1985 7th Avenue, c. 1939-1941.
1 media/nynyma_rec0040_1_01904_0002a_thumb.jpg 2024-05-29T20:56:42+00:00 Stephen Robertson a1bf8804093bc01e94a0485d9f3510bb8508e3bf 1 2 Source: DOF: Manhattan 1940s Tax Photos (New York City Municipal Archives). plain 2024-05-29T20:57:09+00:00 nynyma_rec0040_1_01904_0002 20180309 075631+0000 Stephen Robertson a1bf8804093bc01e94a0485d9f3510bb8508e3bfThis page has tags:
- 1 2023-12-13T11:08:55+00:00 Anonymous Department of Finance, Manhattan 1940s Tax Photos: 7th Avenue Anonymous 4 plain 2023-12-13T16:17:45+00:00 Anonymous
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Around midnight, gunshots rang out more frequently as the violence of the police response to the disorder intensified. Some of that shooting came as police encountered and tried to disperse the crowds in the two areas where disorder was concentrated at this time, Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street and 7th Avenue south of 125th Street.
On Lenox Avenue around 132nd Street, the staff in William Feinstein’s liquor store who had been watching the violence for an hour heard an increase in police gunfire that made them decide it was no longer safe to remain. David Schmoockler, the manager, and an unnamed Black employee locked the doors, closed the iron gates that protected the storefront, and left Harlem. Lawyers for the city would later criticize the men for not first moving the merchandise in the window to the rear of the store. The judge in that trial saw the men’s situation differently, accepting that they had been too scared by the escalating violence to spend any longer in the store.
Schmoockler and his coworker were not the only people observing the disorder who perceived an increase in police violence and use of guns around midnight. So too did several white journalists. Gunfire that had been episodic in the preceding hours became more constant. White journalists variously attributed police shooting to the increased violence of participants in the disorder, the need to protect white men and women from attack, and the outbreak of widespread looting, while the Afro-American’s correspondent portrayed it as a response to the increasing number of police being injured. Only more widespread looting was actually evident on Lenox Avenue at the time. It took little for police to feel justified in shooting at Harlem’s residents, so individuals taking items rather than simply damaging businesses was enough to increase the shooting. In the context of looting, police officers also became more willing to use their guns in efforts to disperse crowds on the street. Increasingly indiscriminate shooting made it more likely that bystanders would be hit by bullets, a situation all too familiar to Harlem residents.
The spread of looting reflected the variety of circumstances in which it had begun to take place. By midnight, sustained attacks on businesses had done enough damage to make merchandise in the window displays accessible to those who were on the streets. More often than earlier in the disorder, windows were broken so items could be taken immediately. As window displays were emptied of merchandise, those seeking items they needed ventured inside businesses. Individuals climbed through smashed windows to access merchandise on shelves inside or, less often, broke down doors and walked in. Doing so required more willingness to break the law and involved more risk of arrest as it took more time and offered little chance to escape if police arrived. In some cases, those who went inside threw merchandise out on to the street, making it available for others to take more easily and with less risk than reaching into windows.
As participants in the disorder moved out of range of police guns and more of the neighborhood’s most desperate residents came to the street from their homes to the east, it was perhaps around this time that attacks on businesses and looting began to spread north of this area, into blocks in the heart of Black Harlem around 135th Street. A branch of the Wohlmuth clothing store chain at 477 Lenox Avenue near West 134th Street, a chain grocery store near 135th Street, and Philip Jaross’ tailor’s shop between 136th and 137th Streets would all be looted. However, the violence around 135th Street was less extensive than in the blocks below 130th Street. Police estimated that only eighty-five broken windows in total were damaged north of 130th Street on 8th, 7th, Lenox, and 5th Avenues combined. There were crowds of people in the streets on those blocks; twenty-eight of the thirty-two arrests north of 130th Street resulted in charges of disorderly conduct. All those businesses reported to have been looted contained items of which many of Harlem's residents were in need: food and clothing.
Some of the violence seen around 131st Street now manifested further south. A fire was started in Harry Lash’s 5c & 10c store on the corner of 130th Street around midnight. Display windows were smashed the length of the store that faced West 130th Street, as well as on the Lenox Avenue side, and much of their contents taken. Arnold Ford, a nineteen-year-old Black man, joined others entering the store and "helping himself to some merchandise." Untroubled by police, he took "soap, garters, thread and notions" with a value of $1.15. Although Lash would ultimately put the value of the merchandise taken from the store at $1,000, photographs taken the next day showed large quantities of items still on shelves inside the store. The fire was on the West 130th Street side of the building, and firefighters extinguished it before it did much damage. Nonetheless, photographers and newsreel cameras all arrived in time to capture images of the flames. Police would also have converged to respond to the fire and manage the crowds drawn by it and the presence of the firefighters. They likely also arrested the only person charged with taking merchandise from the store, Milton Ackerman, a twenty-four-year-old Black man. He lived nearby on West 130th Street, midway down the block east of the store, so probably was among the residents who had come to Lenox Avenue in response to noise and rumors. Officer Brown must have claimed to have seen him in the store as he charged Ackerman with burglary for taking two rolls of paper and some napkins worth 13 cents in total. While a grand jury did indict him for that offense, indicating that police presented some evidence, a judge later dismissed the indictment, raising the possibility that Ackerman had not actually been a participant in the attacks on the store. Instead, he may have been among those on the street near the store, arrested either by mistake or as part of efforts to clear the streets, as had happened on earlier on 7th and 8th Avenues.
Other arrests of residents in the vicinity of damaged and looted businesses with apparently little regard to whether they participated in the violence were occurring in the blocks south of Lash’s store. Police efforts to control the violence there, as around West 132nd Street, appeared to only temporarily disperse groups who quickly reformed nearby and shifted their attention to different targets. Those participants in the violence were emerging from and returning to the groups of spectators on the street, at least some of whom followed groups moving up and down the avenue rather than remaining in one place as Samuel Pitts and Marshall Pfifer did on 7th Avenue, adding to the disorder on the streets. Businesses in the area consequently suffered episodic attacks, accruing damage and losing merchandise across a period of several hours. At least some officers responded as their colleagues had earlier by somewhat indiscriminately arresting those in the vicinity of damaged and looted businesses. That is what happened around this time at the Romanoff drug store at 375 Lenox Avenue, on the corner of West 129th Street a block south of Lash’s store. An unidentified police officer arrested three men, Oscar Austin, a twenty-nine-year-old Black man, and two twenty-four-year-old Black men, Jacob Bonaparte and Sam Nicholas, and charged them with attempted burglary. That charge fit circumstances in which he had seen the men reaching into the store windows or inside the store but had not found any merchandise in their possession. However, that was not what the men had been doing, as the charge was changed to disorderly conduct when they appeared in court and was then rejected outright by the magistrate who acquitted them. Austin, Bonaparte, and Nicholas were spectators, not participants in the disorder, residents of West 128th Street and West 124th Street who had remained close to home as they followed events on Lenox Avenue.
Even as police intervened to stop the attacks on some businesses, other groups attacked and looted nearby stores without any impediment. Anthony Avitable saw crowds "just breaking into my store" at 381 Lenox Avenue on the block north of the Romanoff drug store as he drove over the 138th Street bridge. He had heard about the disorder in Harlem around midnight and was on his way from his home in the Bronx. Seeing no police near his store, he drove on to the 28th Precinct Station on West 123rd Street and at 12:30 AM report the looting. Officers there said they "couldn't do anything for me," and that he should contact police headquarters. When Avitable called, "a police officer at headquarters told him over the phone: "I'll have men there in two minutes." It would be forty-five minutes before they arrived. Avitable would be one of the white business owners who later sued the city for damages for failing to protect them from the disorder.
Further south in the block between 125th and 126th Streets, police made multiple arrests that suggested there were more officers there around midnight than elsewhere on Lenox Avenue. Officer Anthony Barbaro, at least, was standing on the southeast corner of West 126th Street just after midnight. Undeterred by his presence, a group of people gathered in front of the Rex Drug store across 126th Street at 318 Lenox Avenue. Barbaro then claimed he heard two men call out, "Com[e] on gang, here's two more windows, let's break them." After throwing stones that shattered glass in the windows, the group ran north up Lenox Avenue. Barbaro gave chase. He was almost certainly joined by some other officers, as he alone would not have been able to apprehend the two alleged members of the group arrested two buildings north of the drug store, Leon Mauraine, a twenty-two-year-old Black window washer, and David Smith, a twenty-two-year-old Black clerk. Around ten minutes later, when a group of about thirty people gathered across the street in front of the Temple Grill & Restaurant at 317 Lenox Avenue, another patrolman, Alfred Tait, was nearby. After he allegedly heard Bernard Smith, a thirty-nine-year-old Black interior decorator shout to the group, "We will get these two windows here," throw two stones that broke the restaurant’s windows, and then call, "You fellows get the others," Tait moved to intervene. While his arrest of Smith halted this group’s attacks on the restaurant, it did not prevent them from moving on to break windows in nearby businesses.
Among the businesses that continued to be attacked notwithstanding the arrests were George’s Lunch and Piskin’s laundry on West 126th Street on the opposite side of Lenox Avenue to where Officer Barbaro had been standing. Police struggling with attacks around the intersection would have begun to fire their guns more indiscriminately, so it was likely around this time that a stray bullet went through the laundry window. At that point, Piskin decided to seek help from the police. While he had heard “plenty” of pistol shots before then without feeling the need to leave the laundry, a bullet actually hitting the window evidently represented an escalation in violence that made it too dangerous to remain. Next door, the white staff member in George’s Lunch remained locked in the washroom. Over the next hour or so, people made their way inside both businesses; in the following hours, the machinery in the laundry was broken and the furniture in the restaurant was demolished in attacks against white property that went beyond looting. Piskin’s efforts to get police protection against those attacks was to no avail. He did find an officer a block away at the intersection of West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue: "Report it — I can't leave my post," was the patrolman’s response. So Piskin then went to the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. He received no more help than Anthony Avitable had. "Oh we know all about it," was the response there. When Piskin complained about the lack of police protection, another officer told him, "My life is more important to me than your business is to you." Unsurprisingly, the laundry owner would join with Avitable in suing the city for damages.
Not only Piskin went without aid as police struggled to contain the violence around West 126th Street. So too did August Miller, a fifty-six-year-old white handyman, who collapsed near the intersection of 126th Street and Lenox Avenue sometime soon after Smith’s arrest. Miller had emerged from the subway station at 125th Street not long before, having traveled from the building in the Bronx where he lived and worked. It was a taxi-driver rather than police who went to his aid, transporting the unconscious man to the Joint Diseases Hospital, which was closer than Harlem Hospital. Miller died three days later without regaining consciousness long enough to describe what had happened to him. While the physician who examined Miller diagnosed a possible skull fracture, an injury the more sensational white press was quick to attribute to a beating by “rioters,” the medical examiner who later conducted an autopsy concluded that he had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, “a natural cause [of death], nothing suspicious.” If violence was not directly responsible for Miller’s death, it does seem likely that the stress of being in the midst of the noise and crowds of the disorder contributed to some degree to him suffering a stroke at that time. Given those circumstances, August Miller is counted among those who died during the disorder.
A block west, a woman was attacked, likely in a continuation of the violence some groups of residents targeted at white individuals they encountered on Harlem’s streets. Twenty-six-year-old Emma Brockson’s race was not identified in the hospital record of her treatment for injuries to her left hand "received when assaulted by some unknown person or persons." However, she lived on West 126th Street just west of St Nicholas Avenue, on the boundary of an area largely populated by white residents. At the heart of the commercial district on 125th Street, the intersection with 7th Avenue was heavily trafficked by white shoppers and theater patrons, and consequently the site of recurring violence against white men and women before and after Brockson was assaulted. As elsewhere in Harlem, the presence of police in the area guarding damaged businesses and keeping crowds away from the Kress store did not prevent violence nor did it enable officers to intervene and make arrests when it broke out.
As well as pedestrians, the groups looking to direct violence at white men and women on 7th Avenue targeted the vehicles traveling on the street, a variant of the disorder not seen in other areas of Harlem. At the same intersection with 118th Street where a group had attacked Mario Pravia’s candy store around 11:30 PM, a rock or bottle thrown at a passing car shattered one of its windows, sending glass flying into the face of a passenger, Patricia O’Rourke, a thirty-year-old white woman. She was on her way home to the West Bronx with her two sisters. Harlem was not the destination of most of those driving on 7th Avenue. As the major artery in and out of the city, it brought white individuals into the disorder and delivered them to those looking for targets for violence. The cuts on O’Rourke’s eyes, forehead, and cheeks caused the driver of the car to divert to Harlem Hospital. When she emerged from the hospital sometime later with a bandaged head and a fur coat over her shoulders, O’Rourke attracted the attention of a Daily News photographer. When her image appeared on the front page it was captioned “A Girl Victim.” On 8th Avenue, where there was likely less traffic traveling under the elevated railway line, it was passing police vehicles that had objects thrown at them. Patrolman Harry Whittington, a thirty-five-year-old white member of Emergency Squad 9 was hit by a rock as the emergency truck passed West 123rd Street. While the identity of passengers in cars and buses would not always have been known to those who threw objects at them, that was not the case with police vehicles. Moreover, Whittington was likely riding on the outside of the truck as most of the crew did. He would certainly have been the intended target of the rock that hit his leg, providing a reminder that even as looting became widespread there were Harlem residents whose violence remained directed at police and the white authorities with power over life in Harlem.
Objects being thrown at passing cars were not the only incidents of violence on 7th Avenue around West 118th Street. Around midnight, Charles Saunders, a twenty-four-year-old Black unemployed elevator operator left the room at 1967 7th Avenue that he shared with his wife, Anna Gregory, to buy cigarettes. When he reached the street, Saunders saw the crowd gathered around Ralph Sirico’s shoe repair store to the north just past 119th Street at 1985 7th Avenue. Going to investigate, he saw shoes and hats being thrown out of the broken windows on to the street. Saunders joined others outside the store in picking up some of that merchandise, in his case a pair of shoes, and then turned back towards his home. However, the crowd around the store had also attracted the attention of Detective Jeremiah Juross, one of the police officers patrolling the avenue in radio cars. As he pulled over, the crowd in front to the store scattered. Juross claimed he saw Saunders jump out of the store window and flee down the street. The detective caught up with him and arrested Saunders for looting. Despite what Juross claimed to have seen, C. T. Berkeley, who was part of the crowd around the store, insisted that Saunders was not one of the two men who had been inside.
The arrests of three Black men for looting the branch of the Butler grocery store chain across the intersection from Sirico’s store might also have occurred around this time, perhaps after some of those on the street crossed 7th Avenue to avoid the police arresting Saunders. Multiple arrests required several officers, notwithstanding Patrolman Redmond being recorded as having apprehended all three men. Thirty-two-year-old Nelson Brock and nineteen-year-old Reginald Mills lived nearby, while thirty-year-old William Grant lived some distance uptown. The combination of local residents and visitors pointed to the mix of people on 7th Avenue, some of whom were moving to take merchandise from businesses as they became more damaged.
Violence was also reported for the first time on Lenox Avenue around the commercial district on West 116th Street. That was a very different neighborhood from the other sites of the disorder with a mix of mostly Puerto Rican, Spanish-speaking residents, white residents, and Black residents. Around 40% (75 of 194) of the businesses on West 116th Street between 8th Avenue and 5th Avenue had Hispanic owners when surveyed in the second half of 1935. There had been no violence in this area prior to 10:00 PM, when the businesses began to close. After midnight, a group of Black men and women took the trash cans in front of the San Antonio Market at 71 West 116th Street and threw them at the window on the right side of the store front, apparently watched by local residents who described the events to staff when the store reopened. After smashing all the glass out of the window, they took about $10 of groceries. Unlike in other areas, the store apparently did not suffer repeated attacks or looting over an extended time. Menswear stores in the two blocks to the south on Lenox Avenue that had windows broken may have been attacked around this time, perhaps by the same group. However, no clothing was taken from the window display of the southernmost of those businesses, Mario Gonzalez's Menswear Store at 86 Lenox Avenue. While local residents also described this attack to the store’s owners when they returned, there were no similar reports that established whether the menswear store at 112 Lenox Avenue had been looted or simply had windows broken.
The racial politics of Harlem predisposed Hispanic observers to identify the group who attacked these businesses as made up of Black individuals. In keeping with their general stance, Puerto Rican leaders sought to distance their community from the violence and any hostility it generated in white New Yorkers rather than align themselves with the grievances and protests of their Black neighbors. That it was a Puerto Rican boy who was the subject of the rumors that spurred the disorder was not known until it was over. No accounts of the disorder identified Puerto Ricans among the groups attacking white men and women and white-owned businesses elsewhere in Harlem, but most were viewing the disorder through a racial lens that would not have registered their presence. (Charles Romney, who was a somewhat unreliable source given his repeated efforts to put himself at the center of the MCCH investigation, did describe people talking in Spanish among those at 125th Street and 7th Avenue around 7:30 PM saying that were "going to get into this because a boy was murdered by police.”) On the other hand, that groups who avoided looting Black-owned businesses chose to target those with Hispanic owners indicated the opposite side of those tensions. At least some of the Black participants in the violence targeted their Hispanic neighbors as they did white business owners whom they saw as exploiting and discriminating against them. The extent of the division and misunderstanding between the residents of this area was evident in the response of a Puerto Rican journalist to two Black-owned businesses who followed the practice of putting up signs identifying the race of their owners. Rather than recognizing those signs as a form of protection against attacks meant for white-owned businesses, the journalist read them as a refusal to serve white and Hispanic customers.
Exactly where those who attacked the San Antonio Market came from, whether they were local residents or had come from 125th Street, is unknown in large part because police made no arrests in this area. Police would be on Lenox Avenue a few blocks to the north at West 118th Street, two hours later, and on 7th Avenue at its intersection with West 116th Street after that. However, there is no evidence that police patrolled West 116th Street. White and Black journalists also did not go to 116th Street; nor later did the members of the MCCH and their investigators. Their collective absences left the matter of how the presence of Hispanic residents and businesses complicated the racial violence of the disorder, and the full reach of the violence, addressed only in the Puerto Rican press. -
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Ralph Sirico's shoe repair shop looted
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Around midnight, as Detective Jeremiah Duross of the 6th Division drove a police car on 7th Avenue, the sound of breaking glass drew his attention to a group of people in front of Ralph Sirico's shoe repair store 1985 7th Avenue. As the detective pulled his car up next to the store, the crowd in front of it scattered. He leapt out of the car and claimed he saw Charles Saunders, a twenty-four-year-old Black unemployed elevator operator, jump out of the store window and run down the street. Duross gave chase and arrested Saunders, who he alleged had been drinking and had a fresh cut on his hand, which he implied had resulted from breaking glass in the window. While the Probation Department investigation report stated that the arrest took place at 2:00 AM, that appeared to be an error as the remainder of the narrative referred to events around midnight. A short time earlier, between 11:30 PM and midnight, the superintendent of the apartments above Sirico's store reported that the shoe repair shop window had been smashed. Around that time, there were attacks on nearby businesses at 1953 7th Avenue and likely at 1974 7th Avenue, as well as an assault on a white man named William Burkhard.
Saunders offered a different account than Duross, according to the Probation Department investigation report. He lived nearby, in a furnished room at 1967 7th Avenue a block south of the store, with Anna Gregory. Around midnight, Saunders left home to buy cigarettes. Walking toward a crowd in front of Sirico's store, he saw shoes and hats being thrown through the broken window on to the street, where people in the crowd were picking them up. While there are few accounts of goods being thrown into the street, there are descriptions of merchandise spread over sidewalks and streets, suggesting that some of those who attacked goods destroyed or distributed goods in this manner rather than taking them themselves. Saunders claimed he followed the lead of those around him, and picked up a pair of shoes, cutting his hand on glass on the street in the process, and headed home. At that point Duross arrested him. Saunders denied having been drinking; the detective said Saunders did not have a pair of shoes in his hands when arrested. Berkeley supported Saunders' account to the extent that he said he was not "one of the two men who went through the broken window" of the store. The building superintendent said he could identify those men.
None of stolen goods were recovered, according to the Probation Department investigation report. Nonetheless, Saunders appears to have been charged with taking all the goods that Sirico said had been stolen: "18 or 20 hats which had been cleaned and blocked by him; about 25 pair of shoes which he had repaired; 5 or 6 pairs of unfinished shoes; one dozen leather soles; two and a half dozen rubber heels and a quantity of polish and shoe laces," with a total value he estimated as $66.75. While the district attorney's case file is missing, the Probation Department investigation report summarizes the indictment against Saunders as accusing him of taking merchandise worth $66.75. The two newspaper reports of the case are less specific, with both the Home News and Daily Worker reporting the charge as stealing "several pairs of shoes." On April 1, Saunders pled guilty to petit larceny. In other cases after the disorder in which defendants did not have goods in their possession when arrested, a district attorney generally offered a plea bargain for a different charge, unlawful entry. On April 30, Judge Nott gave him a suspended sentence and placed him on "indefinite" probation on the condition he go to Savannah to live with his sister.
Sirico had insurance that paid the cost of replacing his store windows. The business was included in the MCCH business survey in the second half of 1935. Sirico was still operating the store when he registered for the draft in April 1942, giving his first name as Raffaele. He had arrived in New York City in 1919. Sirico appeared likely to have been in business in Harlem by the time of the 1930 census, when the census enumerator recorded that he worked in a shop. At that time he lived at 293 East 155th Street in the Bronx, with his wife and four children aged between eight years and fifteen months. -
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While violence continued on 8th Avenue and 7th Avenue north of 125th Street, it appeared to intensify on Lenox Avenue and on 7th Avenue south of 125th Street. When Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe, in charge of uniformed police in the borough of Manhattan, was driven through Harlem just before midnight, he saw “thousands of persons were staying in the streets late,” although he judged that “most of them appeared to be spectators.”
As an ambulance from Knickerbocker Hospital traveling down 7th Avenue arrived at 117th Street to treat Alice Gordon, groups in the area continued to attack white individuals they encountered on the street and turned their violence against white businesses. Around 11:30 PM, William Burkhard, a forty-three-year-old white man, alleged a group of Black men assaulted him around a block north of where Gordon had been attacked. He too suffered lacerations to his face before apparently escaping east along West 118th Street. It was midway along that block that the crew of an ambulance from Bellevue Hospital treated him. Burkhard, like Gordon, was a long way from home, which in his case was 533 East 12th Street at the opposite end of Manhattan. Police were in the area but evidently not in the vicinity of the attack as they made no arrests. Some officers did intervene as groups in the area turned their attention to white-owned businesses. However, police found it difficult to — or perhaps were not concerned to — distinguish those attacking stores from residents watching events on the street. Five or so people who threw objects at the windows of Mario Pravia’s candy store near the corner of West 118th Street were among those beginning to seek merchandise rather than targeting businesses with violence. As the Uruguayan-born Pravia and his German wife Gertrude watched from inside the store, the window shattered and some of those outside reached in and took merchandise. Officer Harmon and Detective Harry Wolf also saw the windows broken and arrived at the store in time to arrest Amie Taylor, a twenty-one-year-old Black butcher. The officers claimed to have seen Taylor throw a stone and reach into the window and take something. They found eighteen packets of chewing gum, valued at 3 cents each, in his possession. However, Taylor was likely part of the crowds on 7th Avenue into which those who had been attacking the candy store fled when police approached, as he was ultimately acquitted of the charges Harmon and Wolf made against him. He may have come from his home eight blocks to the south at 1800 7th Avenue to investigate the noise and disorder rather than from 125th Street.
Windows were also broken in Ralph Sirico’s shoe repair store a block north at 1985 7th Avenue. Among those on the street near the store was C. T. Berkeley, the superintendent of the apartments above the business. He did not recognize those who threw objects at the store. Soon after, two men climbed through the broken windows and began to throw merchandise out on to the street. In all, “18 or 20 hats which had been cleaned and blocked by [Sirico]; about 25 pair of shoes which he had repaired; 5 or 6 pairs of unfinished shoes; one dozen leather soles; two and a half dozen rubber heels and a quantity of polish and shoe laces” were taken. Attacks likely also began on the branch of the Butler grocery store chain in the block between Pravia’s candy store and Sirico’s shoe store that was also looted during the disorder. Not until later, around midnight when observers recognized the outbreak of looting, would merchandise likely begin to be taken from the stores whose windows were broken in the blocks between West 118th Street and West 125th Street.
Across 125th Street, crowds were moving up 7th Avenue, watched by residents, like Marshall Pfifer, gathered on the sidewalks and by police radio cars patrolling the avenues. Groups likely continued to break windows in white businesses, but police made no arrests and details of exactly what was happening are lacking. The situation on 8th Avenue was even less clear. Some of the looting in the blocks immediately north of 125th Street may have occurred around this time, and police may have made arrests in response, although more likely that would not happen until after midnight as part of the outbreak of looting noted by observers. Julius Narditch, a thirty-four-year-old white man did report being “jumped” by three black men on 8th Avenue near 147th Street. While such an attack was in keeping with the violence of the disorder, the location was well beyond the area where crowds were on the street at this time. In fact, there was no evidence of any other incidents related to the disorder north of 145th Street. Narditch reported the alleged assault to police, so it was in the records they shared with journalists. However, there was no indication that police limited the cases they included to incidents that they could link to the disorder. Rather than an element of the disorder, the assault on Narditch is better seen as a reminder that attacks on whites visiting Harlem were not limited to the disorder.
While there were crowds on 7th and 8th Avenues north of 125th Street, it was on Lenox Avenue that the violence was centered by this time, likely drawing a greater police presence that contributed to the lack of information about what was happening elsewhere. The group around 131st and 132nd Streets increased the violence of their attacks on white-owned businesses. With windows broken, some of those on the street began taking merchandise from the displays. Some went further, setting fire to Anna Rosenberg’s notion shop at 429 Lenox Avenue and the adjacent hardware store. Those efforts were somewhat at odds with the attempts of others to get items that they needed but lacked the money to buy, contradictory endeavors that highlighted the variety of people now on the streets. While the fires could have been lit only after the businesses had been emptied of merchandise, the episodic nature of most looting in the disorder made it unlikely the stores had been ransacked so quickly. More likely, they had been set on fire as an extension of efforts to destroy white-owned property. Once started, the fires drew crowds, with more residents coming on to the street when the response of the Fire Department added another set of sirens to the noise. While the closest fire company was at 180 West 137th Street, near the intersection with 7th Avenue, fire trucks likely also came from companies outside Harlem as white journalists and photographers were also at the scene of the fire. Uniformed police and detectives converged to manage the crowd. Spectators pressing forward to see the fire got in the way of firefighters, encounters sensationalized in the New York Evening Journal and New York Herald Tribune as efforts to prevent them from putting out the fire were accompanied by chants of “Let them burn.” While the fires were extinguished, the attention they drew let other groups attack and loot surrounding businesses with less interference from police arriving in the area. David Schmoockler, the manager of William Feinstein’s liquor store, watched as police drove groups attacking stores from one side of the street only to have them rush to the other side and continue to break windows in Estelle Cohen’s clothing store, the Gonzales jewelry store, and likely other businesses in the block.
Two blocks south on Lenox Avenue between 128th and 129th Streets, the situation had changed such that forty-eight-year-old Russian-born Benjamin Zelvin was unwilling to close and leave his jewelry business as his neighbor Louis Levy had done only half an hour earlier. Instead, he boarded up the windows to protect them and the stock inside, called the police station, and waited half an hour for officers to arrive, before he left his store at 372 Lenox Avenue. Such precautions indicated Zelvin likely had seen more people than usual on the streets, at least some of whom attacked white men and women they encountered. A group attacked William Ken, a white man going into the bar and grill where he worked, the Blue Heaven Restaurant, just two storefronts north of Zelvin’s business. Two unnamed Black coworkers intervened, pulling Ken inside before he was injured, and convincing the group to move on. Zelvin had likely also seen or heard windows being broken in nearby businesses. It was likely around this time that a window was broken in the grocery store across the street at 371 Lenox Avenue, leading the thirty-six-year-old Russian-born owner Irving Stekin to also call police (he waited two hours for officers to respond). The Peace Food Market south of Zelvin's jewelry store and the South Harlem Rotisserie and a laundry on the other side of Lenox Avenue would suffer damage. Michael D’Agostino’s business at 361 Lenox Avenue, Irving Stekin’s second business at 363 Lenox Avenue, and the Romanoff Drug store on that side of the street would also be looted, as would businesses owned by Samuel Mestetzky and Irving Guberman just around the corner on West 129th Street, although efforts to take merchandise likely had not yet begun. It was likely that the four Black-owned businesses on this block were not targeted. That the Chinese owners of the laundry at 367 Lenox Avenue reportedly put a sign in their windows that read "Me Colored Too," emulating those displayed by some Black businesses, suggests that they saw Black-owned businesses being spared from attacks.
Benjamin Zelvin could also have heard glass shattering in the block south of his store between 127th and 128th Streets. Groups coming from 125th Street and residents on the street could have moved into this block to avoid the police officers who had recently arrested Julian Rogers a block further south at 333 Lenox Avenue between 126th and 127th Street. Detective Perretti likely arrested two twenty-eight-year-old Black men on the northwest corner of 127th Street around this time. He allegedly had seen Arthur Bennett and James Bright throw stones through the window of a drug store at 339 Lenox Avenue. Other officers must have been with the detective for both men to have been arrested at the same time. On the block north of the drug store, businesses at 348 Lenox Avenue owned by Michael D’Agostino, Jack Stern and Sam Apuzzo, a grocery store at 340 Lenox Avenue, the cleaners across the street at 347 Lenox Avenue, an unknown store at 345 Lenox, Louis Levy’s store, and Harry Schwartz's laundry just off the avenue on West 128th Street, at least, would have windows broken during the disorder. It likely took until later for the windows to be damaged enough for some of those on the street to begin to reach into the displays and enter the stores to take merchandise.
Although beyond earshot of Zelvin, attacks on businesses close to 125th Street continued. Objects thrown at George’s Lunch and Harry Piskin’s laundry on 126th Street did further damage to their windows even as more police began to arrive on Lenox Avenue. Windows likely also continued to be targeted in the blocks of Lenox Avenue south of 125th Street. With few businesses in the blocks below 123rd Street, and few police apparently present, the groups in this area may have continued to focus their violence in the blocks immediately south of 125th Street. Bricks did continue to be thrown through the windows of Mrs. Salefas' delicatessen on the corner of 123rd Street, given that she spent some time in the rear of her shop taking shelter. Even if those attacks had started around 11:00 PM, they could still have been occurring around 11:30 PM. -
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2022-01-12T20:26:55+00:00
Ralph Sirico's shoe repair shop window broken
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plain
2024-05-29T21:00:32+00:00
Between 11:30 PM and midnight, Mr C. T. Berkeley, the superintendent of the apartments above 1985 7th Avenue, reported two men smashed the window of the shoe repair shop in the building. The business was operated by Ralph Sirico, a forty-one-year-old Italian immigrant, according to a Probation Department investigation report. Around that time, 11:30 PM to 12:30 AM, there were reported incidents of violence the length of 7th Avenue below 125th Street, with Alice Gordon allegedly assaulted and Mario Pravia's candy store looted south of Sirico's store, and Sarah Refkin's delicatessan looted, stones thrown at Fred Campbell's car and other vehicles, and James Pringle arrested for allegedly urging crowds to attack police in the blocks to the north. Berkeley likely prevented more damage to the shoe repair store given that he got close enough that he thought he could identify the men if he saw them again. No one arrested during the disorder was charged with breaking windows in Sirico's store; however, soon after police did arrest one man for looting the store. Around midnight, the sound of breaking glass drew the attention of Detective Jeremiah Duross of the 6th Division to a group of people in front of the store as he drove a police car on 7th Avenue. As he pulled over, Duross claimed he saw Charles Saunders, a twenty-four-year-old Black unemployed elevator operator, jump out of the store window and run down the street. Duross gave chase and arrested Saunders. The detective allegedly found several pairs of shoes in the Saunders' possession.
The only mention of the store windows being broken was in the report of the Probation Department investigation of Charles Saunders. That report also recorded that Sirico had insurance that paid the $38 cost of replacing his store windows. The shoe repair store was included in the MCCH business survey in the second half of 1935, and Sirico was still operating the business when he registered for the draft in April 1942, giving his first name as Raffaele. He had arrived in New York City in 1919. Sirico appeared likely to have been in business in Harlem by the time of the 1930 census, when the census enumerator recorded that he worked in a shop. At that time he lived at 293 East 155th Street in the Bronx, with his wife and four children aged between eight years and fifteen months.