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• 1 2021-11-21T20:18:50+00:00 Laundry window broken 38 plain 2024-06-03T14:21:22+00:00 A laundry at 367 Lenox Avenue had its window broken during the disorder. The Chinese owner had tried to protect his store by emulating Black business owners in putting a sign in his window identifying it as not a white-owned business. Where the signs that appeared on Black-owned stores read "Colored Store," “Colored,” “Black,” and “This Store Owned by Colored,” the Chinese laundryman's sign read "Me Colored Too." It failed to deter one or more people in the crowds on the street from smashing the window. None of those arrested for breaking windows during the disorder were charged with targeting this store.
  
  Together with the damage done to Hispanic-owned businesses on and around West 116th Street, the windows broken in the laundry highlight both that Harlem's business sector was composed of more than just the Black and white owners mentioned in newspaper stories, and that the crowd's targets during the disorder were not limited to businesses owned by whites. While several Hispanic-owned businesses were among those reported damaged or looted during the disorder, this laundry is the only Chinese-owned business mentioned in the sources. However, the information on the Hispanic-owned businesses was found only in La Prensa; no Chinese-language publication that reported on the disorder has been found. Chinese-owned laundries and restaurants were an established and pervasive presence in Harlem. The MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 recorded 209 Chinese-owned businesses (3.5%, 209 of 5971), including 176 laundries and twenty-three restaurants dispersed throughout the area from 110th to 155th Street, from east of Amsterdam Avenue to the west of Madison Avenue.
  
  
  
  None of the four Black-owned businesses recorded as being on this block in the MCCH business survey — a beauty parlor next door and a tailor four buildings north, and a candy store and grocery store across the avenue to the south at 360 Lenox Avenue — are reported to have put signs in their windows, so where the laundry owner got his inspiration from is uncertain. Several white-owned businesses around the laundry reported being looted. Irving Stekin, who owned a grocery store one buildings north of the laundry complained that the crowds in the area were too large for police on the scene to control, according to a report in the New York World-Telegram. His store, at 371 Lenox Avenue, and another he owned at 363 Lenox Avenue, and Michael D'Agostino's business at 361 Lenox Avenue were all looted, as were stores at 372 and 374 Lenox Avenue across the street. The South Harlem Rotisserie at 365 Lenox Avenue, like the laundry, only had windows broken. Attacks on businesses in this area likely began around 11:30 PM.
  
  The laundry and its sign were reported by the Associated Press and in the New York Herald Tribune and Daily News as a vignette separate from the stories they published about the events of the disorder. In this form, it was presented as a joke at the expense of the Chinese laundryman. The New York Herald Tribune's story read:

  The proprietor of a Chinese laundry at 367 Lenox Avenue resorted to a futile trick yesterday to protect his shop from Harlem rioters. His Negro neighbors hung signs bearing the word "Colored" in their store windows on reports that the rioters would not molest places occupied by Negroes. The laundryman hung out a large placard inscribed "Me colored too." Someone promptly smashed his window.

  An additional layer of racist language was added to the story in the Daily News, with the proprietor becoming "the oriental boss ironer," the "futile" trick becoming "wily," and the laundryman hanging out the sign becoming "the clever (or so he thought) laundryman." Louise Thompson also mentioned the sign in her memoir as a joke, "a humorous side" to the disorder in the first transcription and "an ironically humorous incident" in the edited version. Similarly, Langston Hughes mentioned the sign as a "touch of humor" in his biography of Lt. Battle; based on the interview notes, Battle himself did not mention the sign.
  
  Two other sources mention the laundry and its sign without treating it as a joke, seemingly having missed the context of the information as they also departed from the account in other details and omitted the address of the business. “A Chinese laundryman pasted a placard inscribed 'Me colored, too,' and two Negroes immediately shattered his window,” the New York World-Telegram reported in a story that shifted the events to the night after the disorder. A story in the Black-owned Indianapolis Recorder folded the laundry into its discussion of signs being put up to identify Black-owned businesses, and reported that the sign in the laundry has the same result as those in Black-owned businesses: "His place was not touched." As this is the only source presenting that version of the events, the laundry is treated here as having broken windows.
  
  The laundry appears in the MCCH business survey taken from June to December 1935, and is visible later, between 1939 and 1941, when the Tax Department photograph of the building was taken.