambulance to treat Hurley and Urban and took Rivera and the two men back inside the store, away from a curious crowd that was gathering.