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

Jacob Saloway's stationery store looted

Jacob Saloway's stationery store at 381 Lenox Avenue was looted during the disorder. There are no details of those events. That section of Lenox Avenue was one in which businesses suffered extensive damage and looting beginning around 11:30 PM; the intersection likely saw particularly extensive violence around 1:00 AM when Alice Mitchell and Hugh Young were injured by flying glass. Saloway appeared among the white business owners who filed the first twenty claims for damages against the city identified in stories in the New York Sun and New York Amsterdam News. The stories included only a name, business address, and the amount of damages sought, $676 in Saloway's case. By the time the city comptroller heard testimony from those bringing suit, 106 owners had sought damages. While Saloway was not among those whose testimony appears in newspaper stories about that proceeding, he was one of seven whose cases went to trial in the New York Supreme Court to test the claims in March 1936. The jury awarded damages in all those cases, but none of the newspaper reports of the proceeding mentioned the amount awarded to Saloway. Only the New York Herald Tribune identified him as one of the claimants, noting only that he was a stationer. No one among those arrested for looting was identified as taking goods from this store.

An unpublished image taken by a photographer for the Hearst newspapers, and a similar image published in the Daily News, captured the clean-up on the section of Lenox Avenue containing Saloway's store the morning after the disorder. Saloway's store can be glimpsed on the far left of the image, with signs visible indicating it sold cigars. The windows appear to be missing and the displays emptied of stock. The angle does not show the interior of the store. The two businesses to the right of the store, in the foreground of the picture, also have no windows and empty displays and shelves. Both Anthony Avitable, who owned the grocery store, and Manny Zipp, who owned the Savoy Food Market, also sued the city for damages.

Whatever the damages awarded him, it is possible Saloway was able to remain in business. The MCCH business survey included a white-owned stationery store (a type of store that sold cigars) at 381 Lenox Avenue in the second half of 1935, but no details to confirm that it was the same store there on the night of the disorder. A business also appeared in the Tax Department photograph from 1939–1941, but the signage is not visible. In 1930, the federal census recorded that Saloway lived at 363 Lenox Avenue, a building anomalous in this area of Harlem as being home to only white residents. The six other households included three headed by men who owned stores in Harlem later looted during the disorder who joined Saloway in suing the city, William Gindin, Irving Stetkin, and Michael D'Agostino. There was no evidence of whether Saloway still lived there in 1935; Gindin, at least, had relocated to another building on Lenox Avenue by the time of the disorder.

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