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

Benjamin Zelvin's jewelry store looted

Benjamin Zelvin locked his jewelry store at 372 Lenox Avenue around 11.30 PM on March 19. He may also have boarded up the windows, as  a Home News story mentioned boards later being pulled away. Although there are no reports of looting in this area at that time, there apparently were crowds or other activity that led him to seek police protection for his store before leaving it. The World-Telegram reported that he told a representative of the city Comptroller's office that he waited more than half an hour after calling the station house before police reached his store. Those officers apparently did not remain at Zelvin's store as it was later looted; police told Zelvin "they didn't know anything about it." However, Officer Astel of the 25th Precinct arrested two men, John Henry, a sixteen-year-old Black student, and Oscar Leacock, a twenty-year-old Brazilian laborer around 2.15 AM at Lenox Avenue and 126th Street, and reported that he found on them a quantity of jewelry, which the men admitted they had taken from Zelvin's store. A Home News story reported that they had "pushed away one of the boards" in order to take "several articles of merchandise." The officer then had the men take him to the store, which was only three blocks north, where he found all the windows broken. Zelvin later identified the jewelry found on the men as coming from his store. In the charge against Henry and Leacock the value of the jewelry is initially typed as $100, but then struck out and $75 handwritten in its place. Zelvin later assessed his total losses as far more. When he joined other merchants in suing the city for losses suffered in the disorder, the World-Telegram reported that he asked for $2685 in damages (stories reporting those suits in the New York Sun and New York Post did not mention Zelvin). The New York Evening Journal reported Zelvin told the Comptroller that his losses were "because of the lack of police protection."

There is no newspaper coverage of the looting; Henry and Leacock appear only in the four most comprehensive lists of those arrested published in black newspapers and the New York Evening Journal. The details come from the District Attorney's case file; as the grand jury sent the cases to the Court of Special Sessions, the only information is from the Magistrate Court affidavit.  The 28th Precinct Police Blotter recorded that the judges convicted both men.

Zelvin appears in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 21 to charge an additional man, a thirty-one-year-old Black man named Henry Goodwin, with burglary (the only other individual charged for an offense related to the disorder in the court that day is John Henry, although Zelvin is not listed as the complainant in that case). Goodwin appears only in the docket book and the 28th Precinct Police Blotter; there are no details of his alleged crime. If he did take goods from 372 Lenox Avenue, they were of little value. When Goodwin appears again the charge is reduced to petit larceny and the Magistrate transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions. Like Henry and Leacock, the Police Blotter records that the judges convicted him.

It is possible that Zelvin did not continue to operate his jewelry store. It does not appear in the MCCH Business survey in the second half of 1935, which has no record for 372 Lenox Avenue. The Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941 is from an angle that does not offer a clear view of the business at that address.

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