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

Arrow Sales store windows broken

The Arrow Sales 5 & 10c store at 2318 8th Avenue is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street and walked west to 8th Avenue and looked a block north and a block south of that intersection. The Arrow Sales store is midway down the block between 125th and 124th Streets. Three other stores in the building just north of this address on the southeast corner are also identified by the La Prensa reporter as having broken windows: Andy's Florist on the corner and vacant stores at 2324 8th Avenue and 2320 8th Avenue. Police arrested Viola Woods for allegedly smashing the windows of a a third vacant store at 2314 8th Avenue, to the south of this store. It is possible that other stores in this area suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded their list by noting they had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").



In the first hours of the disorder, crowds around Kress' store on West 125th Street moved down 8th Avenue to 124th Street, to the rear of the store. However, windows in the Arrow Sales do not seem to have been broken then. Smashing glass was reported in the area around 8:00 PM and then again around 9:30 PM, and groups of people began moving south on 8th Avenue around 10:00 PM. The establishment of a police perimeter around the corners of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street beginning around 7:00 PM appears to have prevented merchandise from being taken from the store, even if it could not protect store windows. Only the Danbury Hat store north of 125th Street was reported as being looted.

No other sources mention Arrow Sales, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey does include the white-owned business, which it described as an "Independent 5 & 10c store" at this address. Advertisements announcing the opening of the store appear in the New York Age on November 10 and November 17, 1934, the latter noting it had a staff of four Black women and two Black men. The Tax Department photograph shows a one-story building constructed after 1935.

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