2150 7th Avenue, c. 1939-1941.
1 media/nynyma_rec0040_1_01933_0034_thumb.jpg 2024-05-30T21:15:18+00:00 Stephen Robertson a1bf8804093bc01e94a0485d9f3510bb8508e3bf 1 2 Formerly Greenfield Auto Equipment, a Billiard Hall by 1939. The pillar on the left was one side of the entrance into the apartments above the stores, from which Warren Wright witnessed the shooting of Hobbs. Source: DOF: Manhattan 1940s Tax Photos (New York City Municipal Archives). plain 2024-05-30T21:15:41+00:00 nynyma_rec0040_1_01933_0034 20180308 085235+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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Lloyd Hobbs killed
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Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black teenager, was shot and killed by Patrolman John McInerney, who claimed Hobbs had been looting an auto supply store.
Around 7:30 PM, Hobbs and his fifteen-year-old brother Russell had made the short trip from their home on St. Nicholas Ave to the Apollo Theater on 125th Street for a show, not emerging until 12:30 AM. When they stepped back onto 125th St, they saw crowds down the block at the intersection with 7th Ave, and went to investigate. They followed as police pushed the crowd north on 7th Ave. As people milled in front of a damaged auto parts store at 2150 7th Avenue near 128th Street, a police radio car pulled up, and one of the officers inside, Patrolman John McInerney got out. Fearing that they would be beaten by the police, the boys and the others in front of the store ran up 7th Avenue. Here the accounts of the boys and seven Black eyewitnesses and those of the two white patrolmen diverged.
In assessing the case, the two reports gave significant weight to the character of Lloyd Hobbs and his family. The subcommittee argued that "the record of Lloyd Hobbs and that of his family are presumptive evidence that he was not the kind of boy who would engage in looting." The final report of the MCCH described the boy as "having a good record in school and in the community, and being a member of a family of good standing and character." Lloyd Hobbs had been born in Brunswick County, Virginia, in 1916, the second youngest of five children of Mary and Lawyer Hobbs. (The story published in the New York Amsterdam News on April 6, 1935, accompanied by a photograph of Mrs. Hobbs, gave her first name as Carrie, but it was recorded as Mary in the census in 1930, 1940, and 1950). The boy's name was recorded as Lawyer in the 1930 census and as Lawyer, Jr in the "Social and Economical History" of the family written by James Tartar, but elsewhere in that document and in all other sources as Lloyd. The family farmed in Virginia until 1927, and still owned 83 acres there, when Lawyer's ill health required him to get work "which would not necessitate his being in the sun," according to his wife. He had worked previously in New York City, so the family relocated there. Lawyer found work first as a sexton at Union Baptist Church, then for a construction company. Mary Hobbs worked first as a domestic servant, the most common occupation for Black women, before becoming one of a much smaller group employed in factory work, in her case at a lampshade company. That was her occupation in the 1930 census; Lawyer's occupation was recorded as chauffeur. At that time the family lived at 228 West 140th Street, their home since they arrived in New York City. By April, 1931 both parents had lost their jobs, and the family joined many in Harlem applying for work and relief from private and government agencies. Sometime in the intervening years Lawyer Hobbs found some work as a helper on a truck owned by Charles Bell (perhaps a brother-in-law; a sister-in-law named Senora Bell lived with the family in 1930).
McInerney and his partner, Patrolman Watterson, claimed that as they were driving south, their attention had been drawn to the auto parts store by the noise of breaking glass, and they had seen Lloyd in the window handing items out to those on the street. Three of the eyewitnesses, Howard Malloy, Arthur Moore, and Marshall Pfifer, said all the windows of the store had been broken at least an hour earlier and nothing remained in the display by the time the Hobbs brothers arrived there. The patrolmen said that Lloyd climbed out of the window with items in his hands as they pulled up, and when McInerney pursued him up 7th Avenue and called on him to halt, continued to run. When those running from the patrolman got to 128th Street, Lloyd broke away from the group and turned west on to 128th Street. McInerney then shot the boy. Warren Wright, standing in the entrance of the apartments above 2150 7th Avenue, south of the store, Howard Malloy, Arthur Moore, and Samuel Pitts standing on the corner across 128th Street from the auto supply store, in front of Battle's Pharmacy, to which the crowd was running, John Bennett, in 201 West 128th Street toward which Lloyd turned and ran, and Marshall Pfifer, standing on the corner of West 128th Street on the other side of 7th Avenue, all testified that the boy had nothing in his hands as he ran and that McInerney did not call to him to halt before shooting him. After the bullet hit Hobbs and he fell to the ground, McInerney and Watterson, who had remained in the car, backing it into 128th Street, said Lloyd dropped a car horn and socket set, which McInerney picked up. Seven witnesses said that there was nothing on the ground next to the boy.
The two patrolman loaded Lloyd Hobbs into their car and drove him to Harlem Hospital. Russell Hobbs had kept running up 7th Avenue and had not seen the shooting. He learned from the crowd at the scene that it was his brother who had been shot and driven away and immediately ran home to tell his parents, Lawyer and Mary Hobbs. The family rushed to Harlem Hospital. When they found Lloyd, he told them, “Mother, the officer shot me for nothing. I was not doing anything.” McInerney, guarding the boy, said "Why didn't you halt when I told you to?" Lloyd offered the same account when questioned in the hospital by Homicide Bureau detectives, in a statement recorded by a police stenographer.
Lloyd Hobbs appeared in all seven published lists of those injured in the disorder, in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
In the following days, Lawyer Hobbs went to the 28th Precinct several times trying to make a complaint against the officer who had shot his son. He also sought help from the New York Urban League, giving them a statement about what had happened to his son on March 28, which they sent to the MCCH. As a result, Hobbs and his family were among the witnesses asked to come to the MCCH's first public hearing on March 30. Only Russell testified that day, briefly describing how his brother had been shot. A few hours later, at 6:30 PM, Lloyd Hobbs died in Harlem Hospital, the fourth death resulting from the disorder. While the New York Times, Daily News, New York Age, New York Amsterdam News, and Afro-American referred to Russell's testimony in reporting Hobbs' death, the New York Herald Tribune, Times Union, Home News, Daily Mirror, New York American, and Chicago Defender reported only the boy's death in their stories.
The next week, at the MCCH hearing, Lawyer, Mary, and Russell Hobbs testified, together with three Black men who had witnessed the shooting, Howard Malloy, Arthur Moore, and Samuel Pitts, Dr. Arthur Logan, one of the physicians who treated Lloyd Hobbs, the police stenographer who had recorded a statement from the boy soon after he arrived at Harlem Hospital, and James Tartar, a Black investigator for the MCCH. Assistant District Attorney Saul Price heard the testimony of the three eyewitnesses soon after the hearing and had them appear before the grand jury on April 10 so they could consider charges against Patrolman McInerney. The grand jury also heard from Russell Hobbs, both his parents, McInerney's partner, Patrolman Watterson, the police stenographer, the detective who investigated the shooting, John O'Brien, and the owner of the automobile supply store. Patrolman McInerney also offered to testify, but the grand jury opted not to hear him. They dismissed the case.
The MCCH nonetheless continued to investigate the boy's killing, hearing testimony from McInerney's partner, Patrolman Watterson, and Detective O'Brien, who investigated the shooting, at a hearing on April 20 marked by angry interjections from the audience. Four additional witnesses to the shooting testified at an MCCH hearing on May 18. James Tartar, the MCCH investigator, also obtained information that McInerney had not turned in the items he claimed to have found next to Lloyd Hobbs until April 8, more than two weeks after he shot the boy. That interval raised the possibility that the patrolman had not found the items at the scene but had obtained them later, when he needed to justify the shooting. As a result of that information and the testimony of additional eyewitnesses, Assistant District Attorney Saul Price presented the case to the grand jury for a second time on June 10. After hearing from the new witnesses, and from Tartar about the absence of the allegedly stolen items from police records and the Police Property Department until April 8, the grand jury again dismissed the case without hearing testimony from McInerney.
The police department had committed to an internal hearing on the case before ADA Price had decided to resubmit it to the grand jury. The hearing took place on June 14; in attendance were James Tartar and E. Franklin Frazier, the Howard University sociologist who had recently started work leading the MCCH's investigation of Harlem. It was the first time that anyone outside the police department and the district attorney's office heard Patrolman McInerney's testimony. While Tartar and Frazier were unpersuaded, senior police officers found the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs was justified, reprimanding the patrolman only for his delay in handing in the items he claimed to have found at the scene.
While two grand juries and a police department hearing exonerated McInerney, the MCCH and the Black press did not share that view. Arthur Garfield Hays and Oscar Villard gave a central place to McInerney killing Hobbs in the report of the subcommittee submitted to Mayor La Guardia on June 11, 1935. The report of the subcommittee characterized the killing of Lloyd Hobbs as "inexcusable." E. Franklin Frazier included that material in the final report of the MCCH, framed in even harsher terms: the killing of the boy was "a brutal act on the part of the police." Police Commissioner Valentine was unmoved by that censure. He responded to both reports by asserting that Lloyd Hobbs had been looting the store and that two grand juries had exonerated McInerney.
Lawyer Hobbs' income allowed the family to settle in a fourth-floor apartment at 321 St. Nicholas Avenue in 1932, having moved twice in the preceding year, as many in Harlem did during the Depression. A lodger helped pay the rent in 1935. James Tartar, the MCCH investigator, described the residence as "a comfortable apartment, clean, nicely arranged, nicely furnished and well ventilated."
Throughout their time in the city, the Hobbs children attended school. By 1935 the eldest, twenty-year-old Cassie, was working, but her twin sisters Hazel and Zenobia remained students at the Textile High School, Lloyd was a student at Haaren High School, and his younger brother Russell a student at Frederick Douglas Junior High School. Lloyd would have graduated in June, according to a story in the New York Amsterdam News.
After Lloyd's death, the family continued to live at 321 St. Nicholas Avenue until at least 1950. All the family members resided there in 1940. Fifty-six-year-old Mary, who provided the information to the census enumerator, did not identify an occupation. Lawyer was working as a laborer in a sugar refinery, Cassie and Zenobia as seamstresses in a dress factory, Hazel in a lampshade factory, and Russell as a clerk in a food store. All but Zenobia were still living in the apartment in 1950, although as Cassie was recorded as divorced she had likely not resided there for all of the intervening ten years. Neither Lawyer nor Mary, who was listed as sixty years old, were working by that time. Hazel had joined Cassie working as a seamstress, while Russell now worked as a driver for a construction company.
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12:30 AM to 1:00 AM
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By 12:30 AM, it was on the blocks of 7th Avenue immediately south of 125th Street that large amounts of police gunfire could be heard as significant numbers of police sought to disperse groups breaking windows and taking merchandise from stores. Captain Conrad Rothengast, who had been in Harlem since around 8:30 PM leading the police in front of Kress’ store, was one of the officers in the area by this time. His presence suggested both that he was no longer needed on 125th Street and that a large number of officers had been deployed on 7th Avenue. Fred Campbell first noticed large numbers of patrolmen and officers carrying riot guns when he stopped his car at the traffic light at West 121st Street. The thirty-one-year-old Black businessmen was on his way to pick up the day's receipts from the two barber’s shops he owned at 2213 7th Avenue and 2259 7th Avenue. As he drove toward West 122nd Street, the noise of shots being fired and glass breaking drew his attention to store windows shattering and police trying to disperse crowds. A brick then hit the rear window of his car, shattering it. Looking around as he continued north, he noticed other cars with damaged windows and realized that the cars with white drivers were being targeted. Even though Black drivers like Campbell were evidently not the intended targets, another brick hit Campbell’s car as he passed 123rd Street but did not damage any of the windows. Neither brick injured Campbell himself. Two other men not in cars but on the sidewalk near the intersection of 7th Avenue and 122nd Street were hurt.
John Eigler, a forty-five-year-old white man, was hit by an object only a few feet from his home at 163 West 122nd Street sometime after 12:30 AM. He had been targeted by a group of Black men who likely were also among those throwing bricks at the passing cars, continuing the attacks on white men and women on the streets, which had marked the disorder since groups left 125th Street. A second white man, B. Z. Kondoul, claimed he was attacked by a crowd of "40–50" Black men and women at the same corner. The thirty-five-year-old Kondoul fled down West 122nd Street, as William Burkhard had fled down West 118th Street when attacked earlier. However, Kondoul's assailants pursued him. When he reached Lenox Avenue, Kondoul saw a uniformed patrolman guarding a grocery store on the corner of West 123rd Street and sought his protection. Patrolman Clements fired his pistol to deter and disperse the group chasing the white man, first in the air, and when that did not have the desired effect, at the crowd reportedly without hitting anyone. That was not dramatic enough for the sensational white newspapers who reported the incident; their stories portrayed an extended clash between a crowd threatening death and the patrolman that ended only when a radio car arrived to rescue them. Later, shortly before 1:00 AM, Clarence London, a thirty-four-year-old Black man, was shot in the leg. London was further from his home than Eigler. A resident of 676 St Nicholas Avenue in Harlem’s north, he was likely among those who had come to 125th Street to investigate the rumors about events at the Kress store. The bullet was almost certainly fired by one of the armed patrolmen observed by Campbell as part of the increasingly violent police response that saw officers fire their guns more often and indiscriminately. Channing Tobias, in his apartment in the building on the corner of Lenox Avenue and West 123rd Street, reported that he heard the “firing of guns” from midnight until he went to sleep around 1:00 AM.
The gunshots Tobias heard were accompanied by the noise of glass shattering. Among the stores being looted at this time would have been the business on the street level of his building, the Lafayette Market at 2044 7th Avenue. While it suffered sustained attacks that left all the glass in its windows gone, next door the windows of the Black-owned stationery store were intact. Groups on the street in this area were evidently distinguishing between white-owned and Black-owned businesses even this late in the disorder. Police officers trying to stop the attacks on white business continued to show a contrasting lack of discrimination in making arrests. Officer Ferry of the 28th Precinct arrested Albert Bass, a twenty-seven-year-old Black man, for allegedly being one of those taking merchandise from the Lafayette Market. However, the charge against Bass was changed to disorderly conduct when he appeared in the Magistrates Court, making him another of those Harlem residents for whom police lacked evidence that they had participated in the violence of the disorder. Bass lived only a half block west of the market at 238 West 122nd Street, so had likely come to the corner of 7th Avenue nearest to his home to see what was happening as many of Harlem’s residents did.
A block further north across 7th Avenue another local resident, a thirty-six-year-old Black janitor named Hezekiah Wright, was arrested in front of Sarah Refkin’s delicatessen. He had encountered a crowd in front of the store when he was returning home to the building where he lived and worked having gone out to buy cigarettes. Gunshots drew Captain Conrad Rothengast’s attention to the group of men, shots likely fired by another officer trying to disperse them. As Rothengast, likely with other officers, approached the delicatessen, he allegedly saw Wright kick in the store window, reach in, and take out four lamps and two jars of food. While the other men ran when they saw police officers approaching, Wright dropped those items and raised his hands. Rothengast responded by hitting Wright with his baton, unnecessary violence that the senior officer treated as unremarkable. Wright claimed he had not run with the others as he was a passerby not involved in attacks on the store or taking merchandise from it. Unlike Bass, he was prosecuted and convicted for burglary. Given the assessment of both the probation officer and the psychiatrist from the Court clinic that Wright was a “quiet, inoffensive” and “cooperative” individual, and that he was one of the small number of residents with stable work and housing, it seems likely that he was a passerby, perhaps mistaken for the man who kicked in the store window as police tried to apprehend those attacking the delicatessen.
Even as violence intensified in the blocks of 7th Avenue south of 125th Street, the disorder apparently had yet to reach as far south as West 116th Street. Around 12:30 AM, Jack Garmise, a twenty-two-year-old white clerk, locked the cigar store his father Emmanuel owned at 1916 7th Avenue, in the Regent Theatre building, on the corner of West 116th Street and likely went across town to the family home at 1274 5th Avenue. Most businesses were already closed by that time; the cigar store may have remained open to cater to movie-goers leaving the theater. It had not yet suffered any damage. Theater shows ending would have added new groups, including white men and women, to those on the street who were unaware of the violence of the last several hours.
On Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street, the other area where the disorder was concentrated at this time, fewer details of the ongoing violence were reported. Businesses around West 126th continued to be targeted despite the presence of police officers around the intersection. A large group of people gathered in front of William Gindin’s shoe store just north of the intersection at 333 Lenox Avenue around 12:30 AM. The display windows had been broken several times already and some merchandise taken from them. Gindin lived nearby at 346 Lenox, one of few white business owners with residences in Harlem, but there were no reports he came back to try to protect his store. As Patrolman James Lamattina watched, John Kennedy Jones, a twenty-four-year-old-Black laborer, motioned to others in the crowd, called “Come on," and threw a rock that broke some of the remaining glass. More bricks and stones then struck the glass as others in the group followed Jones’ lead. Whether their goal was to do more damage to white-owned property or to gain access to merchandise in the window was left uncertain as Lamattina moved to arrest Kennedy. He must have come from the intersection as he did not arrive in time to prevent the attack or apprehend any other members of the group. Jones was not a local resident; he lived on West 119th Street midway between Lenox and 7th Avenues, and must have joined crowds moving through the streets earlier in the evening.
A similar scenario likely played out around this time across Lenox Avenue from the shoe store. Detective Phillips must have seen a crowd in front of the grocery store on the corner of West 127th Street, some of whom were reaching through glass broken earlier in the disorder to take merchandise from the display. When he reached the store to stop the looting, he arrested Elizabeth Tai, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman, Arthur Davis, a thirty-six-year-old Black man, and probably another Black man, eighteen-year-old Herbert Hunter. He must have had the help of other officers to make multiple arrests. However, evidently none of those he arrested had actually been among those taking merchandise as the charge they faced in court was disorderly conduct, not burglary. Again, police officers had arrested those they could apprehend, not those participating in the looting. The group highlighted the diverse origins of those on the streets during the disorder. While Davis and Hunter lived on West 126th Street, Tai's home was on the Upper East Side.
By this time, when more police officers would have been patrolling further north on Lenox Avenue, similar arrests were likely being made around West 135th Street. Patrolmen Archbold and Conn arrested three Black men in a branch of the A & P grocery store chain at 510 Lenox Avenue, perhaps after noticing a group in front of the store or hearing breaking glass while driving by in a radio car. Forty-two-year-old Preston White, they alleged, had smashed holes in the store window and taken food; the other two men, twenty-eight-year-old Raymond Taylor and fifty-year-old Joseph Payne, had had taken advantage of already broken windows to take groceries. While the store had clearly been damaged and looted, police ultimately lacked evidence that the three men were among those responsible rather than part of the crowds on the street. They too would only be charged with disorderly conduct.
With the police presence increasing and violence intensifying, some of those on the street may have moved east to 5th Avenue. Around 12:40 AM, Patrolman Rock saw six men run out of Jacob Solomon’s grocery store at 2100 5th Avenue on the corner of West 129th Street. Solomon had closed the business at 9:00 PM. By the time Rock arrived, the windows had been broken and the door broken. He chased the men and caught a thirty-five-year-old Black laborer named Lawrence Humphrey, perhaps because he was carrying a fifty-pound bag of rice. In all, $150 of groceries were missing when Solomon returned to the store just over six hours later. The six men Rock pursued could not have been carrying all that merchandise; the bag of rice had a value of only $2.50. Others in the area must also have taken food without interference from police. Humphrey lived only three blocks away on West 132nd Street in the overcrowded section between Lenox and 5th Avenues. The blocks around the grocery store contained very few businesses. Only the block north of 125th Street, and the blocks from 131st Street to 138th Street, were lined with stores. The stores targeted were businesses that contained food and clothing that residents of the area lacked.
Those stores on 5th Avenue would be attacked with little interference from police. An unclaimed laundry store on the corner of West 131st Street and another grocery store on the corner of West 137th Street already had broken windows and missing merchandise by the time patrolling police made arrests there at some time during the disorder. Patrolman Adamie found Elva Jacobs, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, in the grocery store. However, he had no evidence she was responsible for either the broken windows or the items missing from the store, so Jacobs was charged only with unlawful entry for being inside the damaged business. Patrolman Jackson found Lamter Jackson, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, taking a bag of laundry, evidence for a charge of larceny but not that he had broken the windows of the store from which he was taking the bag. Both Jacobs and Jackson lived east of Lenox Avenue on streets several blocks north of where they were arrested. A fire was lit on the roof of the building containing the store selling unclaimed laundry. Unlike those set in stores on Lenox Avenue, the purpose of the rooftop fire was not to destroy white-owned property. Instead, it was intended to produce a reaction from those on the street: “to stir up excitement” in spectators, according to the Home News, and to draw police officers attacking people on the street away from Lenox Avenue, according to the probably better-informed Daily Worker.
The attacks on businesses on Lenox Avenue around West 116th Street that had begun after midnight likely continued. On the block between West 116th and West 117th Streets, Nathaniel Powell suffered injuries that suggested that glass was being shattered. The nineteen-year-old Black man, who lived nearby on West 118th Street, suffered cuts to his nose and left wrist in circumstances that he did not reveal to the hospital staff who treated him. While Powell could have been watching as others broke the windows, the severity of his wounds suggested he was closer than that and involved in breaking the glass. Julia Cureti’s restaurant on that block had windows broken sometime during the disorder. Two days later, Cureti would identify a homeless twenty-eight-year-old Black man named Jackie Ford as one of those responsible, indicating that she was still in her business when some of its windows were broken. Several businesses a block to the north also had windows broken. Some of the people who attacked the branch of the Wohlmuth Clothing store, a billiard parlor, and a saloon around West 118th Street may have come along the street from 7th Avenue to avoid the increasing police violence on that street. The billiard hall and saloon both responded to being targeted by displaying signs identifying them as “colored” businesses.
In contrast to the continuing disorder on the avenues, West 125th Street had become relatively quiet by the time sixteen-year-old Lloyd Hobbs and his fifteen-year-old brother Russell came out of the Apollo Theater when the show ended at 12:30 AM. They had seen broken windows in some stores and unusually large numbers of people and police on 125th Street west of 8th Avenue on their way to the theater. Leaving four hours later, they and the other audience members encountered “general disorder.” A crowd on the corner of 7th Avenue drew the boys’ attention, and they went to find out what was happening. As they walked toward 7th Avenue, Fred Campbell drove through the intersection. Before the boys could see anything at the corner, police pushed the group up 7th Avenue, moving people away from 125th Street as they had been doing throughout the disorder. As the Hobbs brothers were carried along the sidewalk up 7th Avenue by the crowd and Campbell drove up the avenue in his car, they saw businesses with broken windows as far north as 128th Street.
While Campbell collected the receipts from his barber’s shop at 131st street around 12:35 AM, he watched as a group of Black men and women broke the display windows of a butcher shop on the other side of 7th Avenue. They took hams from the window without interference before police arrived. It was likely a radio car containing Patrolman McInerney and Watterson that Campbell saw. Around this time those officers encountered “quite a crowd breaking windows” around 130th Street. After the crowd scattered uptown, the patrolmen drove south on 7th Avenue. As they came to 128th Street around 12:45 AM, the patrolmen crossed paths with the Hobbs brothers at 2150 7th Avenue, Louis Eisenberg’s auto parts store. The boys had encountered a group of people milling about in front of the store talking. The patrolmen decided to disperse the crowd. Although they would later claim that the noise of breaking glass drew their attention to the store where they saw Lloyd Hobbs in the window display passing out merchandise, seven witnesses said the boy was among the group standing on the street when the radio car pulled up. Marshall Pfifer and Samuel Pitts were still on opposite sides of that intersection watching events on 7th Avenue. By this time other local residents had joined them. Howard Malloy and Arthur Moore were out on the street to get ice-cream for their wives, who were in the Moore's apartment in 213 West 128th Street, drawn into the disorder like Charles Saunders and Hezekiah Wright had been while getting cigarettes. As they arrived at the northwest corner of 128th and 7th Avenue, they saw a "commotion" on the block of 7th Avenue to the south. So too did John Bennett, who lived at 2154 7th Avenue, and was likely on the corner with Malloy, Moore and Pitts. Joseph Hughes was watching from his apartment in 201 West 128th Street. Warren Wright was standing in the entrance to the apartments above 2150 7th Avenue on the other side of the group in front of the auto parts store.
As the police radio car came to a stop, Patrolman John McInerney jumped out with his pistol in his hands. Fearing a beating from the police, the boys and the others in front of the store ran up 7th Avenue. McInerney chased after them; Waterson remained in the car, reversing it back up 7th Avenue behind his partner. When the fleeing group got to West 128th Street, Lloyd Hobbs turned left on to West 128th Street, breaking from the others including his brother Russell, who crossed the street and continued running up 7th Avenue. He may have decided to head back towards his family’s home on St. Nicholas Avenue. When McInerney reached the corner, he raised his pistol and shot the boy. He later claimed that he saw that Hobbs had items from the store in his hands and called out to him to stop. The Black men watching saw nothing in the boy’s hands and heard no call from the patrolman. They did see Hobbs fall to the ground after the bullet hit his right side, went through his abdomen, and lodged in his right wrist. The gunshot would not have been the only one echoing around Harlem at this time, noise that signaled that McInerney’s action was part of the intensifying violence of the police response.
Waterson reversed the radio car into 128th Street, grabbed a rifle, and went to McInerney’s aid. As the residents on the street looked on, the two patrolman loaded Lloyd Hobbs into their car and drove him to Harlem Hospital. Russell Hobbs had not seen the shooting. When he returned to 128th Street after the police car left, he learned from the crowd at the scene that it was his brother who had been shot. He immediately ran home to tell his parents, Lawyer and Mary Hobbs.
Around the same time that McInerney shot Lloyd Hobbs, James Wrigley was struck on the head by a stone thrown at him at 7th Avenue and 126th Street. The forty-nine-year-old white manager of a security guard service had come to Harlem when he heard of the disorder to supervise staff protecting stores in the area. He suffered a head injury and cuts about both eyes and may have been knocked unconscious. Police found Wrigley lying on the street. He, like Hobbs, was loaded into a radio car and transported to Harlem Hospital.
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Greenfield Auto Equipment store looted
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Around 9:00 PM, Louis Eisenberg and three of his staff finished up putting new merchandise and sign cards in the store windows of Greenfield Auto Equipment, at 2150 7th Avenue, and began cleaning up inside the store. They "heard a terrific crash at the front door and saw an angry crowd surging into the store," he told the MCCH in a private interview. Eisenberg and his staff fled out the rear of the store, and on to the street, where they hailed a cab to take them away from the crowd. The timing of that escape varied in different sources. In police records, Eisenberg and his staff fled out a rear window, into the back yard of the store, where they remained until around 11:30 PM. Only then did they avoid the "mob" on the street by jumping in a passing taxi. In his interview with the MCCH, Eisenberg described going from the yard to the neighboring "tailor shop" (actually a cleaning store) and hailing a cab from there. There was no mention of spending time in the yard in the interview, and from the cab he saw only one broken window, which suggested that he and his staff left soon after fleeing the store. That statement contradicted Eisenberg's statements to James Tartar, an investigator for the MCCH, that five windows were broken between 8:30 PM and 9:00PM. Tartar also recorded information from the white owners of four of the six other occupied stores on this block of 7th Avenue, between West 127th Street and West 128th Street, who reported windows broken sometime between 8:45 PM and 11:00 PM. The owner of the cleaning store neighboring Eisenberg's store specified that the windows in the auto equipment store were broken before those in his store, four of which were targeted between 8:45 PM and 9:30 PM.
The time that the windows were broken was early enough in the evening that most of the neighboring stores would still have been open for business, or at least still staffed, as Greenfield Auto Equipment had been. That all the neighboring storeowners interviewed by Tartar could give a time when people threw objects that broke their store windows indicates they were present. The Black-owned Cozy Shoppe at 2154 7th Avenue, on the corner of 128th Street, was undamaged; someone from that store had written "Colored Shoppe" on the store window. Tartar included the "Cozy Shop" on his drawing of the block, together with a Black-owned beauty parlor to the left of the auto equipment store, but neither appear in his list of looted businesses, suggesting the beauty parlor may also have been undamaged.
The storeowners also provided the value of the stock stolen from their stores. Eisenberg put the value of stock stolen from his store at $850; when he reported the theft to police, he provided a two-page list of merchandise without information on its value. While Eisenberg's account of men rushing into his store implied that goods were stolen as soon as the window was broken, the more fragmentary responses Tartar recorded from the other store owners suggested that looting may have happened later, as more general narratives in the press related. The owner of the saloon on the corner of West 127th Street, the Harlem Grill, reported one window broken around 9:00 PM, and two more at least an hour later. Crowds smashed windows in stores on the opposite side of the street apparently without looting them around 9:45 PM, when a police officer arrested Leroy Brown for urging a group of people to follow his lead after he threw a tailor's dummy through a window. Whenever the looting started, by around 11:00 PM, when Howard Malloy passed the store, all the goods in the display window had been taken, he told Tartar in an interview on April 5. On March 20, Detective O'Brien visited the store and reported that he found "five (5) windows of the store broken and merchandise strewn about the floor and window. Also noted that the street in the immediate vicinity was littered with broken glass, bricks, stones and other heavy objects."
Information on the Greenfield Auto Equipment store, and those store neighboring it, appeared in the records of the MCCH because of what happened after the looting, or at least after the looting had started. Around 12:55 AM, two police officers in a squad car traveling south on 7th Avenue reported hearing smashing glass, and seeing Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black student, standing in the store window passing merchandise to a crowd of people on the street. They stopped their car, and Patrolman McInerney chased after the crowd. As Hobbs ran west across 128th Street, McInery shot the boy in the back. Although the officers transported him to Harlem Hospital, Hobbs died on March 30. He and his younger brother, Russell, had been at a show at the Apollo Theater until 12:30 AM, when they emerged to find "general disorder and many broken windows." Russell told Tartar that they wanted to "see and hear what was going on," so walked along 125th Street and up 7th Avenue, passing a crowd in front of Eisenberg's store at the time the police car arrived. Both boys denied Lloyd had looted the store; they had simply joined the crowd in running when the police car stopped, and McInerney had shot Lloyd without warning when he split from the group and turned west on 128th Street, back in the direction of the family home. Three Black eyewitnesses, including Howard Malloy, confirmed that account. Police insisted Hobbs had stolen goods from the store, but they did not produce the items they claimed to have found on him — a horn and socket set — until several weeks after the shooting. The grand jury twice declined to indict McInerney for shooting Hobbs, accepting his claim that it was a justifiable homicide. The MCCH did not agree, and Hobbs became a central part of their report on the events of the disorder.
No other people were arrested or charged with looting the Greenfield Auto Equipment store, or the other stores on this block of 7th Avenue. Eisenberg "was on the point of closing after the riot but was persuaded to stay on," he told an MCCH investigator who visited the store on June 25. He had been in business for sixteen years, with a staff of four, two of whom were Black men. A white-owned auto supply store was recorded in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 (mistakenly located at 2152 7th Avenue rather than 2150 7th Avenue). By 1939, however, the store was gone, with a billiard parlor in its place in the Tax Department photograph.