William Feinstein's liquor store, 452 Lenox Avenue, c. 1939-1941.
1 media/nynyma_rec0040_1_01730_0072_thumb.jpg 2024-05-29T17:21:38+00:00 Stephen Robertson a1bf8804093bc01e94a0485d9f3510bb8508e3bf 1 2 Feinstein's store is behind the car on the left of the sign. Source: DOF: Manhattan 1940s Tax Photos (New York City Municipal Archives). plain 2024-05-29T17:22:12+00:00 nynyma_rec0040_1_01730_0072 20180323 123652+0000 Stephen Robertson a1bf8804093bc01e94a0485d9f3510bb8508e3bfThis page has tags:
- 1 2023-12-13T11:08:36+00:00 Anonymous Department of Finance, Manhattan 1940s Tax Photos: Lenox Avenue Anonymous 4 plain 2023-12-13T16:17:17+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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William Feinstein's liquor store looted
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Around 11:00 PM, David Schmoockler, the manager of William Feinstein’s liquor store, saw a crowd of about thirty people gather near Lenox Avenue and West 132nd Street, according to Justice Shalleck's summary of the testimony he gave in the Municipal Court. Located at 452 Lenox Avenue, the store was in the middle of the block between West 132nd St and West 133rd Street. On the other side of West 132nd Street, Herbert Canter, who owned the pharmacy at 419 Lenox Avenue, testified in another Municipal Court trial that he also saw the crowd, which he described as a "mob" carrying bricks, stones, and bottles, as well as canned goods, march down the street shouting, "Down with the whites! Let's get what we can," and hurling missiles through the windows, according to the New York Herald Tribune. For the next hour, Schmoockler watched as the crowd "created disturbances, hurled various missiles, broke store windows, set fire to some stores, pillaged others, and in general damaged property of various merchants in the locality," Shalleck wrote. Canter also saw a fire at Anna Rosenberg's notion shop at 429 Lenox Avenue, which extended to the neighboring hardware store. At some point police arrived but could not control the crowd. Officers "discharged their revolvers in an attempt to disperse the crowd," according to Shalleck's summary, and sometimes "succeeded in driving the participants from one side of the street, but they would then rush to the other side and back again, all the while continuing their destructive acts." The New York Times story on the Municipal Court trial reported this testimony simply as Schmoockler having “seen rioting in the neighborhood” that scared him and a "Negro helper" not mentioned in Shalleck's summary, omitting details about the crowd and its struggles with police.
By around midnight, the disorder and gunfire had become frightening enough to Schmoockler and the Black staff member that they "locked the doors, closed the [iron] gates" and left the store, according to Shalleck's summary. A later story in the New York Times that mentioned Shalleck's decision reported that the men left “when police began shooting about midnight” and omitted details of the lead-up to that decision. The Magistrate’s Court affidavit began with the store being closed without any mention of the context, and mistakenly had him leaving at 9:30 PM rather than midnight. What the manager should instead have done when faced with this disorder, lawyers defending the city implied in cross-examination reported by the New York Times, was move stock out of the windows and put it beyond the reach of looters, as Max Greenwald and Jack Sherloff did, and notify the mayor, sheriff or county of the attack on his property, an argument reported and dismissed by Justice Shalleck.
A crowd remained in the area after Schmoockler and his helper left. Around 1:15 AM, "a group of from thirty to forty persons smashed the windows" of Feinstein's store, pilfered bottles of whiskey and demolished the store front," according to the New York Herald Tribune report of testimony by "witnesses for Mr Feinstein" in the Municipal Court. Justice Shalleck and the New York Times mentioned the time of the attack, and the same details, although the newspaper story misattributed the testimony to Feinstein. It is not clear who the witnesses were; the store manager had left over an hour earlier, and police officers were unlikely to be testifying against the city. Both newspaper stories and Judge Shalleck's summary noted that police still had not controlled the crowd. Given that the store's iron gate had to be broken before the windows could be smashed, the attack would have taken more time and sustained, noisy violence than most, despite the number of people involved. Even with that opportunity to respond, police did not arrive until the crowd had largely finished looting the store, and made only one arrest. Around 1:20 AM, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit, Officer Nathaniel Carter allegedly saw several men leaving the store carrying bottles. He arrested one of those men, Louis Cobb, a thirty-eight-year-old Black laborer, with one bottle of gin and two bottles of whiskey in his possession. Cobb lived on the next block, at 473 Lenox Avenue. His arrest was not mentioned in either the justice's decision or any of the newspaper stories about the attack on Feinstein's store. The damaged liquor store in a photograph published in the New York World-Telegram is almost certainly Feinstein's store. The caption mentions an iron grill that was torn down as well as smashed windows, and the storefront matched the Tax Department photograph.
Schmoockler put the total losses at around $1,000 in the Magistrates Court affidavit. Feinstein later filed a claim for $627.40 in damages from the city, according to the Home News and New York American. He was not among the twenty business owners identified as the first to file claims identified by the New York Sun. Nonetheless, after the city opted to deny all the claims, Feinstein was the first of the 106 plaintiffs who filed claims after the disorder to go to trial, effectively making him the test case. As a result, much of the newspaper stories on the trial focused on the legal basis for damages. No details of what happened to Feinstein’s store were included in stories in the Home News, New York American, New York Herald Tribune, and New York World-Telegram. The jury awarded him $450. Two months later, Justice Shalleck upheld that award in a decision reported in the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune. The award of damages likely helped Feinstein stay in business. A white-owned liquor store was found at 452 Lenox Avenue both by the MCCH business survey in the second half of 1935 and in the Tax Department photograph taken in 1939–1941.
Louis Cobb appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrate's Court on March 20 charged with burglary. However, the affidavit making the complaint against him was not taken until March 25. In the interim, Magistrate Ford held Cobb without bail. An annotation in the docket book dated March 21 recorded "no bail in absence of record" suggesting police had not been able to produce his criminal record. Magistrates reaffirmed the denial of bail when Cobb's criminal record was eventually produced. He had been charged six times since 1920, for burglary, robbery, drug possession, homicide, procuring, and possession of a firearm, resulting in two sentences to the state prison at Sing Sing, two terms in the penitentiary and a sentence in the Workhouse, and two sentences for violating parole. The grand jury did not indict Cobb, instead transferring him to the Court of Special Sessions to be tried for petit larceny. That decision likely reflected the lack of evidence of him breaking into the store, and the value of the three bottles of liquor Officer Carter allegedly found on him; $7, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit, well short of the $100 threshold for a prosecution for the felony of grand larceny. There was no evidence of the outcome of the case. -
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As the disorder continued to spread, the violence became a more complex mix. As the attacks on businesses and on white men and women on the street continued, increasing incidents of looting occurred.
The multiple windows broken by repeated attacks on the stores around the intersection of 7th Avenue and 125th Street by 11:00 PM provided an opportunity for looting. Officers in the area, particularly the plainclothes detectives among the crowds, were watching for anyone tempted by that chance. At 11:00 PM, Detective Peter Naton, only recently returned after arresting John King, allegedly saw John Vivien, a twenty-seven-year-old Black laborer, reach through the holes in the windows of Regal Shoes and take a pair of shoes. With a previous arrest for robbery, Vivien may have been more willing to take merchandise than many of the other residents on the streets. He was some distance from his home, so had ventured into the disorder rather than remained a spectator on its margins. Individuals may also have begun to take merchandise from at least one other damaged business near the intersection that would also be reported as having been looted, Maurice Gilden’s optician’s shop.
Looting, however, was not yet the goal of most of those in the blocks of 7th Avenue below 125th Street. Fifteen minutes after Vivien’s arrest, a crowd of twenty-five to thirty people, the typical size of the groups observed during the disorder, gathered two blocks to the south at the intersection with 123rd Street. Already back on the street, Detective Naton was close enough to allegedly hear James Pringle, a twenty-eight-year-old Black laborer, call out to the group, “Let's go cross the way and scale rocks at the cops, they are coming down our side of the street.” As the group moved away, Naton arrested Pringle. He might have singled out him out as a leader or Pringle might have been the only member of the group the detective could apprehend. Either way, Naton claimed to have found a rock concealed in the right hip pocket of Pringle’s trousers that he treated as evidence of his involvement in the violence on the streets.
As with the appeals to attack police reported by the officers who had arrested William Ford and Claude Jones on 125th Street around thirty minutes earlier, what Naton claimed was the crowd’s target was by his own account not what they actually went on to attack. They “smashed windows” and attacked several people. Among the businesses damaged at that time was likely Ben Salcfas’ grocery store on the northeast corner of 7th Avenue and 123rd Street. Patrolman Leahy arrested one of those who allegedly threw a rock that broke one of the store’s windows, David Bragg, a thirty-three-year-old Black man. A resident of West 135th Street, Bragg may have come to 125th Street earlier in the evening and moved south on 7th Avenue as the disorder intensified. Other members of the group eluded police. Among the targets of their rocks would have been windows in nearby businesses looted later in the evening: the Lafayette Market at 2044 7th Avenue; Nicholas Peet's tailors store at 2063 7th Avenue; Sarah Refkin's delicatessen at 2067 7th Avenue; and the shoe repair store directly across 7th Avenue from the grocery store.
As they attacked white businesses, groups on the street continued to attack white men and women they encountered on the streets. After Michael Krim-Shamhal, a fifty-four-year-old white man, arrived on 7th Avenue from West 122nd Street around 11:00 PM he reported being assaulted by a group of people. Several blocks further south, around 11:15 PM, a thirty-four-year-old white woman named Alice Gordon alleged she had been attacked by several Black men. Shamhal and Gordon reflected the variety of white men and women still in Harlem. He lived close to where the alleged assault took place, on West 119th Street between 7th Avenue and Lenox Avenue. She lived well outside Harlem, in Rye, so either worked in or was visiting the neighborhood, and may have going to the subway or elevated railroad stations on 116th Street to return home. It was staff of the ambulances called to help Gordon and Krim Shamhal who recorded their accounts and treated the lacerations to the head each had suffered. Although police had been as far south as 121st Street about thirty minutes earlier shooting at groups of people, they were not in the vicinity of the assaults. The alleged assault on Alice Gordon was the first reported violence below 120th Street.
Crowds remained on 7th Avenue north of 125th Street, but there were few reported incidents at this time. Police patrols may have reduced the intensity of the violence, but they did not protect businesses whose windows had been repeatedly damaged earlier in the night from being looted. Sam Lefkowitz’s store windows had been broken since 9:45 PM, when a group of people went up the block between 127th and 128th Streets; some of the substantial amount of merchandise he would report losing was likely being taken at this time. Businesses a block to the south owned by Abe Mohr and Joseph Cohen that lost merchandise could also have been targeted. So too could Max Greenwald’s tailor’s store. There were certainly people at the intersection between those two blocks as some threw rocks at a Fifth Avenue Coach Company bus passing at 11:00 PM. The bus route ran the length of 7th Avenue from Central Park to 155th Street. Despite traveling through the heart of Harlem, the buses had only white drivers and conductors. The company refused to employ Black staff, a sore point with the neighborhood’s residents that might have led some of those on the street to extend their attacks on white businesses to the bus. As the bus was almost certainly carrying Black passengers, it was unlikely that it was targeted as a substitute for the white men and women whom groups had encountered and attacked earlier. The same could not be said of the cars that would soon have rocks thrown at them south of 125th Street.
Violence may have continued to spread further north on 7th Avenue. There would be looting near 131st Street around an hour later, so the attacks on windows in at least two white-owned businesses north of West 135th Street could have happened around this time. Most of the businesses in the area had Black owners. Nonetheless, enough windows were broken for the owners of one of Harlem’s best-known Black-owned businesses, the Monterey Luncheonette, to write “This is a Store Owned by Colored” on their windows to spare them from attack. Residents from the area rather than groups who had come from 125th Street could have been responsible for the broken windows. It was around 11:00 PM that groups began to come down Lenox Avenue from around 135th Street. Police were nearby when at least some of the windows were broken as they arrested two men allegedly responsible. Robert Porter was charged with throwing an ashcan through the window of a shoe repair store at 2360 7th Avenue, the northernmost business reporting damaged during the disorder. Julius Hightower allegedly threw a brick that broke windows in Moskowitz's tailor shop at 2310 7th Avenue. However, both men appeared to simply have been nearby when those attacks took place as those charges were later reduced to disorderly conduct. Police may have mistakenly grabbed them from among a crowd around the businesses, or they could have begun to arrest whomever they could apprehend around outbreaks of violence to get people off the street. Footwear and clothing were particular needs of residents suffering the effects of the depression, so those businesses may have been targeted as part of a shift toward looting later in the disorder when more police were deployed.
On 8th Avenue too, violence seemingly was spreading further north. A meat market at 2422 8th Avenue, on the block between 130th and 131st Streets, had a bottle thrown through its window, the furthest north damage was reported on this street. Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Henry Stewart, a thirty-three-year-old Black man, for throwing the bottle. The same officer had arrested Rose Murrell and perhaps Warren Johnson and Louise Brown at 127th Street, but he was unlikely to have been as far north as the meat market earlier in the evening. He may have remained in the area to attempt to control the crowds and protect the damaged businesses. Like Murrell, Stewart lived near 8th Avenue, so likely had come to the street in response to the rumors and noise of the disorder. However, he, like Hightower and Porter, was only nearby when those attacks took place, not responsible for them, as the charge was later dismissed. If Libman arrested Warren Johnson and Louise Brown around this time, charging them with breaking windows when they proved to simply have been in the crowds in the vicinity of an attack, the similar outcome of the concurrent arrests on 7th Avenue makes it more likely that police had begun ti arrest crowd members to get them off the streets. Stewart, Johnson, and Brown all lived on blocks adjacent to 8th Avenue so likely were among the residents who had come to the avenue in response to the news and noise of the disorder.
With most businesses now closed and many having suffered attacks for several hours, the lack of staff and the access available through broken windows provided the opportunity for those on 8th Avenue to take merchandise. While observers did not notice extensive looting for another hour, some of the businesses in these blocks may have begun to be targeted at this time. Just how extensive the thefts were is not clear as the only reported incidents involved arrests. However, the businesses involved in those later arrests were spread over the three blocks north of 125th Street: the Danbury Hat store on the block above 125th Street; Frendel’s meat market on the block between 126th and 127th Streets; and the Thomas Cut Rate Drug store on the block between 127th and 128th Streets.
As violence continued on 8th and 7th Avenues, the disorder and the police response spread to Lenox Avenue for the first time. While many businesses on the avenue were closed by 11:00 PM, William Feinstein’s liquor store at 452 Lenox Avenue was open. David Schmoockler, the manager, watched as a crowd of around thirty people gathered near Lenox Avenue and 132nd Street. In the next hour, they proceeded to attack white-owned businesses, throwing objects, breaking windows, taking merchandise from some, and setting fire to others. Herbert Canter observed the same group on the block south of 132nd Street. He had arrived back at the pharmacy he owned on the northwest corner of West 131st Street at 11:00 PM to try to protect his business. Where white crowds had converged on Black neighborhoods in response to reports of racial violence in the race riots earlier in the twentieth century, in 1935 the only whites who came to Harlem when they learned of the disorder were business owners like Cantor. He described the group as breaking windows as they proceeded down the street and as chanting "Down with the whites! Let's get what we can." Those shouts signaled that this group differed from those who had called out around 125th Street. They had urged windows be broken, and perhaps attacks on police. It was “whites” that those arriving on Lenox Avenue targeted, with threats against the power and property they had in Harlem — not to kill them, as a sensationalized account the New York Evening Journal would later claim. Setting fire to stores, which would happen only in this area, fitted with those threats, going beyond breaking windows in protest at the behavior of white store staff. Taking merchandise was also the expressed aim of the group, a departure from the attacks on businesses that had occupied most of those on the streets up until now. Gathering around West 132nd Street, north of where any violence had been reported up to this time, the members of the group likely came from the surrounding residences, not from the crowds initially drawn to 125th Street. The streets east of Lenox Avenue were the most densely populated in Harlem, their residents among the hardest hit by the economic depression.
Several businesses on Lenox Avenue between 132nd and 131st Streets with broken windows were likely attacked around this time. A Black staff member in Estelle Cohen’s clothing store at 437 Lenox Avenue did not prevent objects from being throw at the windows. He telephoned Cohen at her home in Washington Heights to tell her of the attack. She then called the police precinct and police headquarters, later writing to Mayor La Guardia with clear frustration that "all the satisfaction I got was that all the men were out and that all windows were being smashed." She must also have sent someone, likely her sons, to board up the damaged and emptied windows in an effort to secure the merchandise inside the store. It would prove to be a wasted effort. No one was in the hardware store at 431 Lenox Avenue, Anna Rosenberg’s notion store at 429 Lenox Avenue, and the Gonzales jewelry store at 427 Lenox Avenue when their windows were broken. Nor were there yet police in the area.
Two blocks to the south, white businesses were not yet being attacked and their owners were closing with no sign they felt threatened. Louis Levy closed his dry goods store at 374 Lenox, between 128th and 129th Streets, and left for home. So too did thirty-seven-year-old Russian immigrant Harry Lash fifteen minutes later after closing his 5c & 10c store at 400 Lenox Avenue on the corner of 130th Street.
Further south, however, attacks on businesses had started where at least some of those on the street would have come from breaking windows on the block of 125th Street between 7th and Lenox Avenues. By 11:20 PM, when Patrolman Nador Herrman arrived at William Gindin’s shoe store on the block between 126th and 127th Streets, windows had already been broken and merchandise taken from the display. Gindin had closed the business he had operated since at least 1930 around 9:45 PM, so those attacks would have come as crowds from 125th Street began to make their way up Lenox Avenue around 10:30 PM. Patrolman Herrman made the first arrest on Lenox Avenue after allegedly seeing Julian Rogers, a thirty-seven-year-old Black auto washer, kick in an undamaged display window and take three odd women's shoes worth $1 each and put them under his jacket. He caught up with Rogers about 100 feet from the store. Given the damage to Gindin’s store, some other businesses between it and 125th Street likely also suffered some damage at this time. Harry Piskin was still in his laundry just off Lenox Avenue at 100 West 126th Street when stones were thrown at its windows. They were the first of escalating attacks that would later cause Piskin to leave and fruitlessly seek help from police. George’s Lunch, a restaurant at 319 Lenox Avenue, on the southwest corner of West 126th Street, was also open when crowds appeared on the street. The three staff responded differently to the disorder. Two Black workers left the restaurant when the attacks began. The white worker called the police station for help and then locked himself in a washroom at the rear of the business. No police responded. Attacks on the Radio City Meat Market in the block between 125th and 126th Street and the Sav-on Drug Store two buildings south of Gindin’s shoe store likely also began about this time. The arriving disorder would also have drawn the attention of Leo and Winifred Richards, the Black owners of Winnette’s Dresses on the corner of West 127th Street. The store may have still been open for business or the couple could have rushed from their home just a block east at 1 West 126th Street when they learned of the disorder. As crowds appeared, they hung at least seven signs reading “Colored Store” on the inside and outside of their windows. While neighboring white-owned stores suffered significant damage and looting, Winnette’s Dresses remained untouched.
Some of those arriving on Lenox Avenue went south of 125th Street rather than north. Windows were broken in the branch of the Liggett’s Pharmacy on the southeast corner of 125th Street, in the Empire Grill and Victoria Pharmacy on the block between 125th and 124th Streets and in the Eleanor Laundry in the block between 124th and 123rd Streets. Mrs. Salefas described a sustained attack on her delicatessen at West 123rd Street and Lenox Avenue. A series of bricks hit the window, sending glass flying into the store and Salefas to take shelter in the rear storeroom. “It broke my heart to abandon my store,” she would tell a journalist the next day, “but what could I do all alone? Every time I peeked out from in back a shower of bricks greeted me.” Over time $100 worth of food and some dishes were taken from the damaged store. That was as far south as groups appear to have gone. There were no reported incidents in the disorder in the blocks below 123rd Street to 119th Street, where there were few businesses. Violence in the blocks around West 116th Street would come later in the evening, from groups moving along 116th Street not coming from 125th Street.
The arrival of crowds at Lenox Avenue and 125th Street also saw some groups continue to attack white men they encountered on the street. An alleged assault by a group of Black men on an unnamed white man at the intersection occurred sometime after 11:00 PM, when police arrived in the area. Detective Doyle of the 5th Division intervened, arresting Rivers Wright, a twenty-one-year-old Black man. However, Wright proved not to have been involved in the assault as the charge against him when he later appeared in court was disorderly conduct. As other officers had on 8th and 7th Avenues, Doyle either mistook Wright for one of the assailants or could only apprehend him among those on the street around the assault. The men who actually committed the assault remained on the streets and may have been involved in other assaults that would occur on Lenox Avenue in the coming hours.
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After 1:00 AM, it was again Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street that saw the most violent and extensive disorder, with incidents spanning the blocks up to 134th Street and perhaps as far as 137th Street with only limited intervention by police. Several people injured seriously enough by flying glass to seek medical attention was an indication that there were significant numbers of spectators and people going about their business on the streets as those attacks took place. By contrast, 7th Avenue was quiet. In fact, it was so free of incidents that Samuel Pitts left the corner of West 128th Street where he’d been watching the disorder for three hours and went west to see what was happening on 8th Avenue. There had been no reported incidents on that street for several hours so he likely returned home disappointed.
If Pitts had instead crossed 7th Avenue and walked east to Lenox Avenue, he would have found groups of spectators made up of residents from the surrounding blocks and witnessed attacks on white storeowners and attacks on stores that sent glass flying into the streets. At 125th Street, twenty-three-year-old James Connel and forty-six-year-old William Holland both suffered cuts to their heads. Those injuries could have come from the batons police swung as they tried to move crowds and stop attacks on businesses, from one of the stones being thrown at store windows, or from shattering glass. At the next intersection, a Black resident who was only a short distance from his home was hit on the head by an object thrown by someone on the street. Henry Blackwell also suffered cuts to his head. The forty-one-year-old man, a driver for a family in 1930, was likely a WPA laborer for the Parks Department by 1935. Around the same time, George Chronis arrived at his restaurant on West 126th Street just off Lenox Avenue. It was too late to do anything to protect the business. He found the restaurant “completely demolished” and his white staff member still hiding in the washroom.
Two blocks further north, between West 127th and West 128th Streets, Herman Young, a fifty-three-year-old white man, and his wife Rose also arrived at their hardware store at 346 Lenox Avenue. The couple had closed the store at 9:30 PM, well before disorder spread to Lenox Avenue, and were in their apartment on the floor directly above the business. Somehow they had slept through the noise of yelling, gunshots, sirens, and breaking glass coming from the street for over two hours until the noise of the glass in their store windows shattering woke them. Looking outside, Herman saw four men in his window display taking merchandise. The couple rushed downstairs and out the building entrance immediately next to the store. Rose arrived first and turned on the lights but remained on the stoop while Herman went inside. A Black man came up behind her, she told police, "called her names," and tried to push past her into the store, but her husband closed the door. The man then started cursing him, calling out, "You Goddam Jew I am going to kill you if you don’t get out of here,” and broke the glass in the door. Rose testified that the man used a piece of pipe; Herman said he used "some instrument." Police later reported a stone had been thrown through the door. Rose said she saw glass hit Herman; the stone may also have hit him. He went to Harlem Hospital for treatment; in his absence more merchandise was taken from the hardware store.
While no police officers intervened in the events at Young’s hardware store, there were police nearby. A little further north, at the intersection with West 128th Street, Wilmont Hendricks, a twenty-five-year-old Black man, was shot around this time. Although the hospital staff recorded that the shooting occurred “in some unknown manner,” the bullet would have come from one of the police weapons being fired with great frequency at this time. Harry Lash arrived at the intersection not long after Hendricks was transported to the hospital. He had traveled from his home in Washington Heights north of Harlem after hearing news of the disorder. Like George Chronis two blocks to the south, he arrived too late to protect his business from attack. While the fire set in the store had been extinguished, he found the windows broken, fixtures damaged, and a significant quantity of merchandise missing. Nonetheless, there is reason to think that his arrival helped prevent more items on the shelves inside the store from being taken.
Another block to the north, around the intersection with West 129th Street, it was again glass not bullets that hit local residents on the street. Both Hugh Young, a twenty-four year-old Black man, and Alice Mitchell, a twenty-one-year-old Black woman, were within a block of their homes when they were cut by flying glass. Multiple businesses around the intersection and in the block to the north were looted during the disorder: Harry Levinson's store at 100 West 129th Street; the Manhattan Renting Agency at 385 Lenox Avenue; Manny Zipp's grocery store at 383 Lenox Avenue; Anthony Avitable's grocery store at 381 Lenox Avenue; and Jacob Saloway's stationary store at 381 Lenox Avenue. At least some of those attacks would have occurred at this time; Young and Mitchell could have been nearby or involved in any of those attacks. Police, however, apparently were not close enough to intervene as they made no arrests.
Police were still near the intersection with West 132nd Street where the first attacks on white property and white people on Lenox Avenue had begun two hours earlier. Violence flared there too. William Feinstein’s liquor store at 452 Lenox Avenue, closed up during the increasingly frequent police gunfire around midnight, was targeted by a group of thirty to forty people around 1:15 AM. It would have taken a concerted attacks to first tear down the iron gate then smash all the glass in the windows and demolish the storefront and enter the store. By the time Officer Nathaniel Carter arrived at the store, he found only a handful of men who were leaving the store carrying bottles, most of group having already scattered. Carter was able to apprehend only one of those men, Louis Cobb. The thirty-eight-year-old Black laborer allegedly had a bottle of gin and two bottles of whiskey in his possession. Given his convictions and long prison terms for burglary, robbery, drug possession, procuring and possession, Cobb likely was among those most looking to take merchandise rather than simply targeting white-owned property. Around the same time Carter arrested Cobb, flying glass cut Herbert Holderman, an injury he specifically attributed to people breaking store windows. Unlike the others cut by glass on Lenox Avenue around this time, Holderman did not live locally, but rather several blocks to the southeast at 73 East 128th Street, so he may have been among the groups moving around rather than a casual spectator.
Further attacks on white-owned businesses were also occurring around West 134th Street. Some of those on the street were taking advantage of windows that had been broken earlier. An unidentified Black man climbed into the display of the branch of the Wohlmuth clothing store on the southwest corner of West 134th Street and took an overcoat, unimpeded by police, as Adam Clayton Powell watched. The milk bottle that struck Thomas Suares was evidence that windows were still being broken. The twenty-seven-year-old Black man who lived nearby had been walking along West 134th Street. In the context of the violence at this time, he was less likely to have been the intended target of the bottle than to have stepped into its path toward a store window.
If police were unable to respond to those incidents around West 134th Street, Officer William Butler did arrest a man for taking merchandise from a tailors shop owned by Philip Jaross two blocks further north. However, Butler was limiting rather than preventing attacks on the business. Earl Davis, the twenty-six-year-old Black man he took into custody, had evidently not had to break into the store as the patrolman charged him with petty larceny rather than burglary. The business had been damaged some time before the arrest.
The violence on Lenox Avenue may have reached ten blocks further north. De Soto Windgate, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, was shot as he walked along West 144th Street between Lenox and 7th Avenues. He told police that he did not know who had shot him. Had Windgate been on either avenue, he could have been among those shot by police or hit by stray police bullets as officers patrolled those streets. However, there was no evidence those patrols traversed residential streets like West 144th Street and no reported violence in the vicinity in which Windgate might have participated or watched that would have brought police into the area. Rather than an element of the disorder, the shooting might be a reminder that not all Harlem’s residents were occupied with the disorder.
Among those who made their way along Lenox Avenue with little regard for the violence were Lawyer and Mary Hobbs and their son Russell on their way to Harlem Hospital to see their older son Lloyd. The medical staff were notorious for their poor treatment of Black residents even when they were not dealing with unusually large numbers of injuries and the presence of numbers of police officers. When Lawyer and Mary Hobbs asked to see their son, they were initially told they could not because he was a criminal. When they did find their way to Lloyd, he told them, “Mother, the officer shot me for nothing. I was not doing anything.” Patrolman 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.
As the crowds and violence on Lenox Avenue intensified, the disorder on 7th Avenue south of 125th Street abated. An attack on a car containing a white woman named Betty Willcox that stopped on 7th Avenue at 125th Street likely took place around this time. Vehicles driving through Harlem were not having objects thrown at them to the extent that Fred Campbell had experienced earlier nor was the noise of breaking glass and gunfire as loud. It was only when the man driving stopped the car at 125th street so he could get cigarettes that Willcox noticed stores in the area had been damaged, and their stock strewn across the street. She then heard gunshots, and saw a white man pursed by a crowd of black men, some of whom caught and beat him. When they saw Willcox, they came toward her, surrounding the car, pounding on it and screaming threats at her. She frantically honked the horn, attracting the attention of a group of uniformed and plainclothes police who "with big clubs swinging, dashed up and began to strike out at random and shoot in the air." The police then formed a cordon around the car while the crowd milled around before slowly dispersing. When the man with her returned, he drove them away from the disorder.
Willcox’s account may not be entirely reliable; it was certainly sensationalized by the New York Evening Journal, the only source to report it, in the form of a first-person account accompanied by a photograph of a smiling Willcox jauntily sitting on the corner of a desk, her legs crossed and her hands on her hips. Nonetheless, the only reported incident on 7th Avenue around 1:00 AM was in keeping with the relative calm she encountered. The circumstances in which Patrolman William Clements arrested Edward Larry indicated police were not rushing to respond to outbreaks of violence as they had been. He stopped a taxi in which he saw the twenty-six-year-old black laborer and found he had a box containing eight shirts, with a value of $12. Larry explained that he had found the shirts on the street at West 129th Street and Lenox Avenue and was returning to the Salvation Army shelter where he lived at 224 West 124th Street, behind Kress' store. The patrolmen was not satisfied by that explanation and took Larry to the 28th Precinct for further questioning. Clements later found evidence to support his suspicion. Morris Towbin, still at the precinct having come to report the robbery of his haberdashery store several hours earlier, identified Larry as one of the men who robbed him.
If the violence on 7th Avenue had ebbed, it may have been that some of those on the street were moving to extend their attacks to the area around West 116th Street. Violence would soon break out there, ending the temporary lull in the disorder on 7th Avenue.