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

Mediaville Liquor store, 1 West 116th Street, c. 1939-1941.

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2:00 AM to 2:30 AM

Police lieutenant Samuel Battle, New York City's senior Black officer, was sent on to Harlem's streets for the first time during the disorder around 2:00 AM. He was not in uniform, having been called into the station house at 11:30 PM, but many Black residents would have recognized him nonetheless. Battle would later report that he found "no excitement" in the area at this time, only businesses with broken windows and some that had been looted, and groups of people that he urged to go home. However, while violence had subsided enough for Battle to perhaps not have encountered any as he toured the neighborhood, police had not yet entirely restored order. On Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street, attacks on stores became more sporadic, and more of those on the street left the area. Police officers continued to fire their weapons at groups they encountered and to scrutinize those now walking away from the area for evidence they were carrying items taken from businesses on Lenox Avenue. Below West 125th Street police were now stationed on corners of Lenox Avenue above West 116th Street, having arrived in response to attacks on businesses in those blocks. Some of those looking to take items they needed or wanted from businesses reacted by going east to 5th Avenue. Sporadic violence likely also continued to occur on 7th Avenue even in the absence of reported incidents.

The bullet that hit Victor Fain’s left ankle while he was around Lenox Avenue and West 128th Street indicated both the presence of police officers and groups of people near the businesses in the area. The nineteen-year-old Black man did not tell the medical staff who treated him the circumstances in which he had been shot, so he may have been participating in breaking windows or taking merchandise from damaged stores, or close enough to others involved in violence to have been hit by a stray bullet intended for them. Fain was not a local resident. He lived well south of 125th Street in a section on the southern margins of Harlem of mostly white and Puerto Rican residents that the disorder did not reach. His presence this far uptown suggested he was willing to brave the disorder and broken glass to see what was happening in the heart of the Black neighborhood.

A block to the south, attacks on stores evidently continued as some glass shattered and hit William Brown, a twenty-year-old man of unknown race. While many of those on the street were local residents, Brown, like Fain, had come from well below 125th Street.

Still further south, the police stationed at the corner of West 126th Street had enough control of the area to be paying attention to people moving through the intersection. Around 2:15 AM, something about Oscar Leacock, a twenty-year-old Brazilian laborer, and John Henry, a sixteen-year-old Black student, attracted the attention of Patrolman Astel. He stopped the men and found a quantity of jewelry in their possession which they admitted they had taken from Benjamin Zelvin’s store at 372 Lenox Avenue. The store was only three blocks to the north. Astel had Leacock and Henry take him there. He found that all the display windows had been broken.

Another man who had been in the crowds on Lenox Avenue attracted the attention of police officers stationed around West 118th Street. James Williams was likely on the way to his home at 153 West 117th Street. There had been no police nearby when the businesses around this intersection were first attacked. The officers the twenty-eight-year-old West Indian cook encountered may have sent in response to that violence. He was carrying four pots of different sizes, two pans, a pitcher, two pails, a bread box, and a cloth lamp. That load was likely what led the officers to arrest him. Later, Herman Young would identify the items as having been taken from his hardware store at 346 Lenox Avenue, which had been looted starting around 1:00 AM. While a magistrate and a grand jury would find that evidence compelling, it did not convince a trial jury.

The arrival of the police officers who arrested Williams likely led some of those who had been attacking stores around Lenox Avenue to move further east. Around 2:25 AM, stones were thrown at the front windows of the Mediaville Liquor Store on the northwest corner of West 116th Street and 5th Avenue. Some bottles of liquor were then taken from the display. Unlike to the west on 116th Street, further attacks on the store apparently did not follow, a sign that there were not many people on the street this far east.

Across the neighborhood in an area beyond the reach of the disorder, Officer Eldridge arrived at Lino Rivera’s home around 2:00 AM. He woke the sleeping boy and told him people thought he was dead. Eldridge then took Rivera to the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street. During the half hour Rivera spent there he was questioned by several police officers and a crowd of white journalists, and members of the press photographed him with two Black officers, Lt. Battle and Officer Eldridge. He assured all those who asked that he not been beaten or arrested. Inspector Di Martini took credit for having Battle pose alongside Rivera in a further effort to diffuse the racial conflict in the disorder. After interviewing and photographing Rivera, journalists stopped describing the boy who had been in the Kress store as “Negro” or “colored” in favor of calling him “Puerto Rican.” Some Harlem residents as well as Communist groups were less readily convinced. Questions about whether Rivera was the boy who had been in the store would be raised for several weeks after the disorder was over.
Mediaville Liquor store looted Around 2:25 AM, stones were thrown through the front windows of the Mediaville Liquor store at 1 West 116th Street, on the northwest corner of 5th Avenue. There was no entrance visible on West 116th Street, so the front window likely faced 5th Avenue. Some bottles of spirits in the window were taken, according to an employee who spoke with a reporter from La Prensa, the Spanish-language daily newspaper. Although the employee somehow knew when the attack took place, they did not know who was responsible. No one was arrested for attacking or looting the store.

A reporter for the paper walked around the Puerto Rican areas of West 116th and Lenox Avenue the day after the disorder looking for damaged businesses. Most of those identified in the story were west of the liquor store on Lenox Avenue and on West 116th Street between Lenox and 7th Avenues and most had broken windows without reported looting. La Prensa provided the only evidence of the looting of the liquor store and those other attacks, as both the white and Black press and the MCCH gave no attention to events in the Hispanic section of Harlem.

The Mediaville Liquor Store did not appear in the MCCH business survey, nor did any other businesses located on that corner. However the store was visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, which showed that it continued to operate after the disorder.