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• 1 2022-02-09T03:39:49+00:00 Gonzales' jewelry store windows broken 15 plain 2024-05-29T21:06:28+00:00 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.