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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. It is not clear if they were still in the businesses 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 store window 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, and the nature of the businesses at the address is not visible in the Tax Department photograph taken in 1939-1941.