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Mr Lazar's cigar store looted
When crowds that had been focused on the block of West 125th Street housing Kress' store began moving to other parts of Harlem, the blocks immediately north on 7th Avenue were among their first targets. As they had on West 125th Street, people threw objects at the windows of white stores, at whites on the streets, and around 11.00 PM, at a passing Fifth Avenue Company bus, and later looted stores. The time the crowds appeared was early enough in the evening that most of the stores would still have been open for business, or at least still staffed, as the cigar store apparently was. That all those interviewed by Tartar could give a time when people threw objects that broke their store windows indicates they were present. Someone was also present in the Cozy Shoppe to write on its window that it was a "Colored Shoppe." It is not clear if the white business were occupied when they were looted. Tartar recorded the value of the stock stolen from their stores, suggesting that looting may have happened some time after windows were broken, as more general narratives in the press relate. Crowds smashed windows in stores on the opposite side of the street apparently without looting them around 9.45 PM, when a police officer arrested Leroy Brown for urging a group of people to follow his lead after he threw a tailor's dummy through a window. No one arrested for looting is identified as having stolen goods from the store.
James Tartar's survey is the only source that mentions the grocery store. His investigation was related to what happened after the looting, or at least after the looting had started. Around 12.55 AM, two police officers in a squad car traveling south on 7th Avenue reported hearing smashing glass, and seeing Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black student standing in the window of the auto equipment store at 2150 7th Avenue passing merchandise to a crowd of people on the street. After they stopped their car and chased after the crowd, one, Patrolman McInerny, fatally shot Hobbs. Hobbs and witnesses at the scene said he had been passing by not taking goods from the store.
It is not clear if Lazar was able to remain in business. The MCCH business survey does not record any stores at 2154 7th Avenue, but given that the survey locates the Cozy Shoppe at 2158 7th Avenue, instead of 2154 7th Avenue, the white-owned stationary store recorded as being at 2156 7th Avenue may be Lazar's business. The nature of the businesses at 2154 7th Avenue is not visible in the Tax Department photograph taken in 1939-1941.
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This page references:
- James Tartar, Drawing of businesses on 7th Avenue, 127th to 128th Street [signed & dated] (April 20, 1935), "Harlem, Mayor's Commission on Conditions in," Box 25, Folder 19, Arthur Garfield Hays Papers (Princeton University).
- James Tartar, "Survey made of neighboring storekeepers of the Greenfield Tire and Supply Store," (April 20, 1935), "Harlem, Mayor's Commission on Conditions in," Box 25, Folder 19, Arthur Garfield Hays Papers (Princeton University)
- [Newsreel] Two damaged stores and the undamaged Cozy Shoppe with "Colored Shoppe" written on window, Excerpt from unidentified newsreel, in New York: A Documentary Film, episode 6, "City of Tomorrow," directed by Ric Burns, 2001, PBS, 1:32:01 (Amazon)