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

James Tartar, "Interview with Howard Malloy and Arthur Moore, 213 W. 128th St.," (April 5, 1935), "Harlem, Mayor's Commission on Conditions in," Box 25, Folder 19, Arthur Garfield Hays Papers (Princeton University)

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Greenfield Auto Equipment store looted Around 9.00 PM, Louis Eisenberg and three of his staff finished up putting new merchanduse and sign cards in the windows of his store, Greenfield Auto Equipment, at 2150 7th Avenue, and began cleaning up inside the store. They "heard a terrific crash at the front door and saw angry crowd surging into the store," he told the MCCH in a private interview. Eisenberg and his staff fled out the rear of the store, and on to the street, where they hailed a cab to take them away from the crowd. The timing of that escape varies in different sources. In police records, Eisenberg and his staff fled out a rear window, into the back yard of the store, where they remained until around 11.30 PM, when they avoided the "mob" on the street by jumping in a passing taxi. In his interview with the MCCH, Eisenberg describes going from the yard to the neighboring "tailor shop" (the cleaning store) and hailing a cab from there. There is no mention of spending time in the yard, and from the cab he saw only one broken window, suggesting they left soon after fleeing the store. That statement contradicted what Eisenberg told James Tartar, an investigator for the MCCH, that five windows were broken between 8.30 PM and 9.00PM. Tartar also recorded information from the white owners of four of the six other occupied stores on this block of 7th Avenue, between West 127th Street and West 128th Street, who reported windows broken sometime between 8.45 PM and 11.00 PM. The owner of the cleaning store neighboring Eisenberg's store specified that the windows in the auto equipment store were broken before those in his store, four of which targeted between 8.45 PM and 9.30 PM.

When crowds that had been focused on the block of West 125th Street housing Kress' store began moving to other parts of Harlem, the blocks immediately north on 7th Avenue were among their first targets. As they had on West 125th Street, people threw objects at the windows of white stores, at whites on the streets, and around 11.00 PM, at a passing Fifth Avenue Company bus, and later looted stores. The time the crowds appeared was early enough in the evening that most of the stores would still have been open for business, or at least still staffed, as Greenfield Auto Equipment was. That all the neighboring storeowners interviewed by Tartar could give a time when people threw objects that broke their store windows indicates they were present. The Black-owned Cozy Shoppe at 2154 7th Avenue, on the corner of 128th Street, was undamaged; someone from that store had written "Colored Shoppe" on the store window. Tartar included the "Cozy Shop" on his drawing of the block, together with a Black-owned beauty parlor to the left of the auto equipment store, but neither appear in his list of looted businesses, suggesting the beauty parlor may also have been undamaged.

The storeowners also provided the value of the stock stolen from their stores. Eisenberg put the value of stock stolen from his store at $850; when he reported the theft to police he provided a two-page list of merchandise without information on its value. While Eisenberg's account of men rushing into his store implies that goods were stolen as soon as the window was broken, the more fragmentary responses Tartar recorded from the other store owners suggest that looting may have happened later, as more general narratives in the press relate. The owner of the saloon on the corner of West 127th Street, the Harlem Grill, reported one window broke around 9.00PM, and two more at least an hour later. Crowds smashed windows in stores on the opposite side of the street apparently without looting them around 9.45 PM, when a police officer arrested Leroy Brown for urging a group of people to follow his lead after he threw a tailor's dummy through a window. Whenever the looting started, by around 11.00 PM, when Howard Malloy passed the store, all the goods in the display window had been taken, he told Tartar in an interview on April 5. On March 20, Detective O'Brien visited the store and reported that he found "five (5) windows of the store broken and merchandise strewn about the floor and window. Also noted that the street in the immediate vicinity was littered with broken glass, bricks, stones and other heavy objects."

Information on the Greenfield Auto Equipment store, and those store neighboring it, appears in the records of the MCCH because of what happened after the looting, or at least after the looting had started. Around 12.55 AM, two police officers in a squad car traveling south on 7th Avenue reported hearing smashing glass, and seeing Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black student standing in the store window passing merchandise to a crowd of people on the street. They stopped their car and chased after the crowd. As Hobbs ran across west across 128th Street Patrolman McInery shot the boy in the back. Although the officers transported him to Harlem Hospital, Hobbs died on March 30. He and his younger brother had been at a show at the Apollo Theater until 12.30 AM, when they emerged to find "general disorder and many broken windows." Russell told Tartar that they wanted to "see and hear what was going on," so walked along 125th Street and up 7th Avenue, passing a crowd in front of Eisenberg's store at the time the police car arrived. Both boys denied they had looted the store; they had simply joined the crowd in running when the police car stopped, and McInerny had shot Lloyd without warning when he split from the group and turned west on 128th Street, back in the direction of the family home. Three Black eye-witnesses, including Howard Malloy, confirmed that account. Police insisted Hobbs had stolen goods from the store, but they did not produce the items they claimed to have found on him - a horn and socket set - until several weeks after the shooting. The grand jury twice declined to indict McInnery for shooting Hobbs, accepting his claim that it was justifiable homicide. The MCCH did not agree, and Hobbs became a central part of their report on the events of the disorder.

No other people were arrested or charged with looting the Greenfield Auto Equipment store, or the other stores on this block of 7th Avenue. Eisenberg "was on the point of closing after the riot but was persuaded to stay on," he told a MCCH investigator who visited the store on June 25. He had been in business for sixteen years, with a staff of four, two of whom were Black men. A white-owned auto supply store is recorded in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 (mistakenly located at 2152 7th Avenue rather than 2150 7th Avenue). By 1939, however, the store was gone, with a billiard parlor in its place in the Tax Department photograph.