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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 was visible in the Tax Department photograph of 3 West 137th Street taken between 1939 and 1941. The two stores in the foreground were not part of 3 West 137th Street but part of a different building that fronted 5th Avenue which would have had the address 1 West 137th Street. One of those businesses had a sign identifying it as a grocery store. The MCCH Business survey in the second half of 1935 included only one store at 1 West 137th Street, a black-owned stationery store that was likely the storefront to the left of the grocery store in the Tax Department photograph. The survey identified 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 was 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 was recorded in the docket book, nor is the name of the store-owner recorded after the disorder by the MCCH investigator. Officer L. W. Adamie of the 46th Precinct arrested Jacobs. He also arrested Courtney Marsh, 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 in which Jacobs appeared. Given that absence, and without a complainant recorded in the docket book to confirm a link between the two, Marsh was not included among those arrested during the disorder. Magistrate Ford sent Jacobs to the Court of Special Sessions; there is no evidence of the outcome of her trial.

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

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