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

Feinstein v. City of New York, 157 Misc 157 (1935).

Case Law

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Hardware store looted and set on fire Sometime during the disorder, the hardware store at 431 Lenox Avenue was looted. Between 11:00 PM and midnight the store was set on fire. So too was the business to the store's left, Anna Rosenberg's notion store at 429 Lenox Avenue. Herbert Canter, who owned the pharmacy several stores to the south, at 419 Lenox Avenue on the corner of West 131st Street, arrived at 11:00 PM to try and protect his business. He remained until 5:00 AM, and testified in the Municipal Court in the trial of Rosenberg's suit for damages from the city that he saw the fire but not who started it. What Canter did report seeing was "a "mob" carrying bricks, stones, and bottles, as well as canned goods, march down the street shouting, "Down with the whites! Let's get what we can," and hurling missiles through store windows. A block north, David Schmoockler, the manager of William Feinstein’s liquor store at 452 Lenox Avenue, also saw a crowd of around thirty people. Between 11:00 PM and midnight he watched as they "created disturbances, hurled various missiles, broke store windows, set fire to some stores, pillaged others, and in general damaged property of various merchants in the locality," according to Justice Shalleck's summary of his testimony in the Municipal Court. A similar narrative of how the store was looted and set on fire was provided in the caption to a photograph from the International News Photo agency taken the next day: "A store at 431 Lenox Avenue was put to the torch after rioters had smashed its windows with missiles and had helped themselves to stock in the windows and the store itself. The interior of the shop was a shambles after rioters had passed, and firemen had extinguished the fire." The photograph was not taken at the time of those events, so the source or reliability of the narrative was uncertain. Another fire reported during the disorder was set just after midnight a block to the south at 400 Lenox Avenue. Firefighters would have been able to get to the stores relatively quickly from the firehouse at 180 West 137th Street. No one arrested for looting was identified as having stolen goods from the store.

A Daily News photograph showed smoke coming out of the store window and doors, and firefighters on the scene fighting the fire. One was swinging an axe at the display window, while a second firefighter stood behind him. A third firefighter was just inside the store, his boots visible beneath the smoke. In the original photograph, cropped from the published version, a hose ran across the photograph to the right in the direction of Rosenberg's notion store. A photograph of the same scene published in the Home News had that hose running to the left in the foreground and another hose going into the hardware store, and three firefighters in the doorway with their backs to the camera. The caption on that photograph misidentified it as a tailor's shop at 429 Lenox Avenue. Two different captions for the Daily News photograph also misidentified the location. The published image is reported as a "tailor shop at 420 Lexington Ave," an address well outside Harlem. The original version from the newspaper's photo morgue (which can be viewed at Getty Images) located the store at 420 Lenox Avenue. The Tax Department photographs of that building make clear that the address was incorrect: those storefronts sit above or below street level accessed by stairs (those buildings also featured in one of Berenice Abbott's 1936 photographs of New York City, which can be viewed in the New York Public Library Digital Collections). Across the street, however, the stores had street level entrances. The Tax Department photograph cataloged as 429 Lenox Avenue showed a six-story building with four store fronts, two either side of the door leading to the apartments on the upper floors. In the MCCH business survey, the beauty salon to the left was listed as 425 Lenox Avenue and the jewelers as 427 Lenox Avenue. The store to the right of the door would therefore be 429; the Hoisery sign visible in the Tax Department photograph confirms that it was Rosenberg's notion store, as hoisery was a name often used for notion stores. The photograph of the store on fire included a portion of the building to the right that matches the windows that would be 431 Lenox Avenue in the Tax Department photograph. (The MCCH business survey, as it did on occasion, jumbled the addresses of the stores next to the jeweler, putting the hardware store at 429 not 431 Lenox Avenue and the stationary store next to it at 431 not 433 Lenox Avenue, and left out Rosenberg's store).

Burned shelves in the window and further inside the store and damaged merchandise were visible in the photograph of the fire. Another Daily News photograph showed the damaged interior of the store the morning after the disorder, and a white man and woman, presumably the owner and his wife, assessing the damage. Boards covering the destroyed windows and the missing glass in the door are visible behind them, together with a white man who appeared to be boarding up the store. Material hanging from the ceiling highlights the damage from the fire. Damaged merchandise covered the floor and the display table in the middle of the store, while the shelves to the right of the couple were still full of stock. Again, the address was misidentified in the caption, this time as 429 Lenox Avenue. However, in the background, the store window can be seen to the left of the door, so on the right from the street side. The Tax Department photograph showed that the doors to the two storefronts are side-by-side, so the store with the window to the right is 431 Lenox Avenue, not 429 Lenox Avenue. The same smashed goods and shelves still full of merchandise were visible, with boarded-up windows and fire damage in the background, in a similar photograph of the damaged store interior published in the Afro-American. The caption to that image identified the business as a hardware store. Two white men stood in the store, the same man in a coat and hat as in the New York Daily News photograph, and a man in a suit and tie. More of the store to the left of the men was visible, showing that the shelves on the wall and the left side of the table in the center have been burned. The fire apparently did not reach much further than the front of the table. A third photograph of the interior, also published in the Afro-American, provided the opposite view, from the door into the store, and showed shelves without any apparent fire damage (the caption gives the store address as 431 Lenox Avenue but misidentified the business as a notion store). The clashes between firefighters and the crowd on the street mentioned in the caption to that photograph were reported by stories in other newspapers as happening at Lash's store a block to the south, not the hardware store.

Two other photographs showed the damaged exterior of the store and the adjacent notion store at 429 Lenox Avenue after the disorder. In an Associated Press photograph, published in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and Afro-American, smashed display windows and doors could be seen in both stores, together with debris piled in front of the hardware store, likely a combination of material from the ceiling and the display window. Notwithstanding the damage to the windows, both stores appeared to still contain significant amounts of merchandise. A police officer and a Black man stood to one side, in front of the distinctive sign of the business to the right of the hardware store seen in other photographs. Patrolmen were stationed outside a number of damaged businesses the day after the disorder so featured in photographs of other locations. The Black man seemed to be posing for the camera, likely at the request of the photographer. A second photograph, published in the Daily Mirror, showed a man on a ladder boarding up the hardware store windows, matching the man and repairs seen in the background of the photograph of the interior damage. (None of the captions to these photographs gave a precise location for the business beyond it being on Lenox Avenue.)

Notwithstanding the damage evident in the photographs, the presence of a hardware store at this address in the MCCH business survey suggested that the store continued to operate in the months after the disorder. The name of the business operating when the Tax Department photograph was taken, between 1939 and 1941, was not visible; the sign did appear to be the one visible in the photograph of the firefighters taken in 1935.
Looting without arrest (38) No one was identified as being arrested for looting just over half of the businesses identified in the sources. There are eighteen individuals arrested for looting for whom there is no information about their alleged targets; some of those men may have been charged with taking goods from stores for which there was no reported arrests. There are also twenty-one men charged with disorderly conduct in the Magistrates Court for which there is no information about their alleged actions. They may have been initially arrested for looting and then had the charges against them reduced when police could not produce evidence that they had taken property rather than been part of crowds around looted businesses. However, only 6% (3 of 50) of those accused of looting were ultimately charged with disorderly conduct (the charges brought against ten of those arrested for looting are unknown).

That evidence supports the claim that police were unable to protect businesses made in multiple newspaper stories and by business owners who sued the city for damages, as well as in the Mayor 's Commission (MCCH) report. Once the crowd around Kress’ store broke into smaller groups sometime after 9:00 PM, police were unable to clear the streets or contain all those groups. Irving Stekin told the city comptroller that the two police officers who eventually responded to his call to protect his store "couldn't do anything. The mob was too big for them," according to a report in the New York World-Telegram. When police did disperse crowds, they simply reformed, according to the New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the MCCH Report. A more pointed image of that futility, in which police dispersed crowds only to see them gather again on the opposite side of the street, was described in the Afro-American and by business owners who testified in the Municipal Court. An alternative account in the Daily News presented crowds not as elusive but as "too scattered" to be controlled. As a result, rather than being ineffective, police were absent from the scene of some attacks on businesses. Business owners who sued the city for damages made that complaint. No police officers came to protect the stores of Harry Piskin, Estelle Cohen, and George Chronis despite Piskin approaching police officers on the street and them all visiting or calling the local stationhouse.

The absence of police from some parts of Harlem resulted in part from a decision to concentrate them elsewhere. Reported police deployments focused on West 125th Street. Inspector McAuliffe used the reserves sent to Harlem after 9:00 PM to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, and Pittsburgh Courier, the only stories that described police deployments. Six emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue in that strategy. Each truck had a “crew of 40 men and [was] equipped with tear gas and riot guns,” according to the Daily Mirror. Emergency trucks were more dispersed according to the New York Herald Tribune; two at West 125th and 7th Avenue, one at West 125th and Lenox Avenue, and one at West 127th and 7th Avenue. Armed patrolmen guarded Herbert’s Blue Diamond Jewelry store on the northeast corner of that intersection as well as other businesses with broken windows in this area. The Daily News noted that guarding “windowless stores” handicapped police without referring to which stores received that protection. This scale of police presence is likely why only one business on West 125th Street — Young’s hat store — was among those reported looted despite at least twenty-three other stores having their windows broken. (The New York Evening Journal did report that "the rioting Negroes swarmed into stores. First the Woolworth "five and ten" then McCrory's and then the department store right and left in both sides of the street,” but as no other sources reported such looting, that claim was apparently a product of the sensationalization and exaggeration that marked that publication's stories about the disorder.)

(In the map, black borders indicate the locations where police arrested individuals for looting). Beyond West 125th Street, the police relied on radio cars patrolling the avenues and limited numbers of uniformed police and detectives in plainclothes moving through the streets. The New York Times reported that an emergency truck was stationed at West 130th Street and Lenox Avenue, in the heart of the blocks that saw the most reported looting. Police made eighteen arrests on Lenox Avenue between 125th and 135th, but clearly lacked the numbers to guard damaged stores or prevent crowds from forming as they did around West 125th Street. Similarly, police arrested three men for looting Jack Garmise's cigar store on 7th Avenue near West 116th Street, indicating the presence of uniformed officers and detectives, but their activity apparently did not extend to the blocks of West 116th Street to the east or the adjacent blocks of Lenox Avenue where Hispanic-owned businesses predominated. Two stores were reported looted in that area, and at least another eleven had windows broken, a reporter from La Prensa found, without an arrest being made during the disorder. The police were not alone in their inattention to that area. Several newspapers drew the boundary of the disorder north of West 116th Street: crowds only went as far south as 120th Street according to the New York World-Telegram, New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Mirror, and as far south as 118th Street according to the Home News. (The Daily News and Afro-American did report crowds as far south as 110th Street.)
Anna Rosenberg's notion store looted and set on fire Anna Rosenberg closed her notion store at 429 Lenox Avenue before the disorder reached it. When she returned the next morning, she found the store "in ruins," according to testimony she gave in the Municipal Court reported by the New York Herald Tribune: "most of the merchandise was either destroyed or stolen and the plate glass window had been shattered." As well as being looted, the store had been set on fire. So too was the hardware store to the store's right, at 431 Lenox Avenue. While fires set in stores often accompanied looting, particularly in later racial disorders, only one more was reported, at 400 Lenox Avenue, a block to the south. No one arrested for looting was identified as having stolen goods from Rosenberg's store.

The fire was started sometime between 11:00 PM and midnight. Herbert Canter, who owned the pharmacy five doors down from the notion store, at 419 Lenox Avenue, arrived at 11:00 PM to try and protect his business. He remained until 5:00 AM, and saw the fire but not who started it, according to the reports of his testimony in the Home News and New York Herald Tribune. What Canter did report seeing was "a mob" carrying bricks, stones, and bottles, as well as canned goods march down the street shouting, "Down with the whites! Let's get what we can," and hurling missiles through windows. A block north, David Schmoockler, the manager of William Feinstein’s liquor store at 452 Lenox Avenue, also saw a crowd of around thirty people. Between 11:00 PM and midnight, he watched as the crowd "created disturbances, hurled various missiles, broke store windows, set fire to some stores, pillaged others, and in general damaged property of various merchants in the locality," according to Justice Shalleck's summary of his testimony in the Municipal Court. The fire a block south at 400 Lenox Avenue was started just after midnight. A little over an hour later, Feinstein's liquor store was attacked by a crowd of thirty to forty people.

Photographs of firefighters attempting to put out the fire in the hardware store next door to the notion store offered further evidence of the fire at the notion store. Cropped from the version published in the Daily News, but visible in the original photograph, a hose runs in the direction of Rosenberg's notion store to the left, indicating a fire in that direction. (The captions to both versions provided an incorrect address for the location. Details in the image identified it as 431 Lenox Avenue.) A photograph of the same scene published in the Home News also included that hose running to the left in the foreground. In addition, two photographs taken the next day focused on the hardware store captured glimpses of the damage to the exterior of the notion store. Part of the storefront appeared on the left of an Associated Press photograph, with no glass and merchandise in its display window. Damage to the exterior wall below the window could be the result of the fire. Inside the store is an L-shaped counter on which a range of different goods are stacked (which distinguished the notion store from the hardware store next to it, which had a central display table). There may be some damaged items on the ground, but neither the ceiling nor the shelves and counter showed the fire damage visible in the store to the right. The whole storefront appeared in a second photograph, published in the Daily Mirror, to the left of a man on a ladder boarding up the hardware store windows. Unfortunately, details are not visible in the microfilm copy of the image.

Rosenberg had a policy covering her store with Royal Insurance. Their fire adjuster's appraisal put the cost of the damage at $980.13. However, the insurance policy did not cover damage resulting from a riot. As a result, Rosenberg joined other white merchants in suing the city for damages on the basis of the failure of police to protect their businesses. The New York Herald Tribune reported Royal Insurance was "a co-defendant with the city in the case," although the basis for the claim against the city was that a riot had taken place, at odds with the basis for an insurance claim. Defending the city, Aaron Arnold, an assistant corporation counsel, denied that a riot had taken place and maintained that the fire was unrelated to the disorder. The jury did not agree; they awarded Rosenberg $804.

The attacks on Rosenberg's store were mentioned only in stories about the Municipal Court trial in the New York Herald Tribune, Home News, New York American, and Times Union, with the later two stories not reporting any testimony, and obliquely in captions to the photographs.

Given that the court award covered the bulk of her losses, Rosenberg likely was able to remain in business after the disorder. The MCCH business survey did not include a notion store at 429 Lenox Avenue in the second half of 1935, but instead white-owned hardware and grocery stores. However, based on the Tax department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, the investigator appeared to have mixed up addresses, as happened for other blocks in the survey, locating the hardware store at number 429, not 431 Lenox Avenue and the stationary store next to it at number 431, not 433 Lenox Avenue. Visible in the photograph was a hoisery store — a name often used for notion stores — that seems likely to be Rosenberg's business, still operating, at 429 Lenox Avenue.
In the Municipal court on September 19 & 20 (1) It took until September 19 for the first of the claims for damages to come to trial. William Feinstein, the plaintiff, owned a liquor store at 452 Lenox Avenue, for which he filed a claim for $627.40 in damages. He was not one of the business owners represented by Barney Rosenstein; Charles Garfinkel was his attorney, according to the Home News. (However, the New York Herald Tribune did note that, “In many cases the property owners have banded together, retaining a single lawyer and filing suits on blanket complaints.”) The trial took place over two days in the Municipal Court, before Judge Shalleck and a jury of six men. After only forty-five minutes of deliberation, the jury awarded Feinstein $450, just over 70% of his claim.

The newspaper stories about the case highlighted that the outcome of the case could set a precedent for other damage claims after the disorder amounting to $1 million. That was almost ten times the $116,000 reported as the total value of the claims in July. None of the stories provided any explanation for that dramatic jump. In fact, the $1 million total was not attributed to any source in stories in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, New York Sun, and Daily News and in the Black newspapers the New York Amsterdam News and Afro-American. (A New York Age editorial that included few details of the case stated more vaguely that additional claims would "cost the city administration a pretty penny.") Other stories attributed the number to Judge Shalleck, with the New York Times quoting him as telling the jury when he discharged them, "I understand that there is possibly $1,000,000 in such suits now pending against the city." The New York American published a similar quotation, while the Times Union, New York World-Telegram, and Home News paraphrased Shalleck's statement. It seems likely that the corporation counsel or city officials had supplied him with that information, as the New York Times also quoted Mayor La Guardia making the same claim, in his response to the verdict: "That award opens the way to claims against the city amounting to $1,000,000." A paraphrase of that statement appeared in the Daily News. The stories in the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, New York Sun, and New York Age that reported a response from the mayor did not include that statement; the Times Union, New York World-Telegram, New York Amsterdam News, New York Post, and Home News did not mention La Guardia at all. The corporation counsel lawyers' denial that the case was a test case was reported only in the New York Times. The story dismissed their statement that "each of the many suits growing out of the Harlem riot would be tried on its own merits" by pointing out that "five members of the city's legal staff were present," implying that was far more than was typical for such a trial.

Only the New York Post made clear the questions the jury had to decide: "Was there a riot on March 20? Was the plaintiff's property damaged? Did the plaintiff use all reasonable diligence to prevent damage to his property?" Only the New York Times reported any of the evidence related to those questions presented during trial. A story on the first day of the trial highlighted cross-examination by the corporation counsel that "brought out that, despite the disturbances in the neighborhood, [the store manager] had made no attempt to remove the bottles of liquor from the show windows." That issue featured again in the newspaper's story on the second day, which mentioned that the manager testified he had been "too frightened to know what to do about it." Fright was "a reasonable factor," the judge instructed the jury, undermining the efforts of the city's lawyers to present the manager's inaction as contributing to the damage done by looting. Likely helped by that guidance, the six-man jury took only forty-five minutes to reach a verdict, according to the New York World-Telegram.

Judge Shalleck supported the jury's verdict. Discharging them, he said "from the facts of the case I don't think you could have done anything else." The stories in New York Times, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and New York World-Telegram quoted that statement, while the New York Sun and Times Union simply stated that he approved the verdict. Shalleck's support was omitted from the brief stories in the Daily News, New York American, and New York Amsterdam News. The New York American did quote extensively the judge's comments about the law under which the claim was made: "The Legislature enacted this law placing property damage in riots on the county and city to inspire citizens to proper vigilance in support of law and order. It is a punishment for permitting riots. The law is drastic and may be changed at the next session." The New York Post and New York World-Telegram added, "In the meantime, it should be a lesson to our people not to be too eager to incite riots and not to lose their heads too quickly." The New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun only quoted that sentence and the one about the law being drastic. Those two publications also quoted the judge's comments about the riot itself, that "another element came into the scene and incited riot, although the City of New York tried every conservative way of stopping the disturbance without bloodshed." By including the passage, the publications were returning to the focus on the Communists as responsible for the disorder, notwithstanding the evidence at the MCCH hearings. While the New York Sun did not make that connection explicit, the New York Herald Tribune did: "his remark was accepted as referring to Communists."

The corporation counsel responded to the verdict by filing a motion to have it set aside. Stories in the New York Times, New York World-Telegram, New York Sun, and New York Amsterdam News mentioned only the motion, not the basis for it. Details were provided in the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and New York Post: all three stories reported the motion argued that the date on the complaint was wrong, and that the events were not a riot. The New York Post reported an additional argument that Feinstein's staff did not do everything they could to avoid damage, whereas the New York Herald Tribune reported that Feinstein had failed to give notice to the mayor and sheriff of the disorder, and the New York American that he "advanced technical points." Other than the error in the complaint, the issues raised by the motion were typical of defenses offered against claims under such municipal laws. The Times Union and Daily News did not mention the motion. Shalleck reserved his decision on the motion and gave parties two days to give him information related to it.

Only some of the stories included Mayor La Guardia's response to the decision. "If this decision is allowed to stand, it will be a very serious matter for the city. It would open up a new form of arson," the New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun quoted him as saying. Asked to clarify that remark, the mayor added that the decision "would encourage property owners to stir up trouble with the express purpose of having their premises burned or damaged so that the city could be made to pay for repairs or valueless stock." The New York Times quoted only the clarifying statement: “If it were permitted we would have deliberate attempts to start trouble so that someone could collect from the city. We simply cannot allow the law to stand." The Daily News and New York American noted only that the mayor said the city would appeal. The other stories on the trial did not include La Guardia's response. The mayor's concern with arson was not derived from the events of the disorder: only four fires were reported, one reason why the damage was not as great as in Chicago in 1919 or East St Louis in 1917.

Missing from the stories are details of the evidence presented to support Feinstein's claim. Only the New York Times story included the store manager's evidence discussed above, and that was the only evidence mentioned. Moreover, stories in the Daily News, New York American, New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram and Times Union incorrectly gave the address of Feinstein's store as Lexington Avenue rather than Lenox Avenue. The only details of the testimony are those included in Shalleck's published decision on the city's motion.
William Feinstein's liquor store looted Around 11:00 PM, David Schmoockler, the manager of William Feinstein’s liquor store, saw a crowd of about thirty people gather near Lenox Avenue and West 132nd Street, according to Justice Shalleck's summary of the testimony he gave in the Municipal Court. Located at 452 Lenox Avenue, the store was in the middle of the block between West 132nd St and West 133rd Street. On the other side of West 132nd Street, Herbert Canter, who owned the pharmacy at 419 Lenox Avenue, testified in another Municipal Court trial that he also saw the crowd, which he described as a "mob" carrying bricks, stones, and bottles, as well as canned goods, march down the street shouting, "Down with the whites! Let's get what we can," and hurling missiles through the windows, according to the New York Herald Tribune. For the next hour, Schmoockler watched as the crowd "created disturbances, hurled various missiles, broke store windows, set fire to some stores, pillaged others, and in general damaged property of various merchants in the locality," Shalleck wrote. Canter also saw a fire at Anna Rosenberg's notion shop at 429 Lenox Avenue, which extended to the neighboring hardware store. At some point police arrived but could not control the crowd. Officers "discharged their revolvers in an attempt to disperse the crowd," according to Shalleck's summary, and sometimes "succeeded in driving the participants from one side of the street, but they would then rush to the other side and back again, all the while continuing their destructive acts." The New York Times story on the Municipal Court trial reported this testimony simply as Schmoockler having “seen rioting in the neighborhood” that scared him and a "Negro helper" not mentioned in Shalleck's summary, omitting details about the crowd and its struggles with police.

By around midnight, the disorder and gunfire had become frightening enough to Schmoockler and the Black staff member that they "locked the doors, closed the [iron] gates" and left the store, according to Shalleck's summary. A later story in the New York Times that mentioned Shalleck's decision reported that the men left “when police began shooting about midnight” and omitted details of the lead-up to that decision. The Magistrate’s Court affidavit began with the store being closed without any mention of the context, and mistakenly had him leaving at 9:30 PM rather than midnight. What the manager should instead have done when faced with this disorder, lawyers defending the city implied in cross-examination reported by the New York Times, was move stock out of the windows and put it beyond the reach of looters, as Max Greenwald and Jack Sherloff did, and notify the mayor, sheriff or county of the attack on his property, an argument reported and dismissed by Justice Shalleck.

A crowd remained in the area after Schmoockler and his helper left. Around 1:15 AM, "a group of from thirty to forty persons smashed the windows" of Feinstein's store, pilfered bottles of whiskey and demolished the store front," according to the New York Herald Tribune report of testimony by "witnesses for Mr Feinstein" in the Municipal Court. Justice Shalleck and the New York Times mentioned the time of the attack, and the same details, although the newspaper story misattributed the testimony to Feinstein. It is not clear who the witnesses were; the store manager had left over an hour earlier, and police officers were unlikely to be testifying against the city. Both newspaper stories and Judge Shalleck's summary noted that police still had not controlled the crowd. Given that the store's iron gate had to be broken before the windows could be smashed, the attack would have taken more time and sustained, noisy violence than most, despite the number of people involved. Even with that opportunity to respond, police did not arrive until the crowd had largely finished looting the store, and made only one arrest. Around 1:20 AM, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit, Officer Nathaniel Carter allegedly saw several men leaving the store carrying bottles. He arrested one of those men, Louis Cobb, a thirty-eight-year-old Black laborer, with one bottle of gin and two bottles of whiskey in his possession. Cobb lived on the next block, at 473 Lenox Avenue. His arrest was not mentioned in either the justice's decision or any of the newspaper stories about the attack on Feinstein's store. The damaged liquor store in a photograph published in the New York World-Telegram is almost certainly Feinstein's store. The caption mentions an iron grill that was torn down as well as smashed windows, and the storefront matched the Tax Department photograph.

Schmoockler put the total losses at around $1,000 in the Magistrates Court affidavit. Feinstein later filed a claim for $627.40 in damages from the city, according to the Home News and New York American. He was not among the twenty business owners identified as the first to file claims identified by the New York Sun. Nonetheless, after the city opted to deny all the claims, Feinstein was the first of the 106 plaintiffs who filed claims after the disorder to go to trial, effectively making him the test case. As a result, much of the newspaper stories on the trial focused on the legal basis for damages. No details of what happened to Feinstein’s store were included in stories in the Home News, New York American, New York Herald Tribune, and New York World-Telegram. The jury awarded him $450. Two months later, Justice Shalleck upheld that award in a decision reported in the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune. The award of damages likely helped Feinstein stay in business. A white-owned liquor store was found at 452 Lenox Avenue both by the MCCH business survey in the second half of 1935 and in the Tax Department photograph taken in 1939–1941.

Louis Cobb appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrate's Court on March 20 charged with burglary. However, the affidavit making the complaint against him was not taken until March 25. In the interim, Magistrate Ford held Cobb without bail. An annotation in the docket book dated March 21 recorded "no bail in absence of record" suggesting police had not been able to produce his criminal record. Magistrates reaffirmed the denial of bail when Cobb's criminal record was eventually produced. He had been charged six times since 1920, for burglary, robbery, drug possession, homicide, procuring, and possession of a firearm, resulting in two sentences to the state prison at Sing Sing, two terms in the penitentiary and a sentence in the Workhouse, and two sentences for violating parole. The grand jury did not indict Cobb, instead transferring him to the Court of Special Sessions to be tried for petit larceny. That decision likely reflected the lack of evidence of him breaking into the store, and the value of the three bottles of liquor Officer Carter allegedly found on him; $7, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit, well short of the $100 threshold for a prosecution for the felony of grand larceny. There was no evidence of the outcome of the case.
In civil court on September 19 & 20 The first trial to resolve a claim for damages took place in the Municipal Court on September 19 and 20, 1935, before Judge Benjamin Shalleck and a jury of six men. The plaintiff, William Feinstein, was not one of those identified in earlier newspaper stories on the claims and was not represented by the attorney who filed those claims, Barney Rosenstein. He owned a liquor store located at 452 Lenox Avenue, for which a claim of $627.40 of damages had been filed by his lawyer, Charles Garfinkel. Aaron Arnold, an assistant corporation counsel, represented the city, together with four other staff. The trial was reported by the press as a test case, the outcome of which would set a precedent for other claims. The city's lawyers disputed that characterization, telling a journalist from the New York Times that "each of the many suits growing out of the Harlem riot would be tried on its own merits." The response to the jury's verdict belied that claim.

While Feinstein was the plaintiff in the case, he had not been at the liquor store on the night of the disorder, and if he testified at all would have given evidence only about the details of his losses. The only reported testimony, summarized most fully in a later published decision by Judge Shalleck, came from the white store manager, David Schmoockler. He focused not on the absence of police, as had the testimony given by most of the businessmen represented by Barney Rosenstein, but on their ineffectiveness. Around 11:00 PM, he and a Black staff member saw a crowd of about thirty people gather nearby. For the next hour, they watched as the crowd "created disturbances, hurled various missiles, broke store windows, set fire to some stores, pillaged others, and in general damaged property of various merchants in the locality." At some point police arrived, but could not control the crowd. Officers "discharged their revolvers in an attempt to disperse the crowd," and sometimes "succeeded in driving the participants from one side of the street, but they would then rush to the other side and back again." By around midnight, the disorder and gunfire had become frightening enough to Schmoockler and his Black colleague that they "locked the doors, closed the [iron] gates" and left the store. About an hour later, despite the presence of police in the area, a group of thirty to forty smashed the windows of Feinstein's store, took bottles of whiskey, and demolished the store front.

Cross-examining Schmoockler, Arnold tried to shift responsibility for the damage from the police to Feinstein's staff. He questioned him about whether he had attempted to remove the bottles of liquor on display in the windows after the crowd arrived on the street. The manager responded he had been "too frightened to know what to do about it." The question related to one of the requirements of the law, that a plaintiff had "used all reasonable diligence to prevent such damage." Whatever doubt Arnold had raised in the jury about whether Schmoockler had done enough to prevent the store's merchandise from being looted was countered by Judge Shalleck's later instruction to the jury that fright was "a reasonable factor." Any witnesses who testified on behalf of the city or other defenses Arnold raised went unreported in the press.

The six-man jury needed only forty-five minutes to agree on a verdict awarding $450 damages to Feinstein, 70% of the sum he had claimed. Discharging the jury, Judge Shalleck offered his support for their decision, telling them "from the facts of the case I don't think you could have done anything else." Having been made aware that "there are now $1,000,000 in law suits pending," presumably by Arnold, he was less supportive of the statute. "The Legislature enacted this law placing property damage in riots on the county and city to inspire citizens to proper vigilance in support of law and order. It is a punishment for permitting riots. The law is drastic and may be changed at the next session. In the meantime, it should be a lesson to our people not to be too eager to incite riots and not to lose their heads too quickly."

Arnold responded to the verdict by filing a motion to have it set aside. He argued that none of the requirements of the statute had been met: the events of March 19 and 20 were not a riot, taking exception when Shalleck gave the jury the definition of riot contained in the penal law rather than articulating a different definition for civil suits; Feinstein's staff did not do everything reasonable to prevent the damages he suffered; and they had not notified the mayor or sheriff of the threat to the store, a question Shalleck had withdrawn from the jury's consideration as unnecessary in the circumstances of the damage to the liquor store. In addition, Arnold argued that the date on the complaint was wrong. While Judge Shalleck's comments after the verdict indicated little sympathy with those arguments, he reserved his decision on the motion, giving himself time to research the law.

Mayor La Guardia made clear that he thought Shalleck should strike down the verdict, presenting it as the precedent that the city's lawyers insisted it was not. "That award opens the way to claims against the city amounting to $1,000,000," he told journalists. "If this decision is allowed to stand, it will be a very serious matter for the city. It would open up a new form of arson." Asked to clarify that remark, the mayor added that the decision "would encourage property owners to stir up trouble with the express purpose of having their premises burned or damaged so that the city could be made to pay for repairs or valueless stock." Just what had caused the total of the claims against the city to jump from $116,000, the sum widely reported in July, to $1 million was not explained. Certainly, the new number served to increase pressure on Shalleck and his judicial colleagues to interpret the law in the city's favor. La Guardia would have to wait almost two months to hear if the scenarios he invoked would lead Shalleck to deliver such a decision.
In the Municipal court on October 30 (1) In an opinion dated October 30, 1935, Judge Benjamin Shalleck denied the motion of the city's attorneys to set aside the jury's verdict awarding damages to William Feinstein. It had taken him a month to research the law to confirm the approval he gave to the verdict in discharging the jury. The opinion was published as Feinstein v. City of New York, 157 Misc. 157 (1935). The scrapbooks of the Mayor's office on which this study relied for newspaper stories in the months after the disorder included only two clippings related to Shalleck's decision; three additional stories were found in Newspapers.com. It would be surprising if there were not other stories on the decision in newspapers that had reported on Feinstein's trial such as the Home News, New York Sun, New York Post, New York Evening Journal, and New York American.

As they had in covering the trial, the stories led with the implications of the verdict. The existence of $1,000,000 of additional claims resulting from the riot was again alluded to in editorials in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Times Union and a story in the New York Times, but linked in this case to more than a hundred pending cases. The Daily News reported the total claims as $2 million, which given that no other publication reported it must be an error. There were 160 pending cases in the Municipal Court, according to the New York Herald Tribune, the same number it reported after the trial of Anna Rosenberg's claim two weeks earlier. Alongside the impending claims the stories in New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, Daily News, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle editorial quoted the judge's statement that the law could be exploited by "concerted efforts on the part of some persons to use the statute as a means of enrichment," presenting it as a warning rather than simply an acknowledgement of the prediction offered by Mayor La Guardia after the trial of Feinstein's case. They also quoted Judge Shalleck's comment making clear that addressing those potential problems was a task for the legislature, not him. Details of the store manger's evidence summarized in the decision appeared in the New York Times story, more information on those events than in the newspaper's earlier reporting on the trial, but that evidence was misattributed to Feinstein himself. The Times Union editorial made the same mistake, in a briefer summary that described Feinstein, rather than his store manager, closing the store and a "mob of thirty or forty persons" who broke open the gate and took liquor from the store. The New York Herald Tribune more accurately attributed the evidence to "witnesses for Mr Feinstein."

Only the stories in the New York Herald Tribune and New York Times, and the Times Union editorial, mentioned any of the issues that Shalleck decided, and then only the issue of whether a riot occurred. Unreported were other issues raised in the motion that Shalleck's decision examined and rejected: Feinstein's failure to notify the city as soon as he learned of the threat to his store and take reasonable care to protect his property, and the typographical error in the complaint.
Estelle Cohen's clothing store looted The windows of the Norman Toggery store at 437 Lenox Avenue, near West 132nd Street, were smashed during the disorder, and the goods on display stolen. The only information on the attack on the store was a letter the store's white owner, Mrs. Estelle Cohen, wrote to Mayor La Guardia on March 21, 1935. A Black salesman was present in the store when the windows were broken. He could do nothing to prevent the looting, but did telephone Cohen at her home in Washington Heights, 605 West 170th Street. She then called the police precinct and police headquarters, telling La Guardia with clear frustration that "all the satisfaction I got was that all the men were out and that all windows were being smashed." Given that the store was still open, the attack likely came sometime soon after 11:00 PM, when staff in nearby stores either side of Norman Toggery reported a crowd gathered around Lenox Avenue and West 132nd Street. Herbert Canter, who owned a pharmacy at 419 Lenox Avenue, saw "a mob" carrying bricks, stones, and bottles, as well as canned goods, march down the street shouting, "Down with the whites! Let's get what we can," and hurling missiles through the windows, in testimony in the Municipal Court reported by the New York Herald Tribune. A block north, David Schmoockler, the manager of William Feinstein’s liquor store at 452 Lenox Avenue, also saw a crowd of around thirty people. Between 11:00 PM and midnight he watched as the crowd "created disturbances, hurled various missiles, broke store windows, set fire to some stores, pillaged others, and in general damaged property of various merchants in the locality," according to Justice Shalleck's summary of his testimony in the Municipal Court. A little over an hour later, Feinstein's liquor store was attacked by a crowd of thirty to forty people.

What Cohen wanted, she wrote La Guardia, was "police protection at all times. I have my sons in that store, and am a widow; business is very hard besides and I don't wish them to lose their lives." Lacking that protection during the disorder, Cohen sent someone to the storefront to board up the windows after they were smashed and the merchandise taken from the display. However, the boarded-up window failed to protect the inside of the store, Cohen wrote:
...they came back and broke through the windows again and smashed the cases and took the goods out. The shirts were taken off the forms, which showed that they had ample time to work. The floors were scattered with glass and goods all trampled up.
No one arrested for looting was identified as having stolen goods from the store. Cohen estimated her losses as at least $800. A little over a month later, when the New York Sun, New York World-Telegram, and New York Amsterdam News reported that she had joined nineteen other merchants in filing suit against the city government, she claimed $1,219.77 in damages. Unlike some other store owners, Cohen did not have burglary insurance, she wrote, "on account of not being able to get it up in that section." Given that the city lost the trials on such claims reported in the press, it was likely that Cohen received some compensation for the losses. She did seem to have been able to remain in business. The Toggery shop was included in the MCCH business survey; the investigator recorded that the store had been there for three years, managed by "Mr Thomas and a friend," and had "a neat display of ties, hats and shirts in window." The store also appeared in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
In civil court on October 30 Two weeks after the jury in the second trial of a damage claim awarded $804 to Anna Rosenberg, Judge Benjamin Shalleck published his decision on the city's motion to set aside the verdict in the trial which had awarded damages to William Feinstein. After a "thorough research in the evolution of this statute," Shalleck denied the motion.

If Shalleck's comments at the trial supporting the verdict made that decision unsurprising, he had also found consistent case law contrary to the arguments made in Arnold's motion. On the question of whether a riot had occurred, Shalleck's decision referred to both English decisions in civil actions that relied on common law definitions of riot, and the same similarity between definitions in New York cases. The New York Court of Appeals had found in its 1900 decision in Marshall v. City of Buffalo that such an overlap reflected how the statute involved both branches of the law, was "both compensatory and penal"; that the responsibility of each area for preserving peace within its borders extended to compensation for damage resulting from a riot; and that imposing the burden on the inhabitants of that area was intended to punish them for permitting riots and provide an incentive for them to support law enforcement. Shalleck found similar support in New York case law for his decision to not put to the jury the question of whether Feinstein and his staff had notified the mayor and sheriff. Other courts had found a strict interpretation of that requirement to be "absurd" and so restrictive that it was contrary to the intent of the law to provide compensation. The "liberal and reasonable construction" articulated in those decisions allowed for Shalleck's trial ruling that the store manager's testimony showed it was not just impossible for him to have notified the mayor or sheriff, but unnecessary as the presence of police showed that "the city had already known of the existence of the riot and had even taken measures to quell it."

The motion's final argument related to the law, that reasonable care had not been taken to protect the property that was damaged because Feinstein's staff had not removed stock from the window display, Shalleck had posed as a question to the jury. They had answered yes, reasonable diligence had been used to prevent damage, based on which he dismissed the argument. The appeal for dismissal on the grounds of an error in the complaint also warranted little attention: the incorrect date had no impact on the city's defense, and Feinstein's testimony when the corporation counsel examined him to assess the complaint made clear he knew when the damage had been done.

Shalleck did recognize the city's contention that New York's statute "may have by this time outlived its usefulness." He noted that the corporation counsel had informed him that it would impose considerable loss in relation to the disorder in Harlem and in the future given that "in a city of seven millions of people with such a cosmopolitan population, further disturbances may frequently occur," and that people might use the statute "as a means of enrichment." However, those issues had no bearing on his decision: it was up to the Legislature to reconsider and amend the law. In relation to the law as it stood, there were no grounds for setting aside the jury's award of damages.

The consequences of the decision dominated the limited press response. While Shalleck had not specified the costs to the city of the claims filed in relation to the disorder, stories used the figure of $1 million mentioned by Arnold and Mayor La Guardia after the Feinstein trial. Publications ranging from the New York Times to the Daily News presented Shalleck's account of the concerns about the statute raised by the corporation counsel as coming from the judge himself, as warnings and a call for the law to be changed. None of the stories included a response from the corporation counsel or the mayor.
Crowd at Lenox Avenue between West 132nd and West 131st Streets At 11:00 PM, Herbert Canter, who owned a pharmacy at 419 Lenox Avenue, on the northwest corner of West 131st Street, arrived to try and protect his business. He remained until 5:00 AM, according to stories about his testimony in a damages suit in the Municipal Court in the New York Herald Tribune and Home News. During that time, Canter saw "a "mob" carrying bricks, stones, and bottles, as well as canned goods, march down the street shouting, "Down with the whites! Let's get what we can," and hurling missiles through windows. A block north, David Schmoockler, the manager of William Feinstein’s liquor store at 452 Lenox Avenue, also saw a crowd of around thirty people. Between 11:00 PM and midnight, he watched as the crowd "created disturbances, hurled various missiles, broke store windows, set fire to some stores, pillaged others, and in general damaged property of various merchants in the locality," according to Justice Shalleck's summary of his testimony in the Municipal Court. Anna Rosenberg's notion store at 429 Lenox Avenue and the adjacent hardware store at 431 Lenox Avenue, on the same block as Canter's pharmacy, were set on fire, likely during this time. On the other side of the notion store, Gonzales' jeweler's store at 427 Lenox Avenue had windows broken. The fire a block south at 400 Lenox Avenue was started just after midnight. A little over an hour later, Feinstein's liquor store was attacked by a crowd of thirty to forty people.

The crowd Canter saw was further north than other reports of calls urging crowds to violence on West 125th Street and on 7th and Lenox Avenues within two blocks of 125th Street. It was also the only incident for which there were details that was not linked to an arrest. What was shouted to the crowd was different from the calls made to other crowds. Those calls allegedly focused on breaking windows or attacking police. While Cantor observed this crowd breaking windows, the second phrase he reported — "Let's get what we can!" — implied looting, which is what did occur in these blocks of Lenox Avenue possibly on a larger scale than elsewhere in Harlem. The first phrase shouted at the crowd identified whites as targets; mention of whites otherwise featured only in calls focused on police. But what was shouted was quite different from the calls to "Kill the whites," which only one journalist for New York Evening Journal reported. "Down with the whites" was a threat to property and power, not life.
Gonzales' jewelry store windows broken Sometime during the disorder, windows were broken in L. S. Gonzales' jewelers and watch repair store at 427 Lenox Avenue. The business was in the same building as two of the stores set on fire during the disorder, Anna Rosenberg's notion store at 429 Lenox Avene and a hardware store at 431 Lenox Avenue. The jeweler was likely damaged between 11:00 PM and midnight when a crowd "created disturbances, hurled various missiles, broke store windows, set fire to some stores, pillaged others, and in general damaged property of various merchants in the locality," according to Justice Shalleck's summary of testimony in the Municipal Court. No one arrested during the disorder was identified as being charged with breaking the store's windows.

Lieutenant Samuel Battle, New York City's most senior Black police officer, mentioned the damage to the jeweler's store when he testified in the MCCH's first public hearing on March 30, 1935. Asked if the crowds made any distinction between white-owned and Black-owned stores, he answered that Gonzales, his jeweler, had his window broken. On the larger question of the attitude of the crowd, Battle first said "there was no distinction." However, when asked "Are you sure there was no distinction made?" he answered "In many cases, if they knew it was colored, they passed the shop up." Battle's testimony is the only report of damage to the store.

Gonzales' store was recorded in the MCCH business survey at 427 Lenox Avenue. Mentions of the store in the New York Age gave the address as 429 Lenox Avenue, a building that had four storefronts. Gonzales had operated the store for sixteen years. A story, accompanied by a photograph of Gonzales, in the New York Age in 1922, just over two years after he opened the business, identified him as a Cuban immigrant. In 1935 he had one regular Black employee. Interviewed by MCCH staff, he said that in the last three or four years, during the Depression, repair work comprised most of his business, with jobs not collected his biggest difficulty. Gonzales summed up Black business as "nothing," a situation that would not improve until Black unemployment was solved. In keeping with that perception, the MCCH staff member recorded that he "Apparently takes a great deal of interest in community welfare and has been closely engaged in recent picketing activities on 125th Street." A story in the New York Amsterdam News identified Gonzales as having served as the president of the Business and Professional Men's Forum in the 1930s, participating in a campaign to promote Black business, and in 1938, joining the newspaper's drive to get Harlem's businesses to hire Black workers. Gonzales appears to have still been in business when the Tax Department photograph was taken, between 1939 and 1941, as a sign identifying 427 Lenox Avenue as a jeweler is visible.