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

Giles Jackson injured

Giles Jackson, a thirty-three-year-old man, was struck on the leg by “falling glass” around 3:00 AM. An unnamed physician from nearby Beth Israel Hospital attended Jackson at West 116th Street and 7th Avenue, but the hospital record identified the injury as having occurred “in some unknown place.” That place was likely nearby as businesses at the intersection and in the commercial district on West 116th Street between 7th and Lenox Avenues had windows broken and merchandise taken beginning around 1:00 AM. Police arrested Robert Tanner for allegedly reaching through the broken window of Jack Garmise's cigar store on the southwest corner of the intersection to take a pipe around the time Jackson was injured. Injuries from flying glass make up 25% of the injuries not related to assaults that appeared in hospital records and lists of the injured published in the press, the largest group after head injuries.

Jackson’s injury did not require he be taken to the hospital; after the physician attended him, he “left for home.” He gave a home address four blocks south of where the ambulance treated him, at 33 West 112th Street, an area of Puerto Rican residents. The hospital record, the only source in which Jackson appeared, did not identify his race. Census and draft records did identify a Black man born in Virginia named Giles Jackson of the correct age living in Harlem at this time, but he was a roomer who moved frequently so cannot be placed at that address in 1935.

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"Hospital Admissions, 19-20 March 1935," Subject Files, Box 167, Folder 5 (Roll 76), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).