This page has tags:

1. 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
2. 1 2023-12-13T11:09:46+00:00 Anonymous Department of Finance, Manhattan 1940s Tax Photos: 125th Street Anonymous 3 plain 2023-12-13T16:18:31+00:00 Anonymous

This page is referenced by:

• 1 2021-04-29T19:25:04+00:00 Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store windows broken 74 plain 2024-05-29T02:59:22+00:00 Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store on the northeast corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue had windows broken in the early hours of the disorder, beginning after police drove crowds on 125th Street toward 7th Avenue after 8:00 PM. Just how much damage the store suffered the store suffered is uncertain. "One brick was thrown through the window," the New York American reported, while the New York Post and New York Evening Journal reported windows on just one side of the store had been smashed, and the New York Herald Tribune that two windows were broken. The most damage was reported in an interview with Bernard Newman, the store manager, published in the Daily News. He claimed that fourteen "big show case windows" were broken. However, despite being attributed to the manager, the accuracy of that claim is questionable as the story also reported Newman as saying that "the mob jumped in the windows and scrambled for the jewelry," taking at least "Several thousand dollars worth" of merchandise. No other newspaper reported such looting; they all reported to the contrary that the store was not looted. "No attempt was made to loot the windows," according to the New York Herald Tribune, a statement echoed by the Home News. There was nothing to loot, in the New York American's story, as clerks had removed the display from the window. It was police arriving that prevented looting, according to the New York Evening Journal, describing the scene in typically sensational terms, "The emergency squad police swept into the mob with riot guns, drove the yelling, threatening men and women from their loot, and then guarded the store until armored trucks could remove the valuables." Newman was "deeply impressed with the police by the way they handled the situation in the vicinity of the store on the night of the riot," he told a MCCH investigator two months after the disorder, adding weight to the evidence that they did protect the store from being looted.
  
  
  
  Two photographs show a smashed window and empty display that is likely a section of the windows of Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store. Both show the same section of the window; in one there was a white man with his back to the camera looking in the window. The store was identified as a jewelry store by the captions to both photographs, and several bracelets and a pearl necklace can be seen on the back row of the display in the image that includes the white man (no example of that image being published has been found; it is part of the Bettman collection).
  Embed from Getty Images
  
  Only the caption of the photograph in the Afro-American gave a location for the store, on Lenox Avenue, so not at the address of Herbert's store. However, compelling details in the photograph point to Herbert's, namely the distinctive panels beneath the windows, which are visible in the Tax Department photographs of the store, most clearly in the section visible in the photograph of the building to the store's north on 7th Avenue. Mistakenly locating the store on Lenox Avenue, as the caption appears to have done, also occurred a story in the New York Evening Journal, quoting the manager. The Afro-American photo caption also reported that items had been taken from the store window, but did not use the term looting, instead describing merchandise "scattered in all directions" rather than taken. The image itself could equally well fit with the displays having been emptied by clerks, as several other newspapers reported, as with having been looted.
  
  Whenever they arrived, police "were stationed in front of the store for the night," as the Home News put it, one of the few stores identified as receiving such protection. One patrolman standing in front of the store appears in a image taken by a photographer for World Wide Photos, published in the Burlington Free Press and several other newspapers. While the caption did not identify the store, the distinctive panels that decorated the exterior below the windows are visible behind the officer. He was armed with a "riot gun," a rifle, rather than pistols regularly carried by police. Additional officers may have guarded other sections of the storefront. Four patrolmen with riot guns guarded the store in a New York Evening Journal story, three patrolmen in the Daily News, while the New York American and Home News reported two policemen guarded the store, and the New York Herald Tribune did not specify how many "police with riot guns." (Only the Afro-American mentioned police setting up "machine guns to prepare for pitched battle," weapons that were not part of police equipment). Clashes between those policemen and crowds are mentioned only by Bernard Newman, interviewed in the Daily News: 

  It looked for a while, according to Newman, as though the mob would crash the doors and pillage the store, despite three policemen with drawn guns who guarded the entrance. "We waited near the rear, ready to barricade ourselves in the cellar," Newman continued breathlessly, "but by some miracle the doors held."

  In other reports, the police presence less dramatically deterred crowds from approaching the store windows. Police "patrolled in front of the building," in the New York Herald Tribune's account, "Their armament effectively preventing attack by looters," according to the New York American. A second patrolman with a riot gun was photographed guarding another store at the intersection of 7th Avenue and West 125th Street, likely the United Cigar Store across 7th Avenue from Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry on the northwest corner of 125th Street. Notwithstanding the police guards, no one arrested for breaking windows, or looting, was charged with targeting the jewelry store.
  
  However many windows were broken, multiple rocks were apparently thrown at the store, as Newman displayed a collection of rocks to reporters from the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, and Daily News, the latter publishing a photograph of them. The United Cigar Store and the businesses on the other corners were also targeted during the disorder; Regal Shoes on the southeast corner was also reported looted, while the United Cigar Store on the northwest corner and the branch of the Chock Full O'Nuts restaurant chain on the southwest corner only had windows broken. Only three stores with broken windows are reported on West 125th Street east of 7th Avenue, suggesting that most of the crowd instead went north and south on the avenue, where there were multiple reports of looting and assaults, including the looting of another jewelry store, owned by Jack Sherloff, opposite Herbert's store by the Alhambra Theatre.
  
  The broken windows in Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store were more widely and extensively reported by the white press than any other damaged business. The prominent location of the business likely contributed to that coverage, as did the apparent willingness of the store manager, Bernard Newman, to speak with reporters.
  
  The jewelry store is recorded at the address in the MCCH business survey in the second half of 1935 and is visible in the Tax Department photograph from sometime between 1939 and 1941.
• 1 2022-05-23T17:58:54+00:00 8:30 PM to 9:00 PM 36 plain 2024-05-29T02:51:39+00:00
  
  As people in the groups around the northeast corner of 125th St and 7th Avenue began to throw rocks at the windows of the Herbert’s Blue Diamond Jewelry store, store staff rushed to remove the merchandise from the window displays. Businesses on 125th Street remained opened until late in the evening, so there were staff in all the stores whose windows were being broken. Some of those staff may also have cleared the window displays in their store; they almost certainly did what the Herbert’s jewelry staff did after emptying the windows -- gathered in the rear of the store, away from the objects coming through the windows. Outside, nearby police moved to disperse the people around the store, another clash in which twenty-eight-year-old Andrew Lyons may have been hit on the head by a police baton, an injury that would eventually be fatal. Several patrolmen armed with rifles, which identified them as crew from emergency trucks, took up positions in front of the broken windows. They remained there, guarding the store, throughout the disorder, protection that few businesses received. Newspaper photographers recorded the presence of those officers and the damage to the store’s windows. Large holes could be seen behind a patrolman in one image, and an equally large section of smashed glass in the other photographed window, indications that multiple objects had hit the store. However, only some of business’s extensive expanse of display windows suffered such damage before police intervened, and no merchandise was taken. As a result, Bernard Newman, the store manager, was one of the very few Harlem business owners “deeply impressed with the police” handling of the disorder.
  Embed from Getty Images
  
  As police moved to protect Herbert’s jewelry store, at the opposite end of the block in front of the Kress store, Patrolman Gross arrested James Smitten, a twenty-six-year-old Black man, for allegedly assaulting a twenty-four-year-old white mail clerk named William Kitlitz. There were no details of the alleged violence other than the men’s injuries, bruises on Kitlitz’s face and cuts on Smitten’s scalp — although Smitten’s injuries might have come after his arrest, at the hands of police. As one report of Kitlitz’s injury described him as “beaten on head,” Smitten may have hit him — or he may have been hit by the rocks being thrown at store windows at this time. Both men lived within a few blocks of 125th Street, Smitten on 123rd Street to the south and Kitlitz on St Nicholas Avenue to the west, close enough for them to have heard rumors about a boy being beaten or killed, or to have been shopping or going to a theater. While white men and women like Kitlitz who visited 125th Street had not been targets of the complaints of the groups gathered on the street in the preceding hours, they were implicated in the broadening anger that Louise Thompson and Carlton Moss had recently begun to hear from some of those on 7th Avenue. If Smitten did assault Kitlitz, he may have been acting on calls like the one heard by Moss, to “Run dem white folks outa Harlem." However, with no record of the outcome of his arrest, there is no basis for assessing the validity of the charges against Smitten. After Patrolman Gross arrested Smitten, he took him the short distance to the police station on West 123rd Street and called for an ambulance from Harlem Hospital, which arrived at 8:45 PM, to treat his injuries.
  
  Soon after Smitten’s arrest, Captain Conrad Rothengast joined the police in front of the Kress store. Telephoned at home by his office, he came straight to Harlem, in plainclothes not his uniform. On 125th Street he found groups of people, around 250 in total, “trying to get close to [the] Kress store.” Speaking to several women, he was told that “a young colored boy had been beaten.” Rothengast told them that “was not so,” but to his frustration they did not accept what he said. “It was impossible to reason with most of them. It was impossible to do anything with them.”
  
  Further east, at 7th Avenue, mounted police and patrolmen continued to move people away from 125th Street. Louise Thompson, part of a group in front of the branch of the Chock Full O'Nuts restaurant chain on the southwest corner, watched as police repeatedly pushed people back from the corner. However, the officers could not move them as far as the entrance to the Hotel Theresa midway down the block of 7th Avenue to the south. Like other businesses on 125th Street, the Chock Full O'Nuts remained open for business at this time – and for some time longer, as Thompson later went into the “Nut Store.” The restaurant, like its neighbors, also had windows broken sometime during the disorder, some perhaps at this time.
  
  Even as police struggled to keep groups of people off the corners of 125th Street, they did prevent any from going along the street to the Kress store. Around 8:45 PM, some groups began instead to move up 7th Avenue to the north, a decision that Thompson attributed to police not allowing them on to 125th Street. Carlton Moss decided to follow one of those groups, about twenty men, women and children, up 7th Avenue, and watched as they broke windows in stores. Unlike on 125th Street, there were Black-owned businesses on 7th Avenue. While the block between 125th and 126th Streets housed only white-owned businesses, in the next block to the north seven of the twenty stores at street level had Black owners. That proportion increased to eleven of twenty stores a block further uptown. Those businesses were not targeted by the groups of Black men and women who focused their attacks on white-owned stores – although Moss did see “some ill-directed missels [sic] crash colored owned shops.” The “resentment” felt by those breaking windows had shifted from the rumored specific incident of violence by the staff of the Kress store against a boy to the white control of Harlem’s businesses, of which the boy’s fate was just the latest consequence.
  
  Many of the stores on 7th Avenue were still open for business, like their competitors on 125th Street. As rocks broke the windows of Jack Sherloff’s small jewelry store midway between 125th and 126th Street, he jumped into the window display and began throwing merchandise back into the store. He was soon hit himself by objects thrown at the windows, or perhaps directly at him, as his clerk, John Wise, watched from inside the store. Eventually Sherloff was injured badly enough that Wise pulled him back inside. While merchandise was taken from the store, that likely did not happen until later given that only windows were being broken in nearby stores at this time. Across the street, almost opposite Sherloff’s store, tailor Max Greenwald had a similar experience, likely around the same time. When bricks starting hitting the windows of his store, he shut off the lights so he was not “such a good target,” and began moving merchandise from the window into the store. Greenwald was able to move “a lot of merchandise” before so much material was being thrown through the windows that he decided it was too dangerous to continue. He then retreated inside the store, avoiding the injuries suffered by Sherloff. A shoe store on this block several buildings closer to 125th Street than Sherloff’s store that had windows broken during the disorder was also likely attacked around this time.
  
  At the same time, windows were being broken in stores two blocks further north, between 127th and 128th Streets. On the west side of the street, where five of the seven businesses were white-owned, both J. P. Bulluroff’s grocery store on the corner of 127th Street and K. Percy’s tailor and cleaning store in the middle of the block had a window broken around 8:45 PM. A few minutes later, as Lewis Eisenberg and three of his staff finished changing the window display and began cleaning up inside his auto equipment business next to Percy’s store, they “heard a terrific crash at the front door” as a window broke and saw an “angry crowd” on the street. Unlike Sherloff and Greenwald and their neighbors on this block, Eisenberg and his staff did not try to protect merchandise or remain in the business. Instead, they left out a rear exit into the backyard. From there, the men made their way to the street and hailed a taxi to get them out of Harlem. As they drove away, Eisenberg saw one window broken in his store. Even without any apparent police presence to deter those throwing rocks at the store windows, there was not a sustained or systematic attack on the stores in this area. Nor were windows targeted repeatedly at this time. Additional windows would be broken in these stores, but not until sometime later. These attacks did not appear to be the actions of a large crowd acting together, but of small groups and individuals. Police still concentrated on 125th Street did not respond to these windows being broken.
  
  At least some Black storeowners and staff reacted differently than their white counterparts to the windows in their businesses being attacked. One of the owners or staff of the Black-owned Cozy Shoppe restaurant in the building next to Percy’ store, on the southwest corner of 128th Street, wrote “Colored Shoppe” on one of the business’s windows. None of the restaurant’s windows were broken during the disorder, even as all the white-owned businesses on that block had windows broken. Across the street, on the southeast corner of 128th Street, the owner of Black-owned Williams Drug Store or his niece, his only staff member, responded the same way, painting “Colored Store, Nix Jack” in each of the two window panes that faced 128th Street. That message likely went up after the front windows of the drug store were broken sometime during the disorder. Only recently opened, the drug store may not have been widely known to be a Black-owned business. The windows on which the sign was painted were not damaged. In Battle's Pharmacy on the northeast corner of 128th Street across 7th Avenue from the Cozy Shoppe, the staff did not follow their neighbors in putting up signs to identify it as Black-owned. It had been open for three years, but it too had windows broken.
  
  Even as some groups left 125th Street and windows were broken on 7th Avenue, individuals did get through the police perimeter to break windows on 125th Street. Around 8:50 PM, a window was broken in the Willow Cafeteria at 207 West 125th Street, at the western end of the building that occupied the northwest corner of 7th Avenue. The presence of Patrolman Eppler, a member of the crew of Emergency Truck #5 stationed in front of the cafeteria at this time, did not protect the business from damage, but he did arrest Frank Wells, a twenty-six-year-old Black man, for breaking the window. Wells lived nearby, on 123rd Street near 7th Avenue, two blocks to the south. He may have been on 125th Street as part of the protests by the Young Liberators and other Communist Party affiliated organizations, as he was later represented by an ILD lawyer. Wells may not have actually broken the cafeteria window but instead have been picked out of a group on the street by Eppler given that the offense with which he was later charged was not breaking windows.