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

"Harlem Riot Case is Lost by the City," New York Times, November 1, 1935, 22.

In the New York Times

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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.
Louis Cobb arrested Around 1:20 AM, Officer Nathaniel Carter allegedly saw several men leaving William Feinstein's liquor store at 452 Lenox Avenue carrying bottles, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit. 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. A crowd of thirty to forty people had attacked the closed store a few minutes earlier, according to witness testimony in the Municipal Court reported in the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune, breaking down the iron gate protecting it, then smashing the windows, taking bottles of liquor and damaging the storefront. Feinstein put his losses at $627.40 when he sued the city for failing to protect his business. The three bottles allegedly taken by Cobb amounted to just over one percent of that total, $7. Cobb lived only a block north of the store at 473 Lenox Avenue.

Louis Cobb appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrate's Court on March 20. 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 records "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 appeared repeatedly in court, on March 25, 26 and April 2, when he was finally sent to the grand jury. Those decisions reflected the criminal record eventually produced for him: six charges in New York City 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. Cobb appeared in the list of those arrested and charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list published in the New York Evening Journal. There were no newspaper reports of his prosecution.

The grand jury did not indict Cobb; on April 10 they instead transferred 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 required for a charge of burglary, and the value of the three bottles of liquor Officer Carter allegedly found on him, $7, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit, well below the $100 threshold for a felony charge for larceny. Less than a week later, on April 15, the Magistrates in the Court of Special Sessions convicted Cobb and sentenced him to the Penitentary, an outcome recorded only in the records of the 32nd Precinct.

Born in Georgia in 1897, Louis Cobb had made his way to New York City sometime before January 10, 1920, when a census enumerator found him boarding at 334 53rd Street, in San Juan Hill, the city's major Black neighborhood before the rise of Harlem, and working as a porter. A series of criminal convictions though the 1920s and 1930s offer fragmentary glimpses of Cobb's life in Harlem. Just over two months after the census, his criminal record indicates that police charged Cobb with attempted burglary; he was convicted and sentenced to an indefinite term in the Blackwell Island Penitentiary. He was on parole by February 1921, when police arrested him again for violating the terms of that parole and returned him to the penitentiary. Released again later that year, within a few months Cobb was in court, charged with robbery. Convicted of second-degree assault, the judge sentenced him to five years in Sing Sing, the state prison. The prison admissions register recorded that Cobb was unemployed at the time of the alleged crime, now living in Harlem at 30 West 135th Street; in a subsequent admission register entry he would attribute his "first crime" to being out of work. According to the admissions register, Cobb was eligible for parole in May 1925. He likely was released around this time, as in November 1925 police arrested him again, this time for a drug offense, according to his criminal record. The judge sentenced him to another indefinite term in the Penitentiary, but the conviction violated his parole, so Cobb was returned to Sing Sing Prison to serve out his previous sentence.

Likely released in early 1926, Cobb later that year began living with Martha Nelson, who was about ten years his junior. The couple made their home at 8 West 137th Street, in the heart of Harlem. In 1930, Cobb gave his occupation as longshoreman in the 1930 census, but indicated he had not been employed in 1929. He may have been supporting himself in other ways. In May 1929, his criminal record indicates that a magistrate convicted Cobb as a procurer, supplying prostitutes, and sentenced him to sixty days in the Workhouse. About five months after his release, in December 1929, police again arrested Cobb, for the murder of Bert Moore, a Black store manger, during a robbery of the candy store at 23 West 138th Street that he managed. The New York Amsterdam News and New York Age published very different accounts of the crime, neither of which explain why Cobb's criminal record indicated he was discharged in 1931 and charged instead with gun possession. The robbery of the store was the third in as many weeks. According to the New York Age, in a story accompanied by a photograph of Moore, Cobb was involved in all those robberies; on the first two occasions, he had an accomplice, John Boyle, who was arrested after the second robbery when Moore managed to subdue him with a baseball bat until police arrived. Cobb then returned on his own to rob the store again and shot Moore as he left. A customer in the store at the time identified Cobb. The New York Amsterdam News reported Boyle (whose name they misspelled as Doyle) as acting alone and captured by Moore and three customers, and did not link Cobb to either previous robbery. After the third robbery, the New York Amsterdam News reported less evidence linking Cobb to the murder: Moore gave police a description before he died, based on which officers arrested Cobb on West 138th Street close by the candy store. The story also reported that police found a gun when they searched Cobb's home, but that his wife claimed it belonged to her, leading to her arrest for gun possession. The New York Amsterdam News a week later reported Cobb's arraignment and his wife's arraignment in separate stories. Neither paper published anything further about the case.

In April 1930, the census recorded that Cobb was in the Tombs Prison; a magistrate had ordered him held without bail on the murder charge. However, at some point before early 1931 he was released; beginning in February, he worked as a laborer for a coal company, according to the Sing Sing Prison admission register. In April, police arrested him for possession of a revolver; the prison admission register recorded the date of that crime as December 13, 1929, when Cobb was arrested for Moore's murder. Police must have found a way to link Cobb to the gun found in his home that day, but not to Moore's murder; it did not seem that Martha had changed her story, as Cobb still listed her as his wife in the prison admission register. Convicted of gun possession, Cobb was sentenced to seven years in Sing Sing Prison.

Paroled in 1939, rather than returning to Harlem, Cobb settled in Albany, New York, and found work as a presser. He identified himself as single, and his mother, rather than Martha Nelson, as his next of kin, in the Clinton Prison admission ledger in 1939. In July that year police arrested Cobb for burglary, charging him with stealing a $15 radio, a coat, and a vest. The admission ledger recorded that he asserted his innocence, saying he took the property from a friend not knowing it was stolen. Nonetheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to a term of ten to twenty years. The 1940 census recorded him as an inmate of Clinton Prison. He was not eligible for parole until 1948.
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.
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.