S. H. Kress & Co. 5-10-25c store, 256 West 125th Street, c. 1939-1941.
1 media/nynyma_rec0040_1_01930_0053_thumb.jpg 2024-05-28T22:37:34+00:00 Stephen Robertson a1bf8804093bc01e94a0485d9f3510bb8508e3bf 1 2 Source: DOF: Manhattan 1940s Tax Photos (New York City Municipal Archives). plain 2024-05-28T22:38:21+00:00 Stephen Robertson a1bf8804093bc01e94a0485d9f3510bb8508e3bfThis page has tags:
- 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
2021-11-24T18:22:42+00:00
Kress 5, 10 & 25c store front windows broken
99
plain
2024-05-28T22:39:21+00:00
Around 6:15 PM, a step was set up on the sidewalk in front of the Kress 5, 10 & 25c store. A Black man climbed up, spoke briefly to the crowd of about 100 gathered there, and then had Daniel Miller, a twenty-four-year-old white man, take his place on the step. As Miller began to speak, someone threw an object through one of the store windows. A second object quickly followed, smashing another window, according to the New York Times and New York Sun. Different objects are identified as having smashed the store window. A bottle was the most common, identified in the New York Times and Home News, and more precisely a milk bottle in the New York Sun and a whiskey bottle in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and by a police inspector quoted in the Afro-American. The Daily News identified the object as a brick, as did the New York Sun in the case of the second object, while Louise Thompson described it as a stone. The MCCH report opted to simply say "a missile" hit the window. These are all everyday objects, likely close to hand on 125th Street, other than the whiskey bottle. A whiskey bottle fit with portrayals of those who attacked white businesses as hoodlums and played to racist stereotypes about African Americans, as was evident in the appearance of this detail in a list of brief items headlined "Highlights on the Harlem Front." Picketing of white-owned businesses on 125th Street by Black organizations in 1934 had not resulted in any broken windows; concern about what had become of the boy arrested at Kress' may have caused this crowd to react differently. There may also have been members of groups affiliated with the Communist Party in the crowd; when those groups picketed the Empire Cafeteria in 1934, they did break windows.
After the windows were broken, police officers moved in to arrest Miller and push people away from the store, most of whom ran across 125th Street to the opposite sidewalk. No one was arrested for breaking the window. Harry Gordon was arrested soon after trying to speak to the crowd on 125th Street east of Kress' store. A few minutes later, around 6:45 PM, three men began picketing in front of Kress' store. They too were soon arrested by police. Three to five police radio cars, an emergency [riot] truck, and six mounted policemen struggled to keep people from the store. No further objects appear to have been thrown at Kress' store front windows at this time. Soon after West 125th Street was cleared, around 7 P.M., people pushed on to 8th Avenue saw a hearse stop behind the store on West 124th Street, triggering rumors it had come to pick up the body of the boy who had been arrested, and a rush to the rear of the store that saw windows there broken.
Sustained and extensive attacks on stores on 125th Street came sometime after those rear windows were broken. Another brick hit Kress' front windows around 10:40 PM, allegedly thrown by William Ford, who then called for others on the street to attack police. Louise Thompson described a group breaking though the police cordon around 125th Street to break all but a few windows in the store, in the context of an exaggerated claim about the extent of smashed windows, and Kress' store does appear on the list of businesses with broken windows compiled by a La Prensa reporter who walked down 125th Street. But a reporter for the Afro-American wrote that the store "suffered very little loss on the front." The store manager, Jackson Smith, confirmed that later in a public hearing of the MCCH. Of the eighteen windows facing 125th Street and in the vestibule, only four were damaged. Repairs to the front of the store next day appeared to have focused on only two sections of the store window on the right side of the left entrance, in a photograph published in the New York American, and on the left side of the right entrance, where a ladder can be seen in Universal newsreel footage. Those repairs cannot have taken long. A photograph of Kress' store published in the Daily News on March 21 showed intact store windows guarded by two police officers. A sustained police presence during the disorder appeared to have protected the front of the store. That was the opinion of Channing Tobias, the fifty-three-year-old Black secretary of the Colored Division of the National Council of the YMCA, who told E. Franklin Frazier that "I guess it was because police were on guard" that Kress' store "got only a small window smashed." Police established a cordon in front of the store after it closed. Officers were still there around 10 PM, when Detective Henry Roge was hit by a rock while standing in front of the store, and after a window was broken at 10:40 PM, there were officers able to arrest William Ford. Later in the evening, the police cordon extended to cover 125th Street from 8th Avenue to Lenox Avenue, with Kress' store remaining at its center, and as the base for police responding to the disorder.
A window being smashed as a speaker began to address a crowd in front of Kress' store featured in narratives in the New York Times, New York Sun, and Home News. Only the New York Times and New York Sun mentioned the second object and smashed window. A broken window, without reference to a speaker, is reported by the Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York Age, and Pittsburgh Courier. No mention of a window in Kress' store being smashed at the beginning of the disorder appears in the narratives published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, New York American, Daily Mirror, and New York Post, and the Afro-American reported only the damage visible the next day. In the MCCH public hearings, Inspector Di Martini, Patrolman Moran, Jackson Smith, the store manager, and Louise Thompson all discussed how the window was broken. In the MCCH's final report, the arrests of Miller and Gordon police made in the aftermath of the window being broken were included as examples of "actions on the part of the police [that] only tended to arouse resentment in the crowd."
The Kress 5, 10 & 25c store appeared in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 and was still visible in the Tax Department photograph from 1939–1941.
-
1
2022-07-20T18:16:09+00:00
2:00 PM to 2:30 PM
33
plain
2024-05-28T22:41:44+00:00
Just after 2:00 PM, Lino Rivera, a sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy, walked through the front doors of the S. H. Kress 5-10-25c store on West 125th Street. Earlier in the day, around noon, he had taken the subway to Brooklyn, having heard about a job opening for an errand boy. The position had been filled by the time he arrived. It was not the first time he had unsuccessfully visited Brooklyn looking for work. Rivera had stopped attending Textile High School six months earlier to work on a delivery truck, but had to leave that job after a month. His mother, Anna, had a job at a powder-puff factory, but his father had died soon after the family arrived in New York City in 1923. Mother and son shared an apartment with another woman and her child on the 7th floor of 272 Manhattan Avenue. Returning from Brooklyn, Rivera had exited the subway at 125th Street rather than continuing two more stops to his home fourteen blocks further south. He had then gone to a show or movie at one of the theaters that lined the street west of the subway station, the main entertainment and commercial district north of Central Park.
Rivera would have been far from alone in coming to 125th Street (as this photograph taken a month later showed). As well as the subway station on Lenox Ave, a bus route on 7th Avenue and an elevated train line on 8th Avenue also stopped at 125th Street, and a street car line ran its length. In the 1930s, the residential districts south as well as north of 125th Street had filled with Black residents, who had become a majority of the district’s customers. As a result, Rivera would have had his choice of theaters, no longer having to avoid several because they admitted only white patrons. To the contrary, theaters had begun to change as their patronage did, with the Apollo opening the previous year with theatrical shows catering to Black audiences as well as movies and a Black staff. That theater may have been Rivera’s choice; it was opposite the Kress store. With nothing to do after the show ended, he wandered into the store to look around; it also offered a shortcut to 124th Street on his way home.
In going into the Kress store, Rivera was visiting another attraction that drew people to 125th Street, the large stores of various kinds that, like the theaters, spanned the entire width of a block. A 5-and-10-cent store, Kress, like the Woolworth’s store to its east, offered cheaper merchandise than the street's department stores, Blumstein, Koch, and McCrory. Small counters displaying different types of merchandise were scattered throughout the store, behind which stood white staff. The lack of Black sales staff in stores on 125th Street, all of which were white-owned, had been the target of boycott campaigns and pickets for the previous three years, although the Kress store had not been one of those singled out. Around fifty other people were in the store when Rivera walked in, almost all of them Black women, a clientele to which the boycott campaign had drawn attention in making the case for hiring Black staff. Rivera made his way through the store to the rear half, which was twice the width of the shopfloor at the front. A pocketknife on a counter caught his attention. He reached out and put it in his jacket pocket without anyone behind the counter seeing what he had done. His action, however, did not go unnoticed. In one of the offices fifteen feet above that section of Kress’ store, Charles Hurley, a twenty-eight-year-old white floorwalker who supervised the sales staff, was watching the counters with the store manager, Jackson Smith, and saw Rivera take the knife. He called out to the store detective, pointed out the boy, and headed downstairs. Catching boys shoplifting was a regular part of the men’s work. Petty theft was one of the responses to unemployment, poverty, and lots of time to fill in that led to boys from Harlem appearing in the Children’s Court, although far less common than violating regulations against shining shoes on the street, selling newspapers after 7:00 PM, hitching on street trolleys, and riding the subway without paying – the last of which Rivera had been arrested for just a week earlier. Without a nickel to pay for a subway trip back to Harlem after another trip to Brooklyn responding to a job ad, he had used tinfoil from a cigarette packet to make a slug to put in the subway turnstile. He later told a magistrate in the Brooklyn Adolescent Court he had used slugs twenty-five times before without being caught. On that day, a railroad police officer saw him. When he took the pocketknife, Rivera was on parole, due back in court the next week.
Arriving on the shop floor, Hurley grabbed Rivera and demanded the pocketknife. When Rivera denied having taken the knife, Hurley took it from his jacket pocket. Telling the boy to leave the store, he pushed him toward the 125th Street entrance, joined by the store detective. Rivera tried to shake off the men walking on either side of him, telling them he could walk out on his own. As they neared the front entrance Hurley said, "Let's take him down the cellar and beat hell out of him.” Scared of being beaten, Rivera began to “really fight,” throwing his arms around. In response, Hurley put his arm around the boy’s shoulders to restrain him, helped by a window dresser, Steve Urban, a thirty-nine-year-old white man, who also put his arms around Rivera. Once out of store, in the vestibule, the store detective left to get an officer from the Crime Prevention Bureau. That police agency provided an alternative to arrests of children, with its officers instead undertaking investigations of their conditions in order to refer them to social agencies to better prevent “juvenile delinquency.” Staff at the Kress store referred most of the boys they caught shoplifting to the Crime Prevention Bureau and had police arrest only one or two a week. A referral meant that Rivera would not face a trip to court after being caught in the store like he had when caught putting a slug in the subway turnstile.
However, at that moment, Rivera, was more worried about a beating from the Kress store staff than what he faced from police and the courts. Continuing to try to get away after the store detective left, Rivera bit Hurley and Urban on the hands with which they had hold of him. Standing on the street outside the Kress store, Patrolman Donahue saw this struggle and came to investigate, as did at least two other police, his partner Patrolman Keel and a Black officer named Miller. That there were that number of officers near the Kress store reflected both how busy 125th Street was, and the additional police stationed there after the picketing of businesses the previous year. Donahue sent Miller to call an ambulance to treat Hurley and Urban and took Rivera and the two men back inside the store, away from a curious crowd that was gathering.
-
1
2021-12-08T22:06:03+00:00
Kress 5, 10 & 25c store front windows broken (10:40 PM)
22
plain
2024-05-28T22:45:14+00:00
At 10:40 PM, a large display window in Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street broke after being hit by a brick. Patrolman Walter MacKenzie told the Harlem Magistrates Court that he saw William Ford, a seventeen-year-old Black laborer, throw the brick, and them allegedly shout, "in a loud tone of voice 'Shed white blood, kill the cops, there has been enough black blood shed now.'" A "very large and threatening crowd" gathered in response to Ford's shouts. By that time, the large crowds on 125th Street had been cleared from the street and had broken into smaller groups, many of which scattered north and south up the avenues, but some groups remained. Ten minutes before windows were broken in Kress' store, Claude Jones allegedly threw a rock that broke a window at Blumstein's department store several buildings to to the east, and then called on the people on the street to attack police, drawing a large crowd. Around the same time, a white man named Thomas Wijstem was hit by a rock in front of the W. T. Grant store immediately east of Blumsteins, allegedly while being attacked by a group of Black men.
One or two display windows at the front of Kress' store had been broken earlier, at the beginning of the disorder, as well as more windows at the rear of the store not long after. However, a reporter for the Afro-American wrote that the store "suffered very little loss on the front." Repairs to the front of the store the next day appear to have focused on only two sections of the store window, on the right side of the left entrance, in a photograph published in the New York American, and on the left side of the right entrance, where a ladder can be seen in Universal newsreel footage. Those repairs cannot have taken long. A photograph of Kress' store published in the Daily News on March 21 showed intact store windows, guarded by two police officers. A sustained police presence during the disorder appears to have protected the front of the store. Police established a cordon in front of Kress' store from the time it closed; officers were still there around 10 PM, when Detective Henry Roge was hit by a rock while standing in front of the store, and after the windows was broken at 10:40 PM, there were officers able to arrest William Ford. Later in the evening, the police cordon extended to cover 125th Street from 8th Avenue to Lenox Avenue, with Kress' store remaining at its center, and as the base for police responding to the disorder. It was also the case that Ford was not alleged to have been trying to incite others to break more windows, as most of the other men arrested for inciting crowds allegedly did, but to attack police.
There is no mention of this specific incident in any newspapers reporting on the disorder. William Ford did appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court, on March 20, but his case was not among those about which the Home News reported details. Eventually sent to the grand jury, Ford was transferred to the Court of Special Sessions to be tried for both the misdemeanor forms of inciting a riot, and malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property used in the prosecution of those who allegedly broke windows during the disorder. There ws no information on the outcome of that trial; Ford does not appear in the transcript of the 28th Police Precinct blotter that provides outcomes for most of those prosecuted in the Harlem Magistrates Court.
The Kress 5, 10 & 25c store appears in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 and was still visible in the Tax Department photograph from 1939–1941.
-
1
2021-11-14T18:06:36+00:00
London shoe store windows broken
21
plain
2024-05-28T22:44:15+00:00
A branch of the London shoe store chain at 276 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The shoe store was two storefronts from the southeast corner of West 125th Street and 8th Avenue.
Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM, according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). However, the businesses identified in the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror as having windows broken were all east of Kress' store, near the intersection with 7th Avenue rather than 8th Avenue. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The only mention of broken windows west of Kress' store came from the reporter for La Prensa, who walked West 125th Street all the way to 8th Avenue, and an anecdote regarding the Child's restaurant at 272 West 125th Street in the Afro-American. However, the shoe store is the only one of the nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues the reporter identified that was west of Kress', together with five around the eastern corners of 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").
No other sources mention the London shoe store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The white-owned store is included in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935. By the time the Tax Department photographs were taken between 1939 and 1941, a new department store had replaced the buildings at this address in 1935. (London shoes had relocated by January 8, 1938, when an advertisement gave its new address as 252 West 125th Street; a sign for London shoes can be seen at that address, left of Kress' store, in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.) -
1
2022-05-23T17:57:39+00:00
6:00 PM to 6:30 PM
19
plain
2024-05-28T22:42:55+00:00
James Parton and Daniel Miller arrived in front of the Kress store around 6:15 PM. Louise Thompson returned to 125th Street around the same time, making her way from 7th Avenue toward 8th Avenue a little behind the two men. She encountered more people on that block than when she had been pushed out of the Kress store. Small groups talked more excitedly about a range of grievances in addition to the treatment of the boy grabbed in the store: against the agency providing relief for those without work, high rents, prices charged by white businesses and their lack of Black staff. Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white student and member of the New York Student League, an organization affiliated with the Communist Party, and two (likely white) companions walking along this block of 125th Street also encountered groups of “excited” people. Unlike Thompson, Gordon claimed he did not know that something had happened in the Kress store. Nor could he get “anything at all” from the groups on the street about the cause of their agitation, likely because he was a white man. He and his companions may have actually have been in the area as part of the Communist Party response to the rumors circulating in Harlem, or, like Channing Tobias, have come for the entertainments of 125th Street at the end of their workday. When Tobias completed his shopping, he came back to 125th Street and 7th Avenue and continued along the street “to go the theatre.” However, he found “the crowd was pretty thick” and “so threatening” that he reconsidered those plans. Although Black residents made up the majority of those who patronized 125th Street in 1935, white men and women from neighborhoods further west and east would have been among the crowds on the street.
Parton and Miller set up their stepladder and banner in front of the Kress store. While street speakers typically set up on the corners on 7th Avenue and Lenox Avenue, speaking elsewhere on the street as Parton and Miller did was not uncommon even if it offered less space for an audience. Communist Party speakers set up in front of the offices of affiliated organizations and had spoken in front of the Empire Cafeteria during their boycott campaign the previous year. Inside the Kress store, the ladder being placed in front of the store caused one of the four staff who remained to call the manager, Jackson Smith, to the front to see what was happening.
Parton climbed the ladder and spoke first. Few in the small groups around the Kress store stopped talking to listen to him, making it difficult to hear his brief appeal for Blacks and whites to come together against the trouble in the store. He then introduced Miller, who climbed the stepladder and started to speak. The white man had spoken only a few words when someone in the crowd threw an object at the Kress store, breaking one of the display windows. Such attacks had not occurred during the campaigns targeting white businesses on 125th Street the previous year; however, windows in the Empire Cafeteria had been broken during the protests organized by the Communist Party. Both Black and white men and women were on street around Miller when he spoke, including Louise Thompson and Harry Gordon.
The sound of breaking glass brought an immediate reaction from the police in front of the store entrance. Patrolman Shannon pulled Miller down from the stepladder and arrested him. Other patrolmen cleared the sidewalk as the people around Miller scattered. Channing Tobias watched from that side of the street as “a policemen came up on the sidewalk on his horse and attempted to charge through the crowd.” Seeing the crowd come back after the officer went by, Tobias “decided it was going to be some real trouble,” and left for home. Police officers followed some of the scattering crowd, including Louise Thompson and Harry Gordon, across 125th Street, pushing groups east away from the Kress store and towards 7th Avenue. About 300 feet further down the block, Parton climbed a lamppost and again spoke to the crowd, saying “that a boy had been killed and that a crowd should gather in protest.”