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

Julia Cureti's restaurant windows broken

Sometime during the disorder, windows in Julia Cureti's restaurant at 142 Lenox Avenue, on the southeast corner of 117th Street, were broken. Several businesses on the blocks of Lenox Avenue south and north of 116th Street had windows broken, damaged reported only in a story by a reporter for La Prensa who walked up Lenox Avenue the morning after the disorder. However, although the reporter would have walked by it, the restaurant is not included in that story. That likely indicates it was one of the business they reported had not been included as they had only suffered minor damage.

Cureti must have been in the business at the time, as early on March 22 she identified Jackie Ford, a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, as one of the group who broke the windows. There is no information on how she came to identify Ford. Reports of his appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 22 in the New York Post, New York World-Telegram, and La Prensa only mention Cureti's identification and that Ford had broken her store windows. Cureti is recorded as the complainant against Ford in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, where the charge against him is recorded as malicious mischief. Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions and held him on bail of $500. There is no information on the outcome of the prosecution.



A white-owned restaurant is recorded at 142 Lenox Avenue in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935. While that record likely indicates that Cureti remained in business, she may not have operated the restaurant much longer. When a man and woman were arrested after using counterfeit $10 bills to pay for food at the restaurant in July 1937, the New York Amsterdam News story identified Dennis King as the owner. Whoever owned it, a chicken restaurant is visible at 142 Lenox Avenue in the Tax Department photograph from 1939–1941.

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