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

Liggett's Drug Store windows broken

The branch of the Liggett's Drug Store chain, located on the corner of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, is one of the businesses with broken windows identified by the reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, up Lenox Avenue and across West 125th Street to 8th Avenue on the day after the disorder. As well as businesses on the block immediately south of 125th Street, their list included two other businesses on the block to the north with broken windows: the Danbury Hat store at 2334 8th Avenue; and a seafood restaurant on the other side of the hat store at 2338 8th Avenue. 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-owne

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 the Danbury hat store (whose windows were broken during the disorder) and a 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.
 

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