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

Anthony Avitable's grocery store looted

Anthony Avitable's grocery store at 381 Lenox Avenue was closed when crowds appeared on Lenox Avenue. That section of Lenox Avenue was one in which businesses suffered extensive damage with looting beginning around 11:30 PM. Around midnight, Avitable got news of the disorder in Harlem and drove back from the Bronx. He told the city comptroller that as he drove over the 138th Street bridge he saw crowds "just breaking into my store," the New York Sun reported. Seeing no police near the store, he drove on to the 28th Precinct Station on West 123rd Street and at 12:30 AM reported the looting, according to the New York Post. Officers there said they "couldn't do anything for me," and that he should contact police headquarters. When Avitable called, "a police officer at headquarters told him over the phone: 'I'll have men there in two minutes.'" They took forty-five minutes to arrive. Avitable's store likely suffered more damage in the violence around 1:00 AM, when Alice Mitchell and Hugh Young were injured by flying glass. No one arrested during the disorder was charged with looting this store.



Avitable joined one hundred and five other white business owners in suing the city for damages suffered by their stores during the disorder. The only mentions of his business are in newspaper stories about those suits. Those stories located his store at 383 Lenox Avenue. A second storeowner who sued the city, Manny Zipp, was also reported as having a grocery store at 383 Lenox Avenue by the New York Sun, New York Post, and New York World-Telegram. Photographs of 383 Lenox Avenue show only one business at that address, the Savoy Food Market, but there was a grocery store next door, with a Krasdale sign, at 381 Lenox Avenue, that appears to be the store that Avitable owned (the Krasdale company were wholesalers in 1935, not store operators). While the New York Sun identified Anthony Avitable as the owner of the Savoy Food Market, the New York Post and New York World-Telegram identified him only as the owner of a separate grocery store. He appeared separately from the Savoy Food Market in the New York Sun and New York Amsterdam News stories about those who brought the first twenty suits. Zipp had only been in business for three days. Newsreel footage from the day after the disorder shows a banner reading "Grand Opening" hanging over the entrance to the Savoy Food Market (in the Daily News photograph discussed below that a piece of dark fabric has been hung to obscure that banner, or perhaps the banner has simply been reversed). Zipp also reported that his losses, $721 compared to the $537 claimed by Avitable, forced him out of business. It was the Savoy Food Market that went out of business; there was a different store at 383 Lenox Avenue in both the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935, and the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941. The grocery store with the Krasdale sign, Avitable's business, did appear in both the MCCH business survey and the Tax Department photograph. He may have been helped by damages paid by the city. One of the claimants awarded damages in the March 4, 1936, trial in the New York Supreme Court listed in the New York Herald Tribune was a grocer at 381 Lenox Avenue. However, the story identified the owner as Louis Berenson. That could be an error as no one of that name appears in any other source related to the disorder.

An unpublished image taken by a photographer for the Hearst newspapers, and a similar image published in the Daily News, captured the clean-up on the section of Lenox Avenue containing Avitable's store the morning after the disorder. The windows are missing, and both the display and the shelves within the store are empty. Some goods appear to have been thrown on to the street; a man is clearing debris with a shovel. Zipp's Savoy Food Market, and Jacob Saloway's cigar store on the corner, also have no windows and empty displays and shelves. Saloway joined Avitable and Zipp in suing the city.
 

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