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

Grocery store on West 137th Street looted

Sometime during the disorder the grocery store at 1 West 137th Street, close to the northwest corner of 5th Avenue, was looted. That store is visible in the Tax Department photograph of 3 West 137th Street taken between 1939 and 1941. The two stores in the foreground are part of a different building which fronts 5th Avenue, and includes the lunch bar partly visible on the right, and would have had the address 1 West 137th Street, one of which has a sign identifying it as a grocery store. The MCCH Business survey in the second half of 1935 includes only one store at 1 West 137th Street, a black-owned stationary store that is likely the storefront to the left of the grocery store in the Tax Department photograph. The survey identifies the store at 3 West 137th Street, immediately to the left of the triangle on the sign in the Tax Department photograph, as a black-owned grocery store that the investigator described as a "Fairly well supplied store. Has been here 8 years." That is not the grocery store reportedly looted.

When Elva Jacobs, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with burglary, the Home News added the details that she had "broken a store window at 1 W. 137th St. and taken groceries." No complainant is recorded in the docket book, nor is the name of the storeowner recorded after the disorder by the MCCH investigator. Officer L. W. Adamie of the 46th Precinct arrested Jacobs. He also arrested Courtney March, a thirty-nine-year-old Black man who appeared in court immediately after Jacobs, facing the same charge of burglary. Based on other cases recorded in the docket book that indicates that Marsh was also arrested for looting the grocery store, but he is not mentioned in the Home News story on the arraignments in the court, nor does he appear in the list of those arrested in the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette in which Jacobs appears (neither of them are in the list published in the New York Evening Journal). Given that absence, and without a complainant recorded in the docket book to confirm a link between the two, Marsh is not included among those arrested during the disorder.

Magistrate Ford remanded Jacobs in custody. When she returned to court the next day, the docket book records that Ford set her bail at $1500. Two days later, on March 23, Jacobs was back in court. This is likely when the charge against her was reduced from felony burglary to unlawful entry; in the docket book the original charge is crossed out and "Red. to unl. entry" written in its place, in a different handwriting than the original charge. The same handwriting records that on this date Ford sent her to the Court of Special Sessions, to be tried for a misdemeanor, reducing her bail to $50. There is no evidence of the outcome of that trial. The 28th Precinct Police Blotter records outcomes for trials in the Court of Special Sessions for the individuals taken there, but the MCCH records do not include the police blotter for the 32nd Precinct, to which Adamie would have taken Jacobs having arrested her north of 130th Street. The prosecution of Marsh followed the same process until March 23, when Magistrate Ford discharged him rather than sending him for trial as he did Jacobs.

No details survive of the scale of damage done to the grocery store. While it is not in the MCCH Business survey, there is a grocery store visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, suggesting the store may have continued to operate after the disorder.

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