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"Harlem: Survey - Census Tracts #222 (27)," 1935, Roll 80, Subject Files, Office of the Mayor, Fiorello H. La Guardia records (New York City Municipal Archives).
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2020-10-22T01:45:42+00:00
Regal Shoes looted
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2021-10-27T21:45:48+00:00
Edward Wittleder, the assistant manager, closed Regal Shoes, on the corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, at 10 PM, according to his Magistrate's Court affidavit. By that time store windows had been smashed the length of the block of 125th Street to the west, between 7th and 8th Avenues. Police trying to clear people from the street had pushed them toward the intersection on which Regal Shoes sat, creating large crowds, as well as concentrating the officers and riot control trucks there. After 10 PM, small groups had begun to attack businesses north and south of the intersection on 7th Avenue and further east on 125th Street. By 11 PM the store window had been smashed (a reporter from La Prensa included Regal Shoes among the businesses he saw with broken windows the next day). Around that time, Officer Peter Naton of the 28th Precinct claimed he saw John Vivien, a twenty-seven-year-old Black laborer, reach through the window and take a pair of shows from the display. Naton then arrested Vivien, who he said still had the shoes in his possession. Wittleder identified them as coming from the store and being worth $5.50.
Vivien lived at 483 Manhattan Avenue, two blocks west of Regal Shoes, near the corner of West 120th Street. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, where Magistrate Renaud held him for the grand jury on bail of $1000. The Home News reported those proceedings; the remainder of his prosecution is recorded only in legal records and police records. Vivien appeared before the grand jury on April 4, according to his District Attorney's case file; they sent him to the Court of Special Sessions rather than indicting him, indicating a lack of the evidence that he had broken into the store required for a charge of burglary. A charge of larceny was likely the alternative, with the items valued well below the $100 required for a felony charge. The judges in that court then convicted him and suspended his sentence, an outcome recorded in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter.
Regal Shoes continued in business after the disorder. The MCCH Business Survey from the second half of 1935 includes the store, whose address it gives as 2097 7th Avenue rather than 166 West 125th Street as in the reports of the looting. The store also appears in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, of the building labeled 2901 7th Avenue. -
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2021-08-18T18:35:18+00:00
Liggett's Drug Store looted
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2021-10-30T20:49:36+00:00
Some time during the disorder, James Hayes, a sixteen-year-old Black youth, allegedly broke the window of a store at 2334 8th Avenue, and took a baseball bat from the window, according to a report of his appearance in the Magistrates Court in the Home News. There is no information on the circumstances of his arrest. The nearby intersection of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, only a few buildings from Kress' store, saw some of the earliest crowds and violence of the disorder, and a concentration of police, who sought to clear West 125th Street by pushing people on to the avenue. However, there are few other reports of broken windows or looting on 8th Avenue, with most of those attacks on Lenox and 7th Avenues, notwithstanding that almost all the businesses were white-owned.
None of the sources identify the business. It seems likely it was a branch of the Liggett's Drug Store chain, located on the corner of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street. The Tax Department photograph of the corner taken between 1939 and 1941 shows that the drug store window stretched from the corner two thirds of the length of the building that ran from 2330 to 2336 8th Avenue, so would have taken in 2334 8th Avenue. The Liggett's Drug Store is not in the MCCH Business survey, which does not include any stores on the corner of that building, the Bishop Building, only a shoe store at 273 West 125th Street and a bank at 277 West 125th Street, and the Danbury hat store (whose windows were broken during the disorder) and a barber at 2336 8th Avenue. Mention of the store in that location in an article in the New York Amsterdam News in 1932 about a man charged with throwing a brick through the store window (with the address given as 281 West 125th Street) and in the caption of a photograph of picketing of the store in 1938 also in the New York Amsterdam News confirms that the drug store was on the corner prior to when the Tax Department photograph was taken between 1939 and 1941.
James Hayes appears among those charged with burglary in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and in the New York Evening Journal. Hayes appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, where the charge was recorded as petit larceny not burglary. That charge did not require evidence of breaking in and entering a store as burglary did. Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions and held him on $500 bail. The 28th Precinct Police Blotter, which also recorded the charge against Hayes as burglary and misspelled his name as Hazel, is the only source for the outcome of that proceeding: a conviction and suspended sentence. The blotter also added the detail that he broke the window, rather than reaching through an already broken window. Hayes lived at 476 West 141st Street, on Black Harlem's northwest boundary, further from the location of his arrest than most of those caught in the disorder, most of whom lived south of 125th Street or near Lenox Avenue south of 135th Street. -
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2021-11-10T20:44:32+00:00
United Cigar store windows broken
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2021-11-12T19:16:20+00:00
The United Cigar store on the northwest corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue had its windows broken during the disorder. Businesses on at least two of the other corners had windows broken during the disorder; Regal Shoes on the southeast corner was also reported looted, while Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store only had windows broken. There is no mention of the business on the southwest corner, in the Hotel Theresa building, which was likely the branch of the Chock Fill O'Nuts chain recorded in the MCCH business survey. But it likely also had windows broken as the stores immediately next to it on West 125th Street, Wise Shoe store and Mylady's shop did. Police trying to clear people from West 125th Street around Kress' store to the west had pushed the crowd toward this intersection, creating large crowds, some of who broke away and threw objects at the windows of stores on 7th Avenue. After 9.00 PM, emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection, as part of the perimeter Inspector McAuliffe ordered police to establish around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, New York Herald Tribune and Pittsburgh Courier. The presence of such large numbers of police does appear to have resulted in only isolated looting of stores on the corners even if it came too late to protect store windows.
Across 7th Avenue from the United Cigar store, police officers armed with rifles stood guard in front of Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store after the display windows were smashed. Patrolmen may also have guarded the cigar store; while there is no mention of their presence in newspaper stories, the New York Daily News published a photograph of an officer with a rifle guarding a store on West 125th and 7th Avenue with stock visible in the window that fits a cigar store but not any of the businesses on the other corners. One of the captions refers to the business as a drug store, but none of the business identified on the corners of the intersection are drug stores. Damage to the store window is visible to the left of the patrolman, two holes in the glass, in the original version of the image in Getty Images. Only a small section of the window is visible, so there may be more damage.
Both the New York Herald Tribune and the New York American included the cigar store among the businesses on West 125th Street between 8th Avenue and 7th Avenue that they identified as having windows broken, without giving the store's address. (Other newspapers who reported damaged stores on that block listed only larger department stores). The store is also one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, up Lenox Avenue and then west on West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. They gave the store's address as 2100 7th Avenue.
No one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 did record the white-owned store at 2100 7th Avenue, and it is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.