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

Liggett's Drug Store looted

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 a hat store and 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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