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Benjamin Zelvin's jewelry store looted
There were no newspaper stories about the looting. Henry and Leacock appeared only in the four most comprehensive lists of those arrested published in Black newspapers and in the New York Evening Journal. The District Attorney's case file contained some details; as the grand jury sent the cases to the Court of Special Sessions, the only information was from the Magistrate Court affidavit. The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded that the judges convicted both men.
Zelvin appeared 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 was John Henry, although Zelvin was not listed as the complainant in that case). Goodwin appeared only in the docket book and the 28th Precinct Police Blotter; there were no details of his alleged crime. If he did take goods from 372 Lenox Avenue, they were worth less than $100. When Goodwin appeared again, the charge was reduced to petit larceny and the Magistrate transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions. Like Henry and Leacock, the police blotter recorded that the judges convicted him.
Zelvin had started his own business soon after arriving in the city in 1904. By 1918 at the latest, when he registered for the draft, his business was located at 372 Lenox Avenue. By that time Zelvin was also living in Harlem, at 327 Lenox Avenue, where he still resided at the time of the 1920 federal census. Sometime before the state census in 1925, he relocated to a house he bought on 83rd Street in Brooklyn, which is where he lived at the time of the disorder, according to the 1940 census. It was possible that Zelvin did not reopen his jewelry store in Harlem after the disorder. It did not appear in the MCCH Business survey in the second half of 1935, which recorded no business at 372 Lenox Avenue. The Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941 was from an angle that did not offer a clear view of the business at that address. By the time the fifty-six year old Zelvin registered for the draft in 1942, he listed his place of business as 4116 8th Avenue in Brooklyn.
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This page references:
- "Transcripts of Police Blotter - Precinct 28, March 19 & 20, 1935," MCCH - Juvenile Delinquency - 1935-36, Departmental Correspondence. Box 34, Folder 1 (Roll 171), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945.
- Harlem Magistrates Court docket book
- "106 Suits Filed Under Mob Law in Harlem Riot," New York World-Telegram, July 23, 1935 [clipping].
- District Attorney's Closed Case Files, 204032 (1935) (New York City Municipal Archives).
- World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918, M1509, National Archives and Records Administration (Ancestry.com).
- "Business Men Score 'Pampering' of Reds in Protest to Mayor on Riots," Home News, March 22, 1935, 1, 11.
- Draft Registration Cards for New York City, 1940-1947, Records of the Selective Service System, Record Group 147, National Archives and Records Administration (Ancestry.com).
- New York State Population Census, 1925, Election District 33, District 16, Page 24, Brooklyn, New York City (Ancestry.com).
- "Riot Victims Ask Relief," New York Evening Journal, July 23, 1935 [clipping].
- US Census, 1940, Enumeration District 24-179, Sheet 61A, Brooklyn, Kings, New York (Ancestry.com).