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Lokos Clothes shop windows broken
Pauline Lokos, a thirty-nine-year-old white woman, was identified as the storeowner in the Home News and recorded as the complainant in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book when Norris and Wright appeared in court on March 20. She and her husband Henry were listed in the 1933 City Directory as the owners of the men's clothing store at 2275 8th Avenue. The Home News story misidentified the business as a delicatessen. An advertisement in 1954 said the business had opened in 1914. In 1933 the Lokos family lived at 312 West 122nd Street, just a block west of the store, on the corner of Manhattan Avenue, a section of Harlem where the residents were white in the early 1930s.
When Norris and Wright appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court both men were charged with malicious mischief. Magistrate Renaud transferred them to the Court of Special Sessions for trial. The judges convicted them and on April 1st sentenced them each to three months in the workhouse, according to the 28th Precinct Police blotter.
The clothing store was recorded as a white-owned business in the second half of 1935 in the MCCH business survey, which mistakenly located the business at 2273 8th Avenue. By 1937, Lokos Clothes had relocated to 2285 8th Avenue, in the three-story building north of their location in 1935 (where the New York Amsterdam News reported a police officer had shot and killed Allen Bruce after allegedly seeing the twenty-five-year-old Black laborer smash the display window and take a coat). A "Henry Lokos Clothes" store sign was visible in a Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, overhanging the street north of the one-story building in which it was located in 1935. The Lokos' two sons also gave 2285 8th Avenue as their place of employment when they registered for the draft in 1942. By April 6, 1940, when a census enumerator called, the family had moved to 285 St. Nicholas Avenue, between West 124th and West 125th Streets, still close to the store. Their new home was in section of Harlem west of 8th Avenue where white residents remained the majority.
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This page references:
- "Transcripts of Police Blotter - Precinct 28, March 19 & 20, 1935," MCCH - Juvenile Delinquency - 1935-36, Departmental Correspondence. Box 34, Folder 1 (Roll 171), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945.
- Harlem Magistrates Court docket book
- City Directory, New York, New York, 1933, 2065 (Ancestry.com).
- US Census, 1940, Enumeration District 31-1168, Sheet 3A, Manhattan, New York, New York (Ancestry.com).
- Draft Registration Cards for New York City, 1940-1947, Records of the Selective Service System, Record Group 147, National Archives and Records Administration (Ancestry.com).
- "Cop Kills "Thief" Borrowing Overcoat," New York Amsterdam News, October 9, 1937, 2.
- "It's Top Quality," New York Age, March 20, 1954, 7.