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

K. Percy's tailor and cleaning store looted

Around 8.45 PM, an object thrown from the street broke a window in the N. Y. Cleaning and Dyeing Company store at 2152 7th Avenue, the owner Mr. K. Percy told James Tartar, an investigator for the MCCH. By 9.30 PM, more objects thrown at the store had broken three more windows. At some point in the evening, individuals went further into the business, stealing $150 of stock. Tartar also spoke to the owners of four of the other six occupied stores on this block of 7th Avenue, between West 127th Street and West 128th Street. They reported windows broken sometime between 8.45 PM and 11.00 PM, and stock losses ranging from $33 at the cigar store at 2154 7th Avenue, $200 at the grocery store at 2140 7th Avenue, $700 at the saloon next to the grocery store at 2140 7th Avenue, to $850 at the auto equipment store at 2152 7th Avenue. Percy was not among the twenty-seven identified as suing the city for failing to protect their businesses, but an additional eighty-five who brought suits were not identified.

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 the saloon apparently was. That all those interviewed by Tartar could give a time when people threw objects that broke their store windows indicates they were present. It is not clear if they were still in the businesses when they were looted. Tartar recorded the value of the stock stolen from their stores, suggesting that looting may have happened some time after windows were broken, as more general narratives in the press relate. 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. No one arrested for looting is identified as having stolen goods from the store.

James Tartar's survey is the only source that mentions Percy's store. His investigation was related to 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. After they stopped their car and chased after the crowd, one, Patrolman McInerny, fatally shot Hobbs. Hobbs and witnesses at the scene said he had been passing by not taking goods from the store.

It appears that Percy was able to remain in business. Although the MCCH business survey does not include a store at this address, a tailor and cleaning store appears in the Tax Department photograph of 2152 7th Avenue taken in 1939-1941.(Tartar's sketch of the block in 1935 identified Percy's business as a tailor).

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