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

Liggett's drug store windows broken (8th Avenue & West 125th St)

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. The store had extensive windows on both 8th Avenue and 125th Street; the information in the list did not identify which of those windows were broken. 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, which was looted; and a seafood restaurant on the other side of the hat store at 2338 8th Avenue. Other isolated reports of broken windows, looting and arrests on 8th Avenue occurred further north, around 127th and 128th Streets. The 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. No one arrested during the disorder was charged with breaking the store windows

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 and a barber at 2336 8th Avenue (the hat store address was actually 2334 8th Avenue). Mention of the drug 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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