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

Maurice Gilden's Optician's store looted

Some time during the disorder optometrist Maurice Gilden's shop at 2084 7th Avenue, in the Hotel Theresa just south of the corner of 7th Avenue and West 125th Street, was looted. Gilden claimed that several thousand dollars of optical supplies were stolen. Multiple acts of violence and looting were reported in the area around the intersection throughout the disorder, so the attack could have taken place at any time. No one arrested for looting was identified as taking goods from the store.

Only the New York Post and New York Sun mentioned the attack on Gilden's store, as an aside when reporting that Gilden was organizing a group of businessmen to visit the Mayor to complain that he was to blame for the disorder. Gilden told the New York Sun:

We are wondering if the Mayor's lenient attitude toward communistic groups in the city is not responsible for the soft treatment meted out to the rioters by the police. I was informed that high ranking police officials went among the uniformed men and advised them to talk to the members of the mob rather than to use force.

An immigrant from Russia who arrived in 1906, the thirty-seven-year-old Gilden had served his apprenticeship as an optician in Harlem in 1911, according to an advertisement in the New York Amsterdam News. In 1918 he worked for an optician on Columbus Avenue, according to his registration for the draft, but by 1926, when he ran advertisements in the New York Amsterdam News, he had his taken over the optometrist's office established in the Hotel Theresa building in 1899. His main office was at 344 Madison Avenue, in midtown, while he lived in the Bronx.

Despite the scale of damage Gilden claimed, his office continued to operate after the disorder. It appears in the MCCH Business survey, and while it is not visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, it is advertised in the New York Amsterdam News in 1939.

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