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

Percy Gould, "20,000 Fight Police in Orgy of Looting," New York Evening Journal, March 20, 1935, 1.

In the New York Evening Journal

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Fires (4) Fires broke out in three stores during the disorder, all located on the two blocks of Lenox Avenue between West 130th Street and West 132nd Street. Two of those stores were adjacent, Anna Rosenberg’s notion shop at 429 Lenox Avenue and a hardware store at 431 Lenox Avenue. The third store, Lash's 5 & 10c store, was a block to the south at 400 Lenox Avenue. That area of Lenox Avenue saw extensive looting, attacks on stores, and violence. An additional fire was allegedly set on the roof of 5 West 131st Street, a block to the east in an area that saw few reported events during the disorder.

The fires broke out within a period of around an hour, beginning with the notion and hardware stores after 11:00 PM followed soon after midnight by Lash's store. All three stores were also looted. Only photograph captions in the Daily News linked the fires to looting: "Fire was set by rioters after they looted place" in the case of Lash's store; and a more elaborate account for the image of the other stores: "It is but a step from looting to incendiarism. Here's a fireman tacking a blazing tailor shop at 420 Lexington Ave., fired after it was looted." Looting and damaging a business by setting it on fire were not necessarily as continuous as the caption presented: alleged looters generally took items they needed, such as food and clothing; setting fire to a store offered no similar benefit. Instead fires fitted with breaking windows and other attacks that targeted white-owned businesses.

The New York Evening Journal reported fires in two buildings (it is likely that its story treated the fires in the adjacent stores as a single fire, but as two different businesses were affected, it is treated here as two fires), the New York Herald Tribune and Daily Worker a fire in one building, and the Home News, Daily News, New York Times, and New York World-Telegram referred generally to fires in several stores without offering details. The Black-owned Philadelphia Tribune appeared to have repackaged the New York Evening Journal account, and the Afro-American published photographs of fire-damaged stores not referred to in its stories about the disorder. Other Black newspapers made no reference to fires. Nor did the MCCH report. The roof-top fire was mentioned only in the Home News and the Daily Worker, perhaps because it occurred on the margins of the disorder. Those stories attributed the fires to members of the crowds on the street during the disorder, but only the New York Herald Tribune described how one of the fires started.

Firefighters attended the fires, likely from Fire Engine 59 located at 180 West 137th Street, near the intersection with 7th Avenue. Their efforts to extinguish the fires were captured by press photographers. A Daily News photograph showed smoke coming out of the hardware store window and doors at 431 Lenox Avenue, and firefighters on the scene fighting the fire. One is swinging an axe at the display window, while a second firefighter stands behind him. A third firefighter is just inside the store, his boots visible beneath the smoke. In the original photograph, cropped out of the published version, a hose runs across the photograph to the left, in the direction of Rosenberg's notion store at 429 Lenox Avenue. A photograph of the same scene published in the Home News had that hose running to the left in the foreground and another hose going into the hardware store, and three firefighters in the doorway with their backs to the camera. An ACME agency photograph also published in the Daily News and in the New York Herald Tribune showed flames in the last section of Harry Lash’s 5 & 10c store window on West 130th Street. Firefighters can be seen crouched in front of the window (they were cropped out of the version published in the Daily News). No other people are visible in the photographs, which are focused on the burning stores.

Fighting the fires was not straightforward, according to the New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, and Afro-American, which described clashes between crowds and police and firefighters. “A gang of thirty-five Negroes” set fire to Lash's 5 & 10c store in the New York Herald Tribune story. A crowd then “tried to prevent a policeman from sounding an alarm. 'Let it burn!' they shouted. When the firemen came, they hindered them, too, bustling about the hydrants and shoving hose lines about. At last the firemen threatened to turn the water on them instead of the fire and they dispersed.” Some of those details also appeared in the New York Evening Journal, but its story collapsed the two fires together: “As detectives and uniformed men closed in on crowds surrounding the burning buildings, they met with resistance. 'Let them burn. Let them burn.' The shout was taken up by hundreds, and it was not until firemen threatened to turn hoselines on the rioting men and women that they dispersed.” An entire block separated the two locations, too far for a single crowd to be involved. Both the number of police and the size of the crowd are larger in the New York Evening Journal story, which repeats the crowd's alleged chant, “Let them burn," giving it more prominence. Where the New York Herald Tribune characterized the crowd as having "hindered" firefighters with actions that seem to involve individuals pressing forward to see the fire getting in their way, the New York Evening Journal characterized the crowd's behavior as "resistance." Those differences and characterizations are in keeping with how that publication sensationalized and exaggerated the actions of Black crowds. The brief photograph caption in the Afro-American mixed elements of the two stories: it followed the New York Herald Tribune in characterizing the crowd as having "hindered" firefighters, but coupled it with the struggle presented by the New York Evening Journal in claiming that "rioters" "fought them away.”

The New York Evening Journal story went on to link the fires to increased police violence, with the decision to fire bullets at crowds being made in response to fires being set: "The police, working under directions of their highest commanders, were under orders to withhold fire unless necessary, but when the two incendiary fires were started, one at 429 Lenox Ave. and the other at Lenox Ave. and 130th St., bullets flew." The Black-owned Philadelphia Tribune repeated that claim as part of its repackaging of the information in the New York Evening Journal. Multiple other reports instead linked police beginning to shoot at crowds rather than in the air to the outbreak of looting rather than to the fires.

Photographs taken the next day showed the damage resulting from the fire. The exteriors of Anna Rosenberg’s notion store and the hardware appeared in an Associated Press photograph and a photograph published in the Daily Mirror. No glass remained in its display window, partially visible in the left side of the photograph, which had been emptied of merchandise. Damage to the exterior wall below the window could be the result of the fire. Inside the store was an L-shaped counter on which a range of different goods are stacked; there may be some damaged items on the ground but neither the ceiling nor the shelves and counter show the fire damage visible in the hardware store to the right. A fire adjuster for Rosenberg’s insurance company, Royal Insurance, put the damage to her store at $980.13, according to the New York Herald Tribune. As the insurance policy did not cover losses from riots, Rosenberg was among the business owners who sued the city to recover their losses. A jury in the Municipal Court awarded Rosenberg $804, confirming the extent of the damage done by the fire.

No such details exist regarding damage to the hardware store, only the images of its exterior and three photographs of its interior, one in the Afro-American mistakenly identified as the notion store, a second also in the Afro-American identified as the hardware store, and the third in the Daily News. All three images featured the table in the center of the store visible in photographs of the exterior, which distinguished it from the notion store, and show damaged merchandise strewn throughout the store, material hanging from the ceiling visible in the foreground that is likely damage produced by the fire, as well as the burned out display window visible in the photograph of the firefighters at work. Burned shelves and merchandise and fire damage to the table in the center of the store were visible on the left of the photograph in the Afro-American that identified the business as a hardware store. A pile of debris in front of the store visible in the Associated Press photograph appeared to be a combination of material from the ceiling and the display windows. The second exterior image showed a white man boarding up the damaged display window.

Fire damage to Lash’s store appeared less extensive, in keeping with the Home News reporter’s assessment that “damage from the fires was not great.” Only one small section at the rear of the store, on West 130th Street furthest from Lenox Avenue, looked to be burned in an Associated Press photograph. However, the rest of the store appeared significantly damaged. Display windows that ran the length of the side of the store on West 130th Street, as well as those facing Lenox Avenue, appeared smashed. In addition to the damage, Lash reported the loss of $1,000 of merchandise. His insurers too refused to pay, he told a Probation Department investigator. He was not among the twenty-five business owners named as suing the city seeking damages for what their insurance did not cover but may have been one of the eighty-nine not named.

The fire on the roof of 5 West 131st Street received less mention in the press with no reference to any damage it did. A Home News reporter explained that fire as “one method by which the mobs stirred up excitement." It was produced, the story claimed, by stacking "great heaps of newspapers on the roofs of buildings," which, "when ignited, led those in the streets to believe spectacular fires were in progress and many fire alarms were sounded.” An eyewitness offered a different explanation that the fire was a distraction, not an incitement, in the story in the Daily Worker: “This was done, I suppose, to draw the attention of the police force and riot squads from Lenox Avenue where they had concentrated their forces and were attacking the Negroes.” False alarms and the sounds of fire engines are mentioned in several newspapers which might indicate that other roof fires were lit, or simply that calls were made to the fire department.

Fire-damaged stores attracted press attention out of proportion with their numbers given that only three of approximately 300 buildings damaged in the disorder caught fire. A mention in the New York World-Telegram highlighted the impact of that emphasis: “The charred interiors of several shops in which fires broke out added to the appearance of a war-ravaged town.” Burned buildings offered a dramatic, ultimately atypical, picture of damage resulting from the disorder. Fires became more prominent in subsequent racial disorders. More were set in Harlem in 1943, but not the dramatic fires given prominence in coverage of the disorder in Watts in 1965. Harlem’s built environment ultimately meant setting fires could harm residents as much, if not more, than white business owners. Beyond West 125th Street, multiple floors of apartments sat above businesses. Fatalities reported in four fires in Harlem at other times in 1935 made clear the risks of setting fires in stores in such buildings.
Events
Black-owned business signs (6) Six businesses were identified as having signs in their windows identifying them as Black owned. Stories in both white and Black newspapers presented such signs as a more widespread part of the disorder and as a key reason why Black-owned businesses were generally spared from damage and not looted. On placards and directly on windows with whitewash or soap were written “Colored,” "Black," and “This Store Owned by Colored,” the Afro-American reported. Three of the identified businesses fitted those generalizations, with a reporter for La Prensa describing signs that read "Colored" on a billiard hall and the Castle Inn on Lenox Avenue, and a sign reading "This is a Store Owned By Colored" in the Monterey Luncheonette reported by the Afro-American. Three other stores reportedly used a variation on those signs. Seven signs identifying a store named “Winnette’s Dresses” as a “Colored Store” are visible in both a photograph of an arrest taken during the disorder published in the Daily News, and a photograph taken the morning after the disorder showing a group of Black boys in front of the store published in the Afro-American.

The sign on the Williams's drug store used the same phrase, "Colored Store" with the additional phrase "Nix Jack," repeating the combination twice on its side windows. There is no information on the meaning of the phrase "Nix Jack." Roi Ottley, writing in his column in the New York Amsterdam News about the looting during the disorder as targeted at white-owned businesses, ended with an echo of that phrase: "THIS IS A COLORED COLUMN, NIX JACK!" The Cozy Shoppe customized its sign to fit its name, rendering it as "Colored Shoppe." The Home News reporter departed from those descriptions, apparently confusing the nature of the signs displayed. Explaining how it was that "Most of the damage was done to shops which were known to be operated by white persons," the reporter claimed, "The colored persons who owned stores protected their shops against vandalism by picketing their establishments. They carried signs stating that the store was operated by colored people." No other sources mention pickets in front of Black-owned stores. There was no mention of signs being displayed in store windows in the Daily Mirror, New York American, New York Sun, or in Harlem's Black newspapers, the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News, or in the Mayor's Commission (MCCH) Report.

Signs appeared in Black-owned businesses as a response to windows being broken in nearby stores, providing material evidence that those throwing objects at windows chose their targets rather than being an irrational "mob." In some stories, those attacks were indiscriminate until signs appeared; other stories leave open the possibility that the signs reflected store owners' sense of the targets of those throwing objects at windows. "The mob made no choice, at first, of victims," in the most elaborate story, in the New York Evening Journal. "And then one colored man who owned a small restaurant pasted a sign in the window. It bore one word: 'Colored.' The mob passed him by and when others saw how the 'miracle' was worked, signs flashed up in store windows throughout West Harlem. Those owned by Negroes, in most cases, were not broken into." The dismissive tone of the story was typical of that newspaper's treatment of Black subjects; attributing the posting of signs to an individual and the protection from damage that resulted to a "miracle" diminished the decisions those on the streets made about what stores to target that Black store-owners recognized. By contrast, the Black reporter for the Afro-American, emphasized “Stores owned by colored persons in the rioting area had to rush improvised signs reading ‘Colored, “Black,” “This Store Owned by Colored," but cast the signs as based on an understanding of the intentions of those attacking stores, created "in order to be spared in the rain of bricks, whiskey bottles, and other missiles."

Briefer mentions in other newspaper stories generally echoed that framing. Among Black newspapers, the Norfolk Journal and Guide went furthest in emphasizing that Black-owned businesses initially were damaged: "Some Negro establishments were among the 200 which lost their plate-glass windows and had the window contents looted. Finally, some Negro stores in the affected area...had to resort to self preserving signs such as 'Colored' 'Owned by Colored' and 'Black.'" The Philadelphia Tribune ambiguously alluded to earlier attacks, while also erroneously expanding the violence to homes, reporting "Risks to live became so grave Tuesday night that Negroes put up signs on their stores and homes to indicate 'colored' lived there." Signs are simply presented as a response in the Indianapolis Recorder, "As the swarms of rioters swooped down upon the business district breaking store windows and stealing merchandise signs saying 'Colored Store' went up." Among white newspapers, those brief mentions emphasized the lack of damage to businesses that put up signs, without reference to what had happened earlier. Two such mentions came in additional stories in the New York Evening Journal. "The mob wrath in most instances touched no windows whose proprietors had had opportunity to scribble 'colored' in white chalk on the glass," wrote Joseph Mickler. Robert D. Levit similarly noted, "They carefully left unmolested those store which displayed hastily constructed signs with the word 'Colored.'" The story in the New York Post included a similar description, that "Many Negro storekeepers scrawled on their windows, with soap, the word 'colored' and the heat of the mob was never sufficient to cause the Negroes to attack their own." While stories in the Daily News did not mention signs, they appeared in the background of a photograph of two police officers making an arrest, drawing a mention in the caption: "On the dress store window are signs proclaiming it to be a 'colored shop,' to protect it from the raiding marauders."

Two more stories, in the New York Times and New York World-Telegram, described signs in windows the next day rather than during the disorder. Those signs may have gone up after the disorder, as storeowners became aware of details of the previous night's violence, or the white reporters may not have seen those signs during the disorder. The latter seems more likely. The signs in Winnette’s Dresses photographed after the disorder had also been present and photographed during the disorder. Likewise, the sign on the Cozy Shoppe window filmed after the disorder was also reported during the disorder. In both the New York Times and New York World-Telegram stories, Black owners weren't the only ones to put up signs. "Negro proprietors had large white-washed signs on their windows announcing that 'This shop is run by COLORED people,'" the New York Times reported, adding, "Several white store owners took the cue and covered their windows with signs announcing that 'This store employs Negro workers.'" The previous year, the boycott campaign had tried to expand the number of stores with Black staff. Newspaper stories offered contradictory claims about whether such businesses were attacked during the disorder: the New York Post and Pittsburgh Courier reported they were spared, while the Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide reported they were among those damaged.

A further set of store owners' responses were included in the New York World-Telegram: "On every Negro store in Harlem today there were signs bearing this legend, 'Colored Store.' One said:-'Do not break this window. This is colored.'" Also, "There are many Chinese restaurants in Harlem, and they have placed similar signs on their windows. Chain stores have filled their windows with empty pasteboard boxes. Others have nailed boards across their windows." The only other mentions of Chinese-owned businesses as targets of attacks were of a single Chinese laundry posting a sign reading "Me Colored Too," reported by the Associated Press, in the New York Herald Tribune and Daily News (two newspapers that otherwise did not mention signs in their stories on the disorder), and in Time Magazine. That sign captured the issue raised by attention to those businesses: how did those attacking white-owned businesses regard those from other ethnic groups? The New York World-Telegram story implied that Chinese-owned businesses, of which there were 209 (3.5%, 209 of 5791) dispersed throughout Black Harlem, were not attacked because those on the streets during the disorder agreed their owners were "colored too." Newspaper stories in the New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, and New York World-Telegram about the laundry contradicted that view, reporting that the businesss' windows were broken after the sign was displayed. However, there are no other reports of damaged or looted Chinese-owned stores. By contrast, La Prensa reported several Hispanic-owned businesses suffered damage and looting, but made no mention that such stores sought to identify themselves as a "colored store." The author of that story, however, did not appear to understand the intent of the signs, seeing them as an effort to establish a racial divide in the neighborhood, to segregate Black and white residents. The final response described by New York World-Telegram offered further recognition among storeowners of who the violence targeted. Rather than signs identifying why they should be spared from attack, white-owned stores barricaded their windows, seeking to prevent damage from objects that would be thrown at them.
Looting of Black-owned businesses (?) While five Black-owned businesses are reported to have had their windows broken, there are no reports of any merchandise being taken from Black-owned businesses. Roi Ottley, in his column in the New York Amsterdam News, specified that it was looting, not damage that Black-owned businesses avoided: “The marauders, although without leadership, followed a studied program of exclusively looting white businesses.” He expressed the same assessment in more direct terms a week later: "The amazing discrimination manifested in deliberately choosing only stores owned by white people to loot...certainly indicated the direction the protest took...Years of pent-up emotion and resentment flashed their fangs in bitter opposition to the economic inequality imposed on a normally peaceful people." A story in the Atlanta World also specified that it was "stores belonging to white merchants" that were looted. The Communist Daily Worker persistently claimed that crowds "did not attack shops owned by Negroes, or shops on which the owners had put up the signed [sic], 'Colored Work Here.'" While that claim suited the Communist focus on the solidarity of Black and white workers, only one newspaper explicitly contradicted it. The Norfolk Journal and Guide reported that "Some Negro establishments were among the 200 which lost their plate-glass windows and had the window contents looted." The New York Evening Journal also reported that "All the stores were raided and their fixtures smashed." But once Black-owned businesses identified themselves with signs, "[t]hose owned by Negroes, in most cases, were not broken into. The rioters concentrated on others." Staff and storeowners put up signs in their windows identifying their business as “Colored,” “Black,” and “This Store Owned by Colored,” according to the Afro-American. Seven signs identifying a store named “Winnette’s Dresses” as a “Colored Store” were visible in both a photograph of an arrest taken during the disorder published in the Daily News and a photograph taken the morning after the disorder published in the Afro-American. Most reported looting occurred some time after attacks on store windows, so signs displayed in response to windows being broken would likely have helped to prevent stores from being looted as well as having their windows broken.
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The MCCH report was alone in presenting the reverse chronology of when Black-owned business were targeted: "While, of course, many motives were responsible for the actions of these crowds, it seems that as they grew more numerous and more active, the personality or racial Identity of the owners of the stores faded out and the property itself became the object of their fury. Stores owned by Negroes were not always spared if they happened to be in the path of those roving crowds, bent upon the destruction and the confiscation of property." The MCCH "Subcommittee which Investigated the Disturbances of March 19th" had been more definitive in its initial report on May 29, 1935: "Nor is it true that stores owned by Negroes were spared. There is no evidence of any program or leadership of the rioters." While the final version of the report seemed to recognize the evidence of Black-owned stores being spared from attack reported in the press, the fading of that distinction over time was not supported by the lack of reported looting of those businesses. Mentions of Black-owned businesses being spared from attack in the Home News, New York Post, and Afro-American focused on windows being broken and did not mention looting.

The number, nature, and location of those Black-owned businesses also contributed to them not being looted. The MCCH business survey identified 5971 businesses in the blocks of Black Harlem (110th Street to 155th Street, from east of Amsterdam Avenue to west of Madison Avenue); black-owned business constituted only 1,690 (28%) of that total. (The survey was undertaken after the disorder, between June and December 1935, by which time there likely had been some changes in Harlem’s business landscape, but few businesses appear to have been forced to close as a result of the disorder.) In categorizing business owners, the MCCH survey used "Spanish" (largely Puerto Rican) and Chinese as well as white and "colored" (and on occasion "Jewish" and "Italian"). As evidence of looting emphasized that "Spanish" and Chinese businesses were not spared from attack, they are grouped with white-owned businesses in this analysis.

At least one-third of Black-owned businesses did not offer the food, drink, or clothing that appear to have been the primary targets of looting. Beauty parlors and barbers were the most common Black-owned businesses; the 230 beauty parlors and 143 barbers made up more than one in every five (22%) of those businesses. (Lieutenant Samuel Battle did insist in his testimony to a public hearing of the MCCH that beauty parlors had been subject to attack, but there was no evidence to support that claim.) The offices of physicians, dentists, and lawyers represented another 10% (177 of 1,690) of Black-owned businesses, including ninety-eight doctor's offices, fifty-eight dentist's offices, and twenty-one lawyer's offices. Beauty parlors were an overwhelmingly Black-owned enterprise (89.15%, 230 of 258); in the other groups, Black practitioners represented slightly more than half of the total — 56.3% (143 of 254) of barbers, 55.06% (98 of 178) of physicians, 54.21% (58 of 107) of dentists, and 53.86% (21 of 39) of lawyers — and well above the overall Black-owned share of Harlem's businesses (28%, 1690 of 5971). By contrast, the types of businesses most often looted were less likely to have Black owners than that overall distribution of ownership, with one exception, tailors: Black owners operated 13.96% of grocery stores (67 of 480); 27.75% of restaurants (101 of 364); 5.88% of liquor stores (2 of 34); 9.94% of clothing stores (17 of 171);14.63% of hat stores (6 of 41); 24.55% of shoe repair stores (41 of 167); 1.39% of shoe stores (1 of 72); 19.53% of laundries and cleaners (91 of 466); and 35.79% of tailors (107 of 299).

In addition to not containing the items looted during the disorder, many of those Black professional offices were located above street level, so removed from the disorder. Similarly, a proportion of the beauty parlors operated in apartments also located above street level. In all, between 125th and 135th streets, on 7th Avenue, fourteen of the one hundred Black-owned business (compared to 6 of 181 other businesses), and on Lenox Avenue, eleven of fifty-five Black-owned businesses (compared to 3 of 112 other businesses) were off the street and away from the disorder.

Moreover, a portion of those businesses were located on cross-streets rather than the avenues which ran north-south through Harlem on which attacks on stores and looting took place. Excluding West 116th, 125th, 135th, and 145th Streets (which as both transport arteries and sites for businesses were akin to avenues), 767 of 1,920 side street businesses were Black owned (40%, compared to 28% of the total businesses). They made up 45% of all Black-owned businesses (767 of 1,690), compared to 27% of businesses owned by other racial groups (1,153 of 4,281).

The blocks of the avenues on which looting was reported in particular had few Black-owned businesses. Most looting occurred on Lenox Avenue between 125th and 135th Streets, blocks which had fewer Black-owned businesses – 23% (55 of 236) - than those blocks on 7th Avenue to the west – 47% (100 of 212). (Those numbers somewhat exaggerate the possible targets of looting as almost one third of those businesses on 7th Avenue (32 of 100) and 27% (15 of 55) of those on Lenox Avenue were beauty shops or barbers). While a very high proportion of the businesses on 8th and 5th Avenues were also white-owned, there were far fewer businesses on those avenues between 125th and 135th Streets than on 7th and Lenox Avenues: only an average of 13.8 each block on 8th Avenue and 10.375 on each block of 5th Avenue (which had several blocks without any businesses); compared to 20.2 on each block on 7th Avenue and 22.7 on each block on Lenox Avenue. White residents predominatied west of 8th Avenue and east of 5th Avenue, particularly south of 125th Street, while 7th and Lenox Avenues were in the midst of the Black population.

Less looting was reported south of West 125th Street as far as West 115th Street, where it was concentrated on 7th Avenue rather than Lenox Avenue. On both avenues there was a smaller proportion of Black-owned businesses than between West 125th and West 135th Streets — 12.4%, 18 of 145 on Lenox Avenue and approximately 34%, 48 of 141, on 7th Avenue (one side of the street is missing from the survey for several blocks). What focused attention on 7th Avenue in these blocks was its greater number of businesses, on all the blocks down to West 115th Street, whereas Lenox Avenue had few businesses between 123rd and 120th Streets. Reported looting on Lenox Avenue clustered in blocks that had the highest proportion of white businesses, those closest to the retail centers of 125th Street and 116th Street. South of 125th Street, 5th Avenue was interrupted by Mount Morris Park from 124th to 120th Streets, resulting in a similarly small number of businesses as north of 125th Street. 8th Avenue south of 125th Street was lined with businesses to the same extent as 7th Avenue, none of which were Black owned (0 of 184), but around those blocks there were diminishing numbers of Black residents.
Police establish perimeter around Kress' store After Inspector Di Martini returned to 125th Street around 7:00 PM, he called for police reinforcements. A New York Evening Journal story celebrated the response as “the most remarkable 'military' feat in the history of the department.” That portrayal was certainly how the police department would have sought to present the deployment. However, the arrival of additional officers appears to have taken longer than the story allowed, and to have been focused on establishing a perimeter around Kress’ store. The piecemeal arrival of reinforcements made that a protracted process. As police struggled to keep crowds away from Kress' store, those clashes served to disperse crowds along the avenues rather than stopping the violence. Unable to prevent windows being broken in businesses on 125th Street, police had to guard damaged stores, limiting the officers who could be deployed on the avenues. Guards appear to have prevented looting; they did not stop additional windows being broken. After crowds broke through on to 125th Street around 10:30 PM, there are only two further incidents in that area during the remaining disorder, an alleged assault on a woman and a shooting, both at the intersection of 125th Street and 7th Avenue. Although other incidents whose timing is unknown may have occurred during that time, the evidence suggests that police perimeter held through that period.

The New York Evening Journal story lauding the police response reported “a small army of 700 police was beating back the rioters” on 125th Street between 8th and 7th Avenues. That number likely reflected the total deployment rather than the force that set up the perimeter around Kress’ store. It was in line with the number Di Martini reported to the police commissioner were in Harlem after midnight and fell between the totals reported by newspapers, with the 1,000 officers mentioned by the Daily Mirror at one extreme, and the 500 officers reported by the Home News and New York Herald Tribune representing the other end of the range. While the officers coming from beyond the local precincts went initially to 125th Street, Lt. Battle later told Langston Hughes that the reserve officers from Harlem's precincts went to their stations, on West 123rd Street and West 135th Street. Some of those officers may have been sent directly to other areas of Harlem, particularly those who arrived later in the evening.

The perimeter established by police extended from 8th to Lenox Avenues, and from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror and Pittsburgh Courier, the only sources that described police deployments. While Inspector Di Martini had summoned the reinforcements, the newspapers credited that deployment to Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe, who commanded uniformed police in the borough of Manhattan, and would have taken over from Di Martini when he arrived around 9:00 PM. The department’s emergency trucks attracted the most attention in newspaper stories, presented as the anchors of the police cordon. Six emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue in the strategy reported by the New York Times, Daily Mirror, and Pittsburgh Courier. Emergency trucks were more dispersed according to the New York Herald Tribune; two at West 125th and 7th Avenue, one at West 125th and Lenox Avenue, and one at West 127th and 7th Avenue.

The Emergency Services Division had succeeded the police department’s Riot Battalion in 1925. Each truck had a crew of eight officers and, in addition to rescue equipment, carried a Thompson machine gun, three Winchester rifles, and a Remington shotgun, as well as a tear gas gun, for use against "disorderly crowds." The twenty-two trucks in the department in 1935 were dispersed throughout the city. While the two located closest to 125th Street arrived relatively quickly, additional trucks would have taken significantly longer. Squad #6 was based on East 122nd Street, and had been involved in clearing shoppers from Kress’ store earlier. Squad #5, based on Amsterdam Avenue, arrived around 7:15 PM, according to Patrolman Eppler. The New York Evening Journal identified trucks as coming from Kingsbridge in the Bronx and from Coney Island at the southern end of Brooklyn, the latter apparently arriving later: “It slithered perilously over wet streets but arrived in time for its crew to get into action.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle identified another squad from Brooklyn, Squad #16 from Herbert Street, as having crashed returning from Harlem, at 1:00 AM (a time when there was still significant disorder). Thompson did not mention the trucks. Neither did trucks appear in any of the published photographs of the disorder. Some of their crew did, identifiable because the rifles they carried — described as “riot guns” in newspapers stories and photograph captions — caused them to stand out from other police. They did not, however, have a machine gun that needed to be “set up,” as the Afro-American reported: each truck instead carried a single hand-held "Tommy gun." Nor were the trucks equipped with enough of those weapons for all the crew to have one. And there are no reports that they used tear gas. Those weapons prompted several newspapers to use martial language in stories about the squads’ activities. The New York Evening Journal story on the police reinforcements described Harlem as a “seething battleground,” and the police as “beating back the rioters in a savage and organized attack.” An emergency truck from the Bronx “leaped off the machine and tore into a crowd of window smashers” (perhaps at Herbert’s jewelry store at 125th Street and 7th Avenue, where another New York Evening Journal story described a similar scene). The Daily Mirror described emergency trucks as "being sent to the battle zone."

The other evidence of the presence of emergency trucks placed them in less warlike roles. Newspaper photographs show their crew among the officers who guarded damaged stores. A patrolman with a riot gun stands in front of Herbert’s jewelry store on northeast corner of 125th and 7th Avenue in a photograph published in the Burlington Free Press. Stories in the New York Evening Journal and New York Herald Tribune described police with riot guns guarding the store (the Daily News, New York American, and Home News described the officers simply as patrolmen). Another patrolman with a riot gun was photographed on the corner across 7th Avenue from the jewelry store. The image published in the New York Evening Journal is narrowly focused on the officer, whereas another version of that image published in the Daily Mirror shows a Black man walking past him, and the image published in the Daily News shows several Black men and women walking by on the sidewalk, evidence of the continued presence of people around 125th Street. Two additional patrolmen, one visibly carrying a rifle, stand in front of Sherloff’s jewelry store, just a few buildings north of the intersection, in an AP photograph published in the Los Angeles Times. Taken together, the images suggest that the crew of at least one Emergency Truck guarded stores at the intersection. Captain Rothengast, Patrolman Moran, and Patrolman Eppler told the MCCH that they also guarded other stores on 125th Street, including Kress’ store. A photograph published in the Daily News shows a patrolman talking through a broken window with a man inside a store on 125th Street. Again, Black men and women are visible in the background on the sidewalk in the background, their presence indicating that police had not closed the streets.

The police perimeter appears to have focused on keeping crowds off 125th Street, not individuals and small groups. In addition to those visible in photographs, Captain Rothengast described seeing "groups of people in 125th Street – no more than 250" when he arrived at Kress’ store around 8:30 PM. A story in the Home News also reported that “In an effort to keep traffic moving, police permitted pedestrians to walk through 125th St. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were crowded.” Patrolmen Moran and Eppler testified that at least some of those people approached police guarding Kress' store asking about the boy beaten in the store, encounters also described by a reporter for the Afro-American. Allowing individuals to walk along 125th Street was not incident-free: around 8:30 PM, a white man was allegedly beaten in front of Kress’ store, with police arresting James Smitten for committing the assault. About twenty minutes later, police arrested Frank Wells for breaking a window in the Willow Cafeteria. Just before 10:00 PM, Detective Roge was hit by a rock in front of Kress’ store and another patrolman injured at 124th Street and 7th Avenue. At the same time, Louise Thompson described larger groups being pushed back by police. She told a MCCH hearing she saw "one policeman throw his billy into the crowds while the mounted police were riding them down” at the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue between 8:00 PM and 9:00 PM, a scene similar to that captured by a photograph published in the Daily News. There is no evidence of where that photograph was taken, but a second photograph of police dispersing a group of Black men and women, the most widely reproduced photograph of the disorder, was taken at 125th Street and 7th Avenue according to the caption. It shows the island that that divided the north and south lanes on the roadway, which contained trees and were surrounded by the barriers like those visible in the photograph. A group of men and women are scattering in response to a uniformed patrolman moving toward them. One man is bent over; the caption describes him as falling down. He may also have been pushed down or hit by the patrolman; another man obstructs the view of what has happened between the two men. (One version of the caption claimed that the photographer was hit by a rock soon after taking the image, which might explain why the patrolman was trying to move the crowd.)

One of the Black men killed during the disorder, Andrew Lyons, sustained a fractured skull "during the thick of a melee at 125th street and Seventh avenue," according to the New York Amsterdam News, or a block further west at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue according to the Times Union. Police clubs may have been responsible for those injuries, but the doctors who treated Lyons recorded that had been too groggy to tell his roommate or anyone else how he had been injured. No sources mentioned police firing revolvers or rifles to try to disperse the crowds.

On at least two occasions large crowds appear to have broken through the police perimeter. Louise Thompson told a MCCH hearing that around 9:00 PM a crowd broke through on to 125th Street. The Home News also reported that incident. Store windows were broken, Young's hat store looted, and two white men and a white police detective allegedly assaulted around that time. A second crowd broke through around 10:30 PM, resulting in more windows being broken and a white man allegedly being assaulted, and police arresting four Black men.

Most of the incidents on 125th Street before 10:30 PM did not result in arrests, likely because police were heavily outnumbered by crowds and constrained by the responsibility of guarding stores. Only at Kress’ store it seems were enough officers stationed to make arrests: there arrests were made not just around 10:30 PM but also just before 10:00 PM and at 8:30 PM. There are no arrests among those with known times in the period between the arrest of the picketers in front of Kress’ store at 6:45 PM and arrests on 125th Street between 8:30 PM and 9:00 PM. There are approximately a dozen arrests made at unknown times and places that might have occurred during this time, but it is more likely that police were too outnumbered to make arrests, as Lt. Battle later told Langston Hughes. While an arrest for breaking windows was made just before 9:00 PM, police made no arrests for the assaults and broken windows reported when a crowd broke through soon after.

The police perimeter appears to have held after 10:30 PM. Sometime before then, no later than 10:00 PM, and likely as early as between 8:30 PM and 9:00 PM, groups had moved on from 125th Street to attack businesses on 8th Avenue and 7th Avenue, and later, Lenox Avenue. In response, police began to disperse across Harlem, driving along those streets in radio cars and taking up positions on street corners and guarding damaged stores. Exactly when the first police were sent beyond 125th Street is not clear. The first arrest made away from 125th Street, on West 127th Street between St. Nicholas and 8th Avenues around 9:00 PM, appears to have been made by a patrolman on his way to 125th Street rather than being deployed elsewhere in Harlem. The arrest of Leroy Brown around 9:45 PM on 7th Avenue between 127th and 128th Streets is clearer evidence of a spreading police presence.

With the MCCH giving limited attention to this period of the disorder, witnesses who testified at their hearings did not provide the details they do of the earlier police response. Newspaper reporters and photographers were on 125th Street during this time, so would have seen some of these events and been able to obtain information from police. Inspector Di Martini spoke with a group of reporters, including one from the Afro-American during this time. At the same time, those reporters would have had a limited view. The block was too long for those at one intersection to see the details of what was happening at the other intersection, or even for those at Kress' store to clearly see the nearby intersection with 8th Avenue. At the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue the Afro-American's reporter saw only "little knots of people on the corner"; "once he walked on, however, he found high police officials and the first detail of 500 extra policemen rushed to the area" and "a large number of people between Seventh and Eighth Avenues." It is unsurprising then that newspaper stories offer only general and fragmented accounts of this period of the disorder. Information on specific events comes from legal records, which are limited largely to the period around 10:00 PM when police made arrests, and narrowly focused on the actions of a single arresting officer.
Looting without arrest (38) No one was identified as being arrested for looting just over half of the businesses identified in the sources. There are eighteen individuals arrested for looting for whom there is no information about their alleged targets; some of those men may have been charged with taking goods from stores for which there was no reported arrests. There are also twenty-one men charged with disorderly conduct in the Magistrates Court for which there is no information about their alleged actions. They may have been initially arrested for looting and then had the charges against them reduced when police could not produce evidence that they had taken property rather than been part of crowds around looted businesses. However, only 6% (3 of 50) of those accused of looting were ultimately charged with disorderly conduct (the charges brought against ten of those arrested for looting are unknown).

That evidence supports the claim that police were unable to protect businesses made in multiple newspaper stories and by business owners who sued the city for damages, as well as in the Mayor 's Commission (MCCH) report. Once the crowd around Kress’ store broke into smaller groups sometime after 9:00 PM, police were unable to clear the streets or contain all those groups. Irving Stekin told the city comptroller that the two police officers who eventually responded to his call to protect his store "couldn't do anything. The mob was too big for them," according to a report in the New York World-Telegram. When police did disperse crowds, they simply reformed, according to the New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the MCCH Report. A more pointed image of that futility, in which police dispersed crowds only to see them gather again on the opposite side of the street, was described in the Afro-American and by business owners who testified in the Municipal Court. An alternative account in the Daily News presented crowds not as elusive but as "too scattered" to be controlled. As a result, rather than being ineffective, police were absent from the scene of some attacks on businesses. Business owners who sued the city for damages made that complaint. No police officers came to protect the stores of Harry Piskin, Estelle Cohen, and George Chronis despite Piskin approaching police officers on the street and them all visiting or calling the local stationhouse.

The absence of police from some parts of Harlem resulted in part from a decision to concentrate them elsewhere. Reported police deployments focused on West 125th Street. Inspector McAuliffe used the reserves sent to Harlem after 9:00 PM to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, and Pittsburgh Courier, the only stories that described police deployments. Six emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue in that strategy. Each truck had a “crew of 40 men and [was] equipped with tear gas and riot guns,” according to the Daily Mirror. Emergency trucks were more dispersed according to the New York Herald Tribune; two at West 125th and 7th Avenue, one at West 125th and Lenox Avenue, and one at West 127th and 7th Avenue. Armed patrolmen guarded Herbert’s Blue Diamond Jewelry store on the northeast corner of that intersection as well as other businesses with broken windows in this area. The Daily News noted that guarding “windowless stores” handicapped police without referring to which stores received that protection. This scale of police presence is likely why only one business on West 125th Street — Young’s hat store — was among those reported looted despite at least twenty-three other stores having their windows broken. (The New York Evening Journal did report that "the rioting Negroes swarmed into stores. First the Woolworth "five and ten" then McCrory's and then the department store right and left in both sides of the street,” but as no other sources reported such looting, that claim was apparently a product of the sensationalization and exaggeration that marked that publication's stories about the disorder.)

(In the map, black borders indicate the locations where police arrested individuals for looting). Beyond West 125th Street, the police relied on radio cars patrolling the avenues and limited numbers of uniformed police and detectives in plainclothes moving through the streets. The New York Times reported that an emergency truck was stationed at West 130th Street and Lenox Avenue, in the heart of the blocks that saw the most reported looting. Police made eighteen arrests on Lenox Avenue between 125th and 135th, but clearly lacked the numbers to guard damaged stores or prevent crowds from forming as they did around West 125th Street. Similarly, police arrested three men for looting Jack Garmise's cigar store on 7th Avenue near West 116th Street, indicating the presence of uniformed officers and detectives, but their activity apparently did not extend to the blocks of West 116th Street to the east or the adjacent blocks of Lenox Avenue where Hispanic-owned businesses predominated. Two stores were reported looted in that area, and at least another eleven had windows broken, a reporter from La Prensa found, without an arrest being made during the disorder. The police were not alone in their inattention to that area. Several newspapers drew the boundary of the disorder north of West 116th Street: crowds only went as far south as 120th Street according to the New York World-Telegram, New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Mirror, and as far south as 118th Street according to the Home News. (The Daily News and Afro-American did report crowds as far south as 110th Street.)
Police in front of Kress' store Although Inspector Di Martini told a MCCH hearing that he saw no “indications of further trouble” when he left 125th Street at 6:00 PM, he did station some officers at Kress’ store — "Sergeant Bauer, two foot policeman, one mounted policeman in the rear to prevent a riot” according to his testimony, or “a Sergeant and four patrolmen” on the 125th Street side and “a mounted patrolman and a foot patrolman” on the 124th Street side according to his report to the police commissioner immediately after the disorder. A patrolman stationed in front of the store told an MCCH hearing that there were 10–15 officers there around 6:15 PM; that total may have included officers on regular assignment on 125th Street. However many police were present, one was Patrolman Shannon, who like Bauer, had been inside the store earlier.

Patrolman Moran, who arrived after Kress' store was closed, described being instructed to “keep the crowd moving in front of the store.” He insisted he did so by requesting them to “move on”; the lawyers who questioned him at a hearing of the MCCH alleged he used force, pushing people and using his nightstick. By around 6:15 PM, Moran said the front of the store was “pretty clear” while a crowd walked up and down on the opposite side of the street. Louise Thompson told the MCCH that there “little knots of people” on the street (although she wrote in New Masses that the crowd in front of the store numbered in the hundreds, that across the street in the thousands). Two men set up a stepladder in front of the store. A Black man named James Parton speaking briefly and then, as Daniel Miller tried to speak to the crowd, a window in the store was broken and Patrolman Shannon arrested Miller. Outnumbered as they were by the crowd, police made the arrest following the practice of focusing on the leaders of crowds. Other officers then cleared the crowds from in front of the store, moving them first across West 125th Street and then towards 7th Avenue. Thompson testified that “police got rough and would not let anyone stop on the street” and wrote “the cops who were becoming ugly in their attempts to break up the increasing throngs of people.” About fifteen minutes later Patrolman Irwin Young, assisted by several other officers, arrested Harry Gordon when he climbed a lamppost to speak to the crowd. They bundled him into a radio car and took him to the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street. Again, police were trying to control the crowd by arresting men they perceived to be leaders, possibly identifying them as Communists with whom they regularly clashed. They had not arrested Parton, the Black man who introduced both Miller and Gordon. A few minutes later, Patrolman Shannon, Sgt. Bauer, and Patrolman Moran were involved in arresting two white men and a Black man after they refused to stop picketing in front of Kress’ store. Those men carried placards that identified them as members of an organization associated with the Communist Party, which again likely contributed to the decision to arrest them.

After the arrests, police continued to move on people who stopped on the sidewalks around Kress’ store — and perhaps clear some who had gone into the street itself, as the New York Herald Tribune reported the street reopened after being blocked to automobiles and streetcars. By 7:00 PM, the crowds had been pushed to the avenues (some of those on 8th Avenue for a short time moved to attack the rear entrance of Kress’ store, where two police officers were hit by objects thrown by those trying to get into the store). Additional officers who arrived seem to have been key to that success. “15 patrolmen, six mounted police and uniformed men of five radio cars” were on 125th Street by that time according to the New York Evening Journal. Inspector Di Martini also returned, around 7:15 PM.

The Daily News published a photograph of the disorder that showed police officers engaging with crowds. The caption for the image, which captures the largest crowd to appear in a photograph of the disorder, described only the actions of one of the two uniformed patrolmen visible: "The raincoated policeman swings in against the angry crowd as his comrade tries to hold the police line. One colored man is lifting his arm as if to restrain the cop.” The use of force captured here is at odds with Patrolman Moran's insistence that officers simply asked crowds to move. While uniformed patrolmen carried nightsticks as part of their standard equipment, detectives in plainclothes were issued them for riot duty, according to the New York Evening Journal. As well as hitting people with their batons, police officers used the butts of their revolvers and riot guns as clubs. The Times Union directly contradicted Moran's claim police did not use those weapons to move the crowds in front of the store: "Police night sticks swung and soon the mob was dispersed." Only the Daily News reported police fired their guns to move the crowd, describing with unlikely precision that five shots were fired in the air. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he heard no gunshots on 125th Street, so if those shots were fired, it was before he arrived around 7:15 PM. The caption makes no mention of where the photograph was taken; the group appears to be on the sidewalk, perhaps near Kress’ store or later near 7th or 8th Avenue. Unmentioned is the horse’s head visible on the right side of image, indicating the presence of a mounted patrolman.

Mounted patrolmen, part of the police crowd control force, were reportedly deployed “to ride people off the sidewalk,” Louise Thompson testified. Lt. Battle told Langston Hughes that "an officer on a horse can be more effective than twenty patrolmen on foot," as the horses are "trained to brush a crowd back without stepping on anyone." When a reporter for the Afro-American arrived around 7:30 PM, “mounted police rode the sidewalk [in front of the store] keeping the crowd back.” Charles Romney likewise told a hearing of the MCCH that he saw "men on horseback were on the sidewalk to trample people." The New York Times and Daily News opted to describe the mounted police in more sensational terms as ‘charging’ the crowds. In the New Masses, Thompson presented a similar picture, juxtaposing the mounted officers with women protesting in terms echoing those used by other Communists: “Brigades of mounted police cantered down the street, breaking into a gallop where the crowds were thickest. Horses' hoofs shot sparks as they mounted on the glass-littered pavements. The crowds fighting doggedly, gave way. The women more stubborn even than the men, shouted to their companions, 'What kind of men are you-drag them down off those horses.' The women shook their fists at the police. 'Cossacks! Cossacks!' they shouted here in Harlem on 125th Street.” Years later, interviewed for her autobiography, Thompson identified many of the mounted patrolmen as Black officers and described the women as actually fighting with them. Another Afro-American journalist simply described the mounted police as "somewhat rough" during the early hours of the disorder. Whatever approach they took, it was mounted police that the Afro-American credited with keeping large groups away from Kress and on the avenues.

While police cleared 125th Street of large groups and stopped any more assembling there, they did not — or could not — close it off. Instead, “they patrolled 124th and 125th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues constantly to prevent more groups from assembling,” the New York Herald Tribune reported. Thompson testified that she walked up and down 125th Street after the arrests, but was only able to stop and speak with members of groups on the corner of 8th Avenue. Charles Romney told a hearing of the MCCH that when he arrived on 125th Street around 7:30 PM, walking from Lenox to 7th Avenue, he “noticed a crowd of police with sticks on their hands telling the crowd to go on.” Given the small numbers of police, those patrols did not protect the stores on the block from attack: Thompson testified windows were broken in almost every store between 7:00 PM and 8:00 PM (although she was away from the area from 7:30 PM to 8:00 PM); and Romney likewise testified that at 7:30 PM "there were a lot of windows smashed." The New York Herald Tribune reported the same timeline, that “by 8 p.m. one or more windows in virtually every 125th Street store front in the block had been smashed.” Around that time the situation began to change as additional officers arrived, reinforcements that made it possible for police to set up a perimeter around 125th Street and keep people away from the stores.

As with other events at the beginning of the disorder, the most detailed and consistent evidence is the testimony of individuals present on 125th Street in hearings of the MCCH. Newspaper stories were generally vague and inconsistent about how many police were on the scene at what times and how they responded to the crowds, and tended to exaggerate the size of the crowds and the number of people on the street. It does seem credible that several hundred — and perhaps as many as 2,000–3,000 people — were in the area during this time, although not gathered in a single group. This was a larger number than gathered in any one place later in the disorder, contributing to the different way that police responded.
Harry Lash's 5 and 10c store looted and set on fire Around 11:15 PM, Harry Lash closed his 5c & 10c store at 400 Lenox Avenue, on the southeast corner of West 130th Street. He likely then went home to his residence at 536 West 178th Street, north of Harlem in Washington Heights. Wherever he was, Lash apparently got news of the disorder in Harlem and returned to the store around two hours later, at approximately 1:20 AM, according to the affidavit he gave later that day in the Magistrates Court. He found the store windows broken, fixtures damaged, and "general merchandise" valued at $1,000 missing. Display windows that ran the length of the side of the store that faced West 130th Street, as well as those that faced Lenox Avenue, could be seen smashed in the Associated Press photograph published in the New York Sun. Significant damage to the window displays was also visible. However, large amounts of merchandise could be seen still inside the store, indicating limits to the scale of the looting. Lash's store was in the heart of the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of West 125th Street where reported looting was concentrated. Disorder continued in this area after the time Lash returned to his store.

The store windows were likely broken and merchandise taken starting around 11:30 PM and continuing until Lash returned to the store. The rear of Lash's store on West 130th Street had also been set on fire, by a "group of 35 blacks...soon after midnight," according to the New York Herald Tribune. That crowd "tried to prevent policeman from sounding an alarm - 'let it burn' they shouted," the report continued. "When firemen came, they hindered them too, bustling about hydrants and shoving hose lines about - when firemen threatened to turn the hose on them, they dispersed." Some of those details also appeared in the New York Evening Journal, but its story combined the fire and those at 429 and 431 Lenox Avenue two blocks to north: “As detectives and uniformed men closed in on crowds surrounding the burning buildings, they met with resistance. 'Let them burn. Let them burn.' The shout was taken up by hundreds, and it was not until firemen threatened to turn hoselines on the rioting men and women that they dispersed.” An entire block separated the two locations, too far for a single crowd to be involved. Both the number of police and the size of the crowd were larger in the New York Evening Journal story, which repeated and gave more prominence to the crowd's alleged chant, “Let them burn." The New York Herald Tribune characterized the crowd as having "hindered" firefighters because some individuals who pressed forward to see the fire got in their way. The New York Evening Journal more sensationally characterized the crowd's behavior as "resistance." Those differences and characterizations were in keeping with how that publication sensationalized and exaggerated the actions of Black crowds.

An ACME agency photograph published in the Daily News showed flames in the last section of the store window on West 130th Street. Firefighters could be seen crouched in front of the window (they were cropped out of the version published in the Daily News). They appeared to have quickly extinguished the fire. Only one small section at the rear of the store, on West 130th Street furthest from Lenox Avenue, looked to be burned in an Associated Press photograph. A Home News reporter’s assessment that “damage from the fires was not great” fit that image. There were no other newspaper stories or photographs of this fire, but it attracted the attention of newsreel cameramen. Some of the limited footage from the night of the disorder showed the fire burning in the store and firefighters crossing in front of the camera. No bystanders were visible. Cameramen returned the next day to shoot footage of the burned section of the building both from Lenox Avenue, and, for the Universal newsreel, West 130th Street by the fire-damaged section looking toward Lenox Avenue. Debris was visible on the sidewalk in front of the fire-damaged section in the footage from Lenox Avenue. Several Black men and women walked by the store in the footage from West 130th Street.

Lash's store was misidentified in several sources including the caption to the Associated Press photograph in the New York Sun: headed "Harlem Rioters Break Every Window in Radio Store," it read "Not a pane of glass was left unbroken in this West 125th Street establishment. The Harlem Church of the Air on the second floor escaped raiders." The New York Herald Tribune also described the store as a Raffer's Radio store. Some of the confusion resulted from the large sign on the store advertising Raffer's Radio Service. By the time the Tax Department photograph was taken between 1939 and 1941, that sign had been changed to read "Harry's 5 and 10c Store." The details of the windows and the shape of the sign in the Associated Press photograph matched those in the Tax Department photograph. Signs for the You Pray for Me Church of the Air visible in the second story windows confirmed that match. Sister Rosa Horn's Pentecostal Church occupied the upper floors of the building spanning 392-400 Lenox Avenue by September 1932, remaining there for several decades. Additionally, the Acme agency caption and the caption published by the Afro-American identified the store as being on Lenox Avenue. The Daily News and New York Herald Tribune captions of the photograph of the store on fire mistakenly located it at 128th Street and Lenox Avenue, but the windows matched the distinctive details of Lash's store, as did the presence of the Hope Wo Chinese Hand Laundry next to the store. A Chinese laundry appeared in the MCCH business survey at 68 West 130th Street, and the sign that was visible in the newspaper photograph could be seen in the Tax Department photograph.

Around 1:50 AM, an arrest for looting the store was made five blocks to the east, on the Third Avenue Bridge connecting the eastern end of West 130th Street in Harlem with the Bronx. Patrolman Louis Frikser observed a Black man, nineteen-year-old Arnold Ford, "walking across the bridge with a package," according to the details provided in the Probation Department investigation. Ford was likely going home; he lived just three blocks beyond the bridge, at 246 East 136th Street in the Bronx. The package he carried cannot have been large as it contained "soap, garters, thread and notions" with a value of $1.15. According to Frikser, Ford admitted being part of a group of men who had entered Lash's store and stolen goods. Later, Ford made clear that he had not broken the store windows but only joined others entering the store and "helping himself to some merchandise." "A few minutes later" the officer stopped a second man crossing the bridge from Harlem, Joseph Moore, a forty-six-year-old West Indian carpenter, and also arrested him for looting Lash's store. None of the reports of this case described what caused Frikser to stop Moore or what he found in his possession. Like Ford, Moore was likely returning home; he lived next door to Ford, at 248 East 136th Street in the Bronx. Only seven other men are identified in the sources as having been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, a group making up one third (9/27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27/60).

Police charged both Ford and Moore with burglary in the Harlem Magistrate Court. Subsequently they were indicted by the grand jury and tried in the Court of General Sessions. During the trial on April 1, Ford pled guilty to petit larceny. Moore, however, was acquitted at the direction of the judge, an outcome for which the Daily Worker gave credit to the International Labor Defense lawyers who appeared for him. Ford was the only individual of the ten men convicted in the Court of General Sessions as a result of the disorder placed on probation rather than incarcerated. He remained under supervision under April 1938.

Police also arrested a third man for looting who likely also allegedly took merchandise from Lash's store. Lash was recorded as the complainant when Milton Ackerman, a twenty-four year old Black man, was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20. According to the New York Times, Ackerman was charged with "taking two rolls of paper, worth 5 cents, and 8 cents' worth of napkins from a Lenox Avenue store." It seems likely Lash's store at 400 Lenox Avenue was the location referred to in the story, especially given that Ackerman lived at 33 West 130th Street, only a few buildings east of that store. Lash's other store in Harlem was at 2530 8th Avenue, near the corner of West 135th Street, not on Lenox Avenue. There was no mention of where or when police arrested Ackerman.

Ackerman returned to the Magistrate's Court on March 25, when the charges against him were dismissed as he had been indicted by the grand jury, and he was held on $1000 Bail. Three days later he appeared in the Court of General Sessions, where Judge Donnellan dismissed the indictment and released him. Neither of the sources for that outcome, the 28th Precinct Police blotter and the New York Times, provided any explanation for the judge's decision.
Injured (74) At least seventy-four people suffered injuries from assaults, flying debris, and unknown circumstances during the disorder. Some newspapers reported higher numbers of injuries, which is likely the case given inconsistencies in the records. The Mayor’s Commission gathered two sets of hospital records, one which lists individuals attended at locations in Harlem, presumably by ambulances, and a second list of individuals attended by physicians with no information on where the treatment took place, which may be emergency room attendances. In addition to the thirty-nine injured individuals identified in those records, another thirty-three are listed as injured in newspaper reports, some recorded as being taken to Harlem Hospital (that number does not include individuals mentioned as involved in violence in newspaper stories who do not appear in lists of the injured). A United Press International (UPI) story reported that “Many of the injured were treated by ambulance surgeons, thus making an exact check on their number impossible,” implying that those numbers did not even capture everyone who received medical treatment, let alone all those who suffered injuries. Although the story claimed that fewer than fifty people required hospital treatment, the reporter estimated that up to 100 had been injured — and several of the publications that ran the UPI story used that figure as a headline. The Associated Press reported Harlem Hospital officials “estimated they alone treated about 70 victims,” but the hospital records and newspaper reports identify only forty-seven people attended by physicians from that hospital.

The injured include forty-nine victims of assault; four other assaults involved attacks on individuals in vehicles that damaged cars and smashed windows, but did not result in reported injuries, and Thomas Wijstem died three months after the attack on him led to a prosecution for assault. Four of the men charged with assault are also recorded as being injured: Paul Boyett shot by a policeman who alleged he was part of a group assaulting Timothy Murphy; Charles Alston, who fell from a building roof to a ledge several floors below while trying to escape police; Isaac Daniels, arrested for assaulting Herman Young; and James Smitten, arrested for assaulting William Kitlitz. An additional man arrested in the disorder for inciting a riot, Hashi Mohammed, also appears in lists of the injured. Another five individuals are identified as injured by flying glass, and Stanley Dondoro was accidentally shot by police pursuing James Thompson. The remaining fourteen are listed as injured with no information on the circumstances that produced their injuries.

Few of the injured suffered wounds severe enough to require being admitted to the hospital. Information is available for forty-three of the seventy-two injured individuals: physicians sent only twelve (28%) to the hospital. Six of those were shot and wounded (two other shooting victims were not admitted to the hospital, while the three men shot and killed were admitted, although one does not appear in hospital records). The other six individuals injured severely enough to be sent to the hospital received their wounds in a variety of circumstances: head wounds when assaulted by a group, by an individual and in unknown circumstances; and injuries to the leg and nose. The highest proportion came in assaults on individuals, but the numbers are very small (1/4, with no information in three cases). In terms of injury, the highest proportion sent to hospital were of those with leg injuries (2/5). By the day after the riot, March 21, only eight men remained in the hospital, according to the New York Herald Tribune.

That combination of a high proportion requiring treatment and a small number admitted is at odds with accounts that emphasize shooting during the disorder, particularly on March 20. The New York Evening Journal's picture of the extent of injuries resulting from the violence seems particularly sensationalized and exaggerated:
Ambulances raced through the streets to care for the wounded as the casualty list grew until it resembled some wartime engagement. The accident wards of Harlem, Sydenham, Knickerbocker and Jewish Memorial hospitals were jammed with victims of the mob's wrath. At first the victims were those injured by rocks or clubs. But as the night wore on and the looting and violence increased to a point never before reached in New York City, the police were forced to use their guns - were forced to use them to protect helpless whites from being beaten and kicked and stamped to death under the feet of the stampeding blacks. And then the reports carried the words: "Gunshot wounds."

Not even estimates reported in other newspapers suggest injuries on the level of “some wartime engagement,” let alone as many as would result from violence “at a point never before seen in New York City.” Nor do the handful of gunshot victims support claims of widespread gunshot wounds.

The injured attracted the attention of photographers from the Daily News, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Mirror, and appear in almost a quarter of the published images of the disorder. Those images span the experience of injury from wound to treatment to recuperation, and feature men and women, Blacks and whites, and police and medical staff: an unidentified white man knocked to the ground; an injured white police detective, Henry Roge, being helped by another officer (on the street in the New York Evening Journal and Daily Mirror and inside in a second photograph in the New York Evening Journal); an unidentified man waiting for an ambulance (likely in a police precinct); Dr. Sayet of Harlem Hospital treating an unidentified Black man in a police precinct; police officers carrying an unidentified Black individual on stretcher (likely Charles Alston); police officers picking up an unidentified injured man outside Harlem Hospital; doctors treating an unidentified Black man and an unidentified Black woman in Harlem Hospital; a room of people recuperating in hospital beds; a bandaged white woman, Patricia O'Rourke, leaving Harlem Hospital (on the front page of the Daily News); and an injured white woman, Elizabeth Nadish, at home. The presence of three Black individuals in these images is out of proportion with the number of Black men and women identified as injured in the sources, suggesting that those lists did not include all those injured during the disorder. Black men with bandaged heads also appeared among the men arrested during the disorder photographed being transported to court the next day, in photographs published in the Daily News, one on the front page, and in the Acme Photo Agency image below.
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Events
Black women arrested for looting (3) Three Black women were among the sixty individuals arrested for looting. They represent just under half of the women arrested, with three women arrested for breaking windows and another woman for inciting a crowd. (No women identified as white are among those reported as arrested during the disorder.) Few details of their arrests and alleged actions are recorded. Loyola Williams appeared only in the lists of those arrested for burglary; there is no evidence that she was prosecuted. Elizabeth Tai and Elva Jacobs were both charged with taking groceries, although the outcomes of their prosecutions suggest that neither actually had any merchandise in their possession. A district attorney reduced the charge against Tai to disorderly conduct, which suggested a lack of evidence of breaking in to a business or taking items. In Jacobs' case, a district attorney reduced the charge to unlawful entry, which suggested she had been arrested in a store, but without any items in her possession. Those reduced charges indicated that police could only provide evidence that the women were part of crowds on the streets not that they participated in looting.

The presence of Black women in the crowds on Harlem’s streets was recorded in most accounts of the disorder, but they are only rarely mentioned as participants in attacks on stores or looting. The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. (The Daily News highlighted their presence among those who broke windows in a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” without mentioning women breaking windows in the story itself.) Other papers such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram, and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Their presence at the outbreak of violence distinguishes the disorder in Harlem from those that followed in subsequent decades, in which Marilynn Johnson argues women became involved after men had initiated the violence. Women's early involvement in Harlem resulted from the disorder beginning in a store, at a time when only women were present to witness what happened to Lino Rivera. (Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, or New York Age.)

Women were specifically reported as participants in looting in only four newspapers. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle's general description of the disorder included "looting stores" among other activities of "Bands of men and women, in some cases joined by whites." When the Daily Mirror’s narrative reached the time when “Looters began to clean out the goods on display in the stores whose windows had been broken,” it noted “Both men and women were doing the looting.” In the Black press, the Atlanta World broadly included women in crowds that looted in a similar manner: “the members of the mob needed little provocation to start on the rampage. Using whatever weapons that were to hand, men, women and children in the mob broke hundreds of plate glass windows in stores belonging to white merchants, scattered and stole merchandise and destroyed fixtures.” Rather than a general presence among looters, women appeared just in a crowd looting Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store in the New York Evening Journal: “The emergency squad police swept into the mob with riot guns, drove the yelling, threatening men and women from their loot and then guarded the store until armored trucks could remove the valuables.” However, other sources indicate that Herbert’s was not looted, but only had its windows broken, by the crowds that had gathered early in the disorder across the street around Kress’s store — crowds that multiple sources record included women. (The New York Evening Journal story also presented women as participating in an attack on a white man, B.Z. Kondoul, and in efforts to prevent firefighters from extinguishing a fire in a store on Lenox Avenue.)

Rather than participants, women were presented as instigators by Roi Ottley in his column in the New York Amsterdam News: “LENOX AVENUE was the scene of much of the disorder during that riotous fracas...From every shattered window rioters would emerge laden down with spoils...Women stood on the fringes of the mobs and dictated their choice to their men folk, who willingly obliged by bringing forth the desired article.” (Ottley also cast women as inciting the disorder more generally, also from greater distance, in an earlier column: “Women hanging out of windows screamed applause to the reign of terror...and prodded their men-folk on with screeching invectives.”) Those images are somewhat at odds with the agency displayed by the women shopping in Kress' store and may reflect Ottley's attitudes to women as much as their behavior during the disorder.

While these stories, and the photographs that accompanied them, indicate that women were part of the crowds on March 19, it remains unclear whether those women did not participate in looting or did and were not recorded by reporters or arrested by police focused on men they likely considered more threatening. From a broader perspective more removed from the events of the disorder, the MCCH appears to have concluded that women did participate, noting in its report: "Even some grown-up men and women who had probably never committed a criminal act before, but bad suffered years of privations, seized the opportunity to express their resentment against discrimination in employment and the exclusive rights of property." However, this section of the report was part of an effort to frame looting as less violent and threatening than it appeared in the initial newspaper stories. While noting that "it seems indisputable that the criminal element took advantage of the disorders," the previous sentence argued, "it seems equally true that many youngsters who could not be classed as criminals joined the looting crowds in a spirit of pure adventure." An earlier discussion of crowds in the disorder made a similar claim, that "Some of the destruction was carried on in a playful spirit. Even the looting, which has furnished many an amusing tale, was sometimes done in the spirit of children taking preserves from a closet to which they have accidentally found the key." Including women as participants in "playful" behavior did not run counter to gender roles and stereotypes in the way that their participation in violence did. The only other place women appear in the MCCH report's discussion of the events of the disorder is as shoppers in Kress' store.

By the time disorder broke out again in Harlem in 1943, when the police recorded attacks on businesses and looting systematically in a way that they had not been in 1935, the press associated looting with Black women, a representation that would intensify in subsequent decades. Harold Orlans' contemporary study of newspaper stories about the 1943 racial disorder and Laurie Leach's more recent analysis both note the attention given to Black women. Photographs of women participating in attacks on stores and being arrested for looting appeared on the front pages of both of Harlem's Black newspapers, the New York Amsterdam News and the New York Age, when they first reported the disorder in 1943. One striking image on the front page of the New York Amsterdam News a week later, which also appeared in Life magazine, could be seen as in line with the reading of women's behavior as playful advanced in 1935. Historian Sara Blair described the image as featuring "an attractive young woman [who] smiles openly at the camera, part of a group of style-conscious women balancing boxes of hosiery and other consumer goods (one shopping bag is emblazoned with the logo “Modesse”) as they are escorted by police." She explains the woman's unselfconscious engagement with the camera as reflecting a participation in a social spectacle, a performative response to being photographed, that marked the new visual culture emerging in this period. The figure of the Black woman looter would take a more threatening form in white reporting and photography of the 1967 riots, as "greedy" and "criminal and culpable," as Kevin Mumford insightfully unpacked in his study of Newark in 1967.
Kress 5, 10 & 25c store rear windows broken When police officers pushed people away from the front of S. H. Kress' store and off West 125th Street after someone threw objects that broke the store's front windows, some ended up on 8th Avenue and West 124th Street. Around 7:00 PM, a hearse stopped on 124th Street near the rear of the S. H. Kress' store, located about a third of the way along the block to the east, attracting the attention of members of the crowd. A woman saw the vehicle, according to reports in the New York Times, New York Sun, and New York Herald Tribune. She called out "There’s the hearse come to take the boy’s body out of the store,” according to New York Times and New York Sun, and "It's come to get the dead child," according to the New York Herald Tribune. While there were many Black women inside and outside the store, singling out one fit the emphasis in the narratives published by those newspapers on the hysterical nature of the crowds: the New York Herald Tribune described the woman who called out as "excitable;" the New York Times reported that she "shrilled;" while in the New York Sun "her piercing scream lifted itself above the hoarse shouts of the mob," with the result that other people were "Incited." The outcry is more generalized in the New York Evening Journal, in line with its more explicitly racist narrative. That story claimed that "the Negroes were worked up to such a frenzy that they did not realize [the arrival of the hearse] was simply a coincidence. The cry went up 'They've killed him! They've killed him! They're taking him away in a hearse!'" No one arrested during the disorder was identified as being charged with inciting the crowd.

Whether they saw the hearse as evidence of the fate of the boy arrested in the S. H. Kress store or responded to shouts making that connection, people moved to the rear of the store. Those at the rear of the store may have found further reason to think the boy had come to harm when they found the store lights on and men moving around inside, workmen repairing displays and counters damaged earlier, according to the New York Herald Tribune and New York American. Or members of the crowd moved directly to renew the attack on the store begun on West 125th Street, as reported in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, and Times Union. Or the crowd gathered at the rear of the store was joined by "a number of colored persons, believed to be inmates of the Salvation Army located on 124th Street, west of 7th Avenue,...[who] began throwing stones," as Inspector Di Martini wrote in a report to the Police Commissioner the next day. (The Salvation Army operated a hostel for homeless men at that location.) One result was that windows in the rear of S. H. Kress' store were broken.

An "L" shaped building that spanned the width of the block between 125th and 124th Streets, S. H. Kress' store had twice as much storefront on West 124th Street as it had facing 125th Street. There were retail counters in the wider rear section of the store, and basement exits out on to West 124th Street (Lino Rivera had been released through one). Windows also faced 124th Street, but no images have been found that show their size and extent. Whatever their extent, more windows in the rear of the store appear to have been broken than in the front. Compared to the "very little loss on the front," a reporter for the Afro-American described "the windows in the rear showed signs of the stone and whiskey bottle barrage." Similarly, the New York Age reported "a plate glass window in the front of the store was smashed, while the back part of the building suffered several broken windows." Without the comparison, the Times Union reported similar damage, "the store's rear windows were smashed," as did the New York Times less precisely, noting "Stones were hurled through windows." With typical exaggeration, both the Home News and New York Herald Tribune claimed all the rear windows were shattered.

Windows were possibly not the only target of objects thrown on West 124th Street. Police officers had been stationed at the store's rear entrance earlier in the evening. Together with officers who followed the crowds from 8th Avenue, police once again tried to clear them from the street. Two mounted patrolmen were part of that group, according to Joe Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators. Unlike on West 125th Street earlier, objects struck police officers. At least two officers suffered injuries that required an ambulance. Patrolman Michael Kelly was hit on the right leg by a rock and Detective Charles Foley was hit on the shoulder by a stone. Officers trying to push crowds away from the rear of the store could have been hit by objects thrown at the windows, but white newspapers reported in sensational terms that police were the targets. "A barrage of missiles fell on the ranks of police," according to the New York Times, while the New York Herald Tribune described a more dramatic scene in which "Negroes showered [police] with miscellaneous missiles from roofs, hallways and other hiding places." News of the hearse's appearance and renewed police clashes with crowds on the street spread to people gathered on 8th Avenue, and windows in other stores on 125th Street began to be smashed. Despite these attacks, police appear to have cleared the crowd from 124th Street within a few minutes. When Emergency Truck #5 arrived on the block around 7:15 PM, Patrolman Henry Eppler told a MCCH hearing that "everything was quiet," which led to the truck relocating to 125th Street.

Several newspapers made no mention of broken windows in the rear of S. H. Kress' store. A hearse appears in most of those narratives, provoking generalized reactions from the crowds on the street. It served to "fire the crowd" in the Afro-American's narrative, and in stories in the Home News and New York Post, although in the white newspapers crowds see the vehicle on West 124th Street before the speakers try to address the crowd, a different chronology. The New York Sun described the crowd moving directly to attacks on police and stores and looting. The hearse appears in front of the store, not at its rear, in the Daily Mirror. And it is mentioned as appearing in the area without mention of a specific location in the Atlanta World and in an ANP story published in both the Atlanta World and Pittsburgh Courier. Neither broken windows in the rear of Kress' store nor a hearse are features of the narratives in the Daily News and New York World-Telegram, and are likewise missing from Louise Thompson's account (she was on 125th Street when the rear windows were broken).
Assaults by police (?) There are no reported victims of assaults by police officers during the disorder aside from Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, the two men police officers shot and killed. Four additional Black men arrested by police appeared in lists of the injured, one shot, three with injuries that may have resulted from being beaten. Harry Gordon, a white man arrested trying to speak at the beginning of the disorder, claimed he was beaten while in custody. Generalized reports of violence by police suggested that some unattributed incidents of violence and injuries may have been the work of police officers.

The uniformed patrolmen who responded to the disorder carried both nightsticks and pistols. Detectives did not typically carry nightsticks but were issued them to deal with the crowds, according to the New York Evening Journal. Emergency trucks carried rifles that were used by the patrolmen who crewed those vehicles. All those weapons were evident in photographs of police taken during the disorder. Officers first resorted to nightsticks and pistols used as clubs. A Daily News photograph of the arrest of Charles Alston showed one of the officers holding his pistol by the barrel so the butt could function as a club, a detail to which the newspaper’s caption drew attention. The Times Union story on the riot noted that “Police night sticks accounted for almost as many minor injuries as the shower of stones thrown from rooftops, windows and hallways by rioters.” Officers used nightsticks when they sought to move or contain crowds. One can be seen in the hand of the officer pushing into the crowd in a Daily News photograph; that one of the Black men to his right appears to be reaching for the officer’s arm confirms he is swinging into the people in front of him.

One Afro-American journalist reported that while mounted police had been "somewhat rough" early in the disorder, violence by other officers only came later in the disorder, "early Wednesday morning, as the news that fellow-officers had been wounded with bricks increased, [when] other officers 'got even' by 'mussing up' whoever came into their hands." Further evidence of that more indiscriminate use of nightsticks appeared in a New York Herald Tribune story about the “best joke” doing the rounds at the West 135th Street station after the disorder. It involved Detectives McCane and Teed chasing a group of Black residents into a hallway near 130th Street and Lenox Avenue. Although that area saw the most concentrated looting of the disorder, the officers were not seeking to make an arrest. Instead, after Teed went into the hallway, McCabe waited outside. As Teed caused each of the black individuals to flee back to the street, McCabe “hit them over the head with a nightstick” as they went by. It became a joke when his “zealousness” led him to hit his partner when he too exited the hallway. Similarly, police responded to a crowd attacking the car in which Betty Wilcox sat, she related, "with big clubs swinging,... and began to strike out at random and shoot in the air."

A Black man named James White suffered a “laceration of the scalp…during an altercation with an unknown white man” just a block away from that incident, at 129th Street and Lenox Avenue. He reported that assault only to the hospital staff from whom he sought treatment. White did not identify his assailant as a police officer, perhaps indicating the man was not in uniform. Detectives who wore plainclothes like McCabe and Teed would have made up a significant proportion of the white men present at the heart of the disorder. Andrew Lyons, a Black man who suffered a fatal injury to his skull during the disorder, may also have been hit with a nightstick. Two newspapers reported he had been injured on 125th Street, at different locations on the police perimeter. However, medical records indicated he did not receive medical attention until the evening after the disorder, by which time he was described as "stuporous" and unable to tell doctors what had happened to him.

The only photograph of an arrest being made, published in the Daily News, did not show, but suggested, violence by police. Two officers were visible, on the southeast corner of Lenox Avenue and 127th Street, with one standing over a Black man seated on the ground (none of the arrests with locations identified in the sources occurred at the corner). The patrolman was “dragging a recalcitrant rioter off to prison,” according to the caption, although the image did not offer a view of the patrolman's hands. That kind of treatment could produce some of the injuries reported in the press. More serious injuries would have come from being hit with a nightstick. One officer in the photograph had his nightstick under his arm, while the other, in the foreground, had a revolver in one hand and a nightstick in the other. As they had those weapons at hand, they likely employed them in apprehending the man. He may have fallen, but it seems more likely that the officers knocked him down during the arrest. His face was obscured by his hat so there were no visible signs that he was beaten. (In the background several Black women are visible walking past the scene along 127th Street, one looking back over her shoulder at the police.)

Black men arrested during the disorder displayed further evidence of police violence. The New York Post reported that many of the prisoners who filled the West 123d and West 135th Street police stations before midnight were “slightly injured,” while the New York Sun described "groups of prisoners battered and bruised." Descriptions and published photographs of the appearance of prisoners the next day in line-ups and being transported to court confirmed those reports. Many had bandaged heads and visible bruises. The New York Sun unambiguously attributed those injuries to the men’s “furious battles with the police.”

Four Black men and a white man arrested by police were also among those reported injured. Patrolman Conn hit Paul Boyett in the shoulder when he shot at the crowd around a group of men assaulting Timothy Murphy. A doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated Boyett's wound before he was placed in a cell. When James Smitten was arrested for assaulting William Kitlitz, the “lacerations to the scalp he received in some unknown manner” were severe enough that doctors were also called to the 28th Precinct to treat him. Isaac Daniels had contusions on his arm and Hashi Mohammed internal injuries, with no description of the circumstances in which they were wounded. In addition, Louise Thompson reported to the MCCH the “severe beating” that she saw Patrolman Irwin Young and his colleagues administer to Harry Gordon, a white Communist, when they arrested him on 125th Street. ILD lawyer Isidore Englander did not see police beat Frank Wells, but saw the results when he found him at the Harlem Magistrates Court. "His head was bandaged, his shirt was red with blood, he could not stand on his feet," Englander testified in a public hearing of the MCCH. According to a summary in a list of "Cases of Police Brutality, Discrimination and Mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem" later supplied to the MCCH by the Communist Party, Wells was "attacked by police and brutally beaten" while walking down 125th Street, again at the police station, and a third time in the police line-up on the morning of March 20.

While few reports of the disorder showed any concern about the indiscriminate use of nightsticks by police, officers' use of their guns was another matter. No one disputed that guns were fired, beginning almost as soon as police faced crowds. The officer in the foreground of the Daily News photograph of an arrest above has drawn his revolver, ready to fire it, not use it as a club. However, newspaper stories emphasized that prior to midnight, officers fired those shots into the air, not at any individuals. The Daily News reported very precisely that the detachment of police trying to clear crowds from 125th Street after someone broke the first window in Kress’ store fired five shots into the air. The shooting of Lyman Quarterman around 10:30 PM was to be at odds with that claim: he was part of a crowd police were attempting to disperse on 7th Avenue at 121st Street, firing their weapons, supposedly only in the air. However, there were no reports of anyone else other than police firing guns during that incident.

After midnight, when looting and damage to property increased, whatever restraint police had shown in using their guns disappeared, notwithstanding one Afro-American journalist who claimed that police "did not fire into crowds." It was during this period that officers shot and killed Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, and that Patrolman William Clement shot at a crowd pursuing B. Z. Kondoul, a white man, allegedly in order to protect him from assault. Four other Black men suffered gunshot wounds from unidentified shooters in the same period, all but one in the area in which looting was concentrated. It was likely that at least some were shot by police. Eunice Carter asked Captain Rothnengast for details of those shootings during a MCCH hearing, suggesting that they had been shot by police: “Officer, you stated that other people were shot but who shot them? Was there any effort to find out who shot them? Was any check made on the bullets to ascertain whether they came from police guns?” He replied simply that “No bullets were recovered.” There was little evidence of Black individuals firing guns; there were two arrests for possessing a gun. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he heard gunshots around 130th Street sometime during the disorder that "apparently came from some roof or window on the side streets," but he did not actually see that himself. Despite the evidence of police firing at crowds, the New York Post reporter compared the fatalities and injured favorably to "the long lists of deaths that might easily have resulted," indicating that "the police handled the crisis so carefully." A journalist for the Afro-American agreed that "the police, on the whole were restrained," but saw a different consequence, that the "crowd would not have been downed if colored bodies were scattered here and there felled by police bullets."
Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store windows broken Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store on the northeast corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue had windows broken in the early hours of the disorder, beginning after police drove crowds on 125th Street toward 7th Avenue after 8:00 PM. Just how much damage the store suffered the store suffered is uncertain. "One brick was thrown through the window," the New York American reported, while the New York Post and New York Evening Journal reported windows on just one side of the store had been smashed, and the New York Herald Tribune that two windows were broken. The most damage was reported in an interview with Bernard Newman, the store manager, published in the Daily News. He claimed that fourteen "big show case windows" were broken. However, despite being attributed to the manager, the accuracy of that claim is questionable as the story also reported Newman as saying that "the mob jumped in the windows and scrambled for the jewelry," taking at least "Several thousand dollars worth" of merchandise. No other newspaper reported such looting; they all reported to the contrary that the store was not looted. "No attempt was made to loot the windows," according to the New York Herald Tribune, a statement echoed by the Home News. There was nothing to loot, in the New York American's story, as clerks had removed the display from the window. It was police arriving that prevented looting, according to the New York Evening Journal, describing the scene in typically sensational terms, "The emergency squad police swept into the mob with riot guns, drove the yelling, threatening men and women from their loot, and then guarded the store until armored trucks could remove the valuables." Newman was "deeply impressed with the police by the way they handled the situation in the vicinity of the store on the night of the riot," he told a MCCH investigator two months after the disorder, adding weight to the evidence that they did protect the store from being looted.

Two photographs show a smashed window and empty display that is likely a section of the windows of Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store. Both show the same section of the window; in one there was a white man with his back to the camera looking in the window. The store was identified as a jewelry store by the captions to both photographs, and several bracelets and a pearl necklace can be seen on the back row of the display in the image that includes the white man (no example of that image being published has been found; it is part of the Bettman collection).
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Only the caption of the photograph in the Afro-American gave a location for the store, on Lenox Avenue, so not at the address of Herbert's store. However, compelling details in the photograph point to Herbert's, namely the distinctive panels beneath the windows, which are visible in the Tax Department photographs of the store, most clearly in the section visible in the photograph of the building to the store's north on 7th Avenue. Mistakenly locating the store on Lenox Avenue, as the caption appears to have done, also occurred a story in the New York Evening Journal, quoting the manager. The Afro-American photo caption also reported that items had been taken from the store window, but did not use the term looting, instead describing merchandise "scattered in all directions" rather than taken. The image itself could equally well fit with the displays having been emptied by clerks, as several other newspapers reported, as with having been looted.

Whenever they arrived, police "were stationed in front of the store for the night," as the Home News put it, one of the few stores identified as receiving such protection. One patrolman standing in front of the store appears in a image taken by a photographer for World Wide Photos, published in the Burlington Free Press and several other newspapers. While the caption did not identify the store, the distinctive panels that decorated the exterior below the windows are visible behind the officer. He was armed with a "riot gun," a rifle, rather than pistols regularly carried by police. Additional officers may have guarded other sections of the storefront. Four patrolmen with riot guns guarded the store in a New York Evening Journal story, three patrolmen in the Daily News, while the New York American and Home News reported two policemen guarded the store, and the New York Herald Tribune did not specify how many "police with riot guns." (Only the Afro-American mentioned police setting up "machine guns to prepare for pitched battle," weapons that were not part of police equipment). Clashes between those policemen and crowds are mentioned only by Bernard Newman, interviewed in the Daily News:
It looked for a while, according to Newman, as though the mob would crash the doors and pillage the store, despite three policemen with drawn guns who guarded the entrance. "We waited near the rear, ready to barricade ourselves in the cellar," Newman continued breathlessly, "but by some miracle the doors held."
In other reports, the police presence less dramatically deterred crowds from approaching the store windows. Police "patrolled in front of the building," in the New York Herald Tribune's account, "Their armament effectively preventing attack by looters," according to the New York American. A second patrolman with a riot gun was photographed guarding another store at the intersection of 7th Avenue and West 125th Street, likely the United Cigar Store across 7th Avenue from Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry on the northwest corner of 125th Street. Notwithstanding the police guards, no one arrested for breaking windows, or looting, was charged with targeting the jewelry store.

However many windows were broken, multiple rocks were apparently thrown at the store, as Newman displayed a collection of rocks to reporters from the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, and Daily News, the latter publishing a photograph of them. The United Cigar Store and the businesses on the other corners were also targeted during the disorder; Regal Shoes on the southeast corner was also reported looted, while the United Cigar Store on the northwest corner and the branch of the Chock Full O'Nuts restaurant chain on the southwest corner only had windows broken. Only three stores with broken windows are reported on West 125th Street east of 7th Avenue, suggesting that most of the crowd instead went north and south on the avenue, where there were multiple reports of looting and assaults, including the looting of another jewelry store, owned by Jack Sherloff, opposite Herbert's store by the Alhambra Theatre.

The broken windows in Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store were more widely and extensively reported by the white press than any other damaged business. The prominent location of the business likely contributed to that coverage, as did the apparent willingness of the store manager, Bernard Newman, to speak with reporters.

The jewelry store is recorded at the address in the MCCH business survey in the second half of 1935 and is visible in the Tax Department photograph from sometime between 1939 and 1941.
Windows broken in Black-owned businesses (8) At least eight Black-owned businesses had windows broken during the disorder, 11% (8 of 72) of the businesses reported damaged. That proportion is far below the share of Harlem's businesses that had Black owners, 28% (1690 of 5791) in the area from 110th Street to 155th Street, east of Amsterdam Avenue to west of Madison Avenue identified by the MCCH business survey taken after the disorder. The limited scale of that damage fits with stories in the Home News, New York Post, New York Evening Journal, and Afro-American, and Inspector Di Martini's "Report on Disorder" for the Police Commissioner, that the windows of Black-owned businesses were generally not broken. Lieutenant Samuel Battle, New York City's most senior Black police officer, asked in the MCCH's first public hearing on March 30, 1935 if the crowds made any distinction between white-owned and Black-owned stores, insisted that Black-owned businesses did have windows broken, but then qualified the extent of such attacks: "In many cases, if they knew it was colored, they passed the shop up." James Hughes, a twenty-four-year-old Black shoe repairer, who was part of the crowd at West 125th and 8th Avenue around 10 PM, also told a probation officer that those around him were breaking windows "where no colored were employed."

"Fully 30 of the store fronts shattered in Harlem were in Negro establishments," white journalist Edward Flynn claimed in a story in the New York Evening Journal focused on Communist activities in Harlem. In arguing that "the riot [was] conducted on the best Communist lines," the reporter pointed to how "the Negro merchant's property was destroyed as well as that of the white." Three Black-owned businesses close together on 7th Avenue that had windows broken were identified in the story. Battle's Pharmacy on the northwest corner of 7th Avenue and West 128th Street was mentioned together with the Williams drug store, across 7th Avenue on the southeast corner of 128th Street. "Both of these stores were damaged by the rioters although virtually everyone in Harlem knows who operates them." The third store was the Burmand Realty office at 2164 7th Avenue, two buildings north of the pharmacy. Not mentioned in the New York Evening Journal story was the Cozy Shoppe restaurant at 2154 7th Avenue across the street from Williams drug store which had a sign on its window identifying it as Black-owned, and had no windows broken. If the number of Black-owned stores with broken windows did total thirty, that would amount to approximately 10% of those damaged, a little over one-third of the proportion of Harlem's businesses that were Black-owned. That disproportionate share of the damage does not suggest indiscriminate attacks on store windows.

A claim of more extensive damage to Black-owned businesses, that "forty windows were broken in the exclusively Negro section [of 8th Avenue] north of 130th Street,” did appear in a story published in the New York Herald Tribune. However, that story misrepresented those blocks of 8th Avenue; the MCCH business survey showed they were still predominantly populated by white-owned businesses. The character of the street did change, but from 92.5% (74 of 80) white-owned businesses from 125th to 130th Streets, to 71% (34 of 48) white-owned businesses from 130th to 135th Streets, and 74% (65 of 88) white-owned businesses from 135th to 140th Streets. The one arrest in this area for allegedly breaking windows, of Henry Stewart, involved a white-owned business, a meat market at 2422 8th Avenue, between 130th and 131st Streets. If there were another thirty-nine windows broken in this area, almost all were likely also in white-owned businesses. However, that number seems exaggerated, as Inspector Di Martini's "Report on Disorder" estimated only eighty-five broken windows in total north of 130th Street, in the 32nd Precinct that also covered 7th, Lenox, and 5th Avenues.

The MCCH report did also seek to emphasize that damage was done to Black-owned businesses rather than how many were spared damage. It only implicitly recognized that those on the street chose their targets, casting that behavior as present only early in the disorder, giving way to more indiscriminate violence, cast as more important to understanding the events: "While, of course, many motives were responsible for the actions of these crowds, it seems that as they grew more numerous and more active, the personality or racial Identity of the owners of the stores faded out and the property itself became the object of their fury. Stores owned by Negroes were not always spared if they happened to be in the path of those roving crowds, bent upon the destruction and the confiscation of property." Unmentioned in the report is the countervailing development in which, after the initial attacks on store windows, Black-owned businesses identified themselves with signs. The New York Evening Journal, New York Post, and Afro-American reversed the chronology presented by the MCCH report, locating the damage to Black-owned businesses early in the disorder, until signs appeared identifying "Colored Stores," after which they were no longer attacked. The period of indiscriminate violence posited by the report was also when looting became widespread, according to newspaper narratives of the disorder and reported events. However, there were no reports of Black-owned stores being looted, and the New York Evening Journal and New York Post noted that merchandise had not been taken from them, which they attributed to the signs placed on those businesses.

There is no information on when the eight stores were damaged, so no evidence if they fit the picture provided in the MCCH report. Five of the Black-owned businesses that were reported damaged do not clearly contradict claims that those on the street directed violence at specific targets (there is no information related to Battle's Pharmacy, Burmand Realty, or Gonzales Jeweler). The Manhattan Renting Agency storefront was the office of Everard M. Donald, a twenty-seven-year-old Black real estate broker and owner of a chain of barbers, but also where Hary Pomrinse, a sixty-six-year-old Jewish real estate broker, did business. A similar ambiguity surrounded the ownership of the grocery store that had windows broken, a Peace Market operated by followers of Father Divine, a Black religious leader whose theology and claim to be God in a body drew criticism from Harlem's Black clergy and leaders. The Peace Food Market name and sign would have identified the store as not being a white-owned business, but Divine's Peace Mission had white members in its Harlem ranks, historian Judith Weisenfeld has shown. That interracialism that may have made the store a target; so too might the controversy Divine provoked within Harlem's Black community.

The nature of the damage done to the other three Black-owned businesses reported to have had windows broken offers another manifestation of how confusion over the ownership of stores, rather than disregard for it, produced attacks on stores. After the front windows of the Williams Drug Store facing 7th Avenue were broken, the owner wrote “Colored Store, Nix Jack” on the side windows on West 127th Street. Those windows were not damaged. Two other businesses that a La Prensa reporter recorded as having damaged windows, a billiard parlor and the Castle Inn saloon on Lenox Avenue south of 125th Street, also put up signs, according to another story in La Prensa. That reporter did not appear to understand the intent of the signs, seeing them as an effort to establish a racial divide in the neighborhood, to segregate Black and white residents, and did not relate them to the damage suffered. However, as the reporters could see the signs as well as broken windows, those stores too had been able to prevent extensive damage by identifying themselves as having Black owners. Other businesses also put up signs, and at least three suffered no damage. The success of that strategy suggests that broken windows in Black-owned businesses resulted from ignorance of who owned them, produced perhaps by residents joining crowds that moved beyond the areas where they lived. Edward Flynn, a white journalist writing for the New York Evening Journal, insisted that "virtually everyone in Harlem knows who operates [Battles Pharmacy and Williams drug store]," which nonetheless had windows broken. While he was certainly right about those who lived nearby or passed by that section of 7th Avenue, it is less clear how widely that knowledge would have been shared by those who lived and spent their time in other areas of the neighborhood and found themselves part of crowds moving up the avenue. Although the MCCH business survey found only six other Black-owned drug stores in Harlem, compared to 116 white-owned stores, neither business advertised extensively, nor were pharmacies and drug stores unusual enough to make them widely known to the changing population of the neighborhood who largely frequented drug store chains.
Timothy Murphy assaulted & Paul Boyett shot Around 9:00 PM, as police reinforcements tried to disperse the large crowds that had gathered on 7th and 8th Avenues around 125th Street, a few blocks northwest on West 127th Street between 8th Avenue and St Nicholas Avenue, a group of around Black men allegedly attacked Timothy Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old white rock driller, on his way to his home at 44 Moylan Place. Murphy alleged that the men knocked him to the ground and then hit and kicked him. The men told him “they were beating me because I was a white man,” the Daily Mirror reported Murphy as saying. What they actually said was “You white son-of-a-bitch, take it now," according to his affidavit in the Magistrates Court. As a result of the beating Murphy suffered “lacerations, contusions [about his head, face and body], a broken nose and loss of hearing in his left ear.” Press reports simply said he received a broken nose.

The men beating Murphy allegedly attracted the attention of Patrolman George Conn from the 30th Precinct, immediately west of Harlem. He may have been in a radio car on his way to 125th Street, as the New York Amsterdam News reported "police drove up." His Magistrates Court affidavit described the crowd as numbering around ten men, a number reported by the New York Herald Tribune, Home News, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Other newspapers described larger crowds, twelve men according to the Daily Mirror, twenty men according to the Associated Press, and forty to fifty men in the sensationalized narrative published in the New York Evening Journal. The New York Times and New York Sun simply reported that several men had attacked Murphy. As Conn ran toward Murphy, newspaper stories and legal records agreed that he shot Paul Boyett, a twenty-year-old Black garage worker who lived only a few buildings away, at 310 West 127th Street. The New York Sun and New York Times reported Conn's statement that he had first fired a shot in the air to disperse the crowd and then ordered Boyett to halt and shot him only when he continued running. The Daily Mirror and Home News reported those details without making clear that Conn was the source of that information. The New York Evening Journal reported Conn fired two shots, one "in the air and then a second shot which struck Boyett in the back." A brief account in the New York Herald Tribune and Associated Press simply had Conn shooting Boyett, one of the group attacking Murphy. Several other newspapers did not mention that anyone else but Boyett had allegedly been involved in attacking Murphy: the New York American had Conn shooting Boyett "when he tried to flee," the Daily News "as he was about to strike" Murphy, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle simply reported that Conn had shot Boyett. This incident was the most widely reported assault in the disorder, both because it occurred early in the evening, and because it fit the sensationalized narrative of racial violence which the Hearst newspapers and white tabloids employed.

Boyett testified at his trial that he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance,” and “struck no one at that time,” the New York Amsterdam News reported. In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave as police appeared, a bullet hit him. While the newspaper stories on March 20 give the impression that Conn arrested Boyett where Murphy had been assaulted, testimony at the trial revealed that Boyett continued running back to his home, apparently pursued by Conn, who arrested him in the building's hallway. A trial jury accepted Boyett's account and acquitted him of assaulting Murphy. The only source on the trial, the story in the New York Amsterdam News, did not mention what evidence was presented. One issue may have been how Conn claimed he picked Boyett out of the crowd; only the Daily News explicitly mentioned that he saw Boyett beating Murphy, although the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge against him as "kicked complainant." A likely alternative scenario to that offered by Conn was that he simply fired at the crowd rather than singling out Boyett and calling on him to halt, and that his shot hit Boyett, whose injury consequently led Conn to arrest him.

The New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Associated Press reported Boyett had been shot in the right shoulder, the Daily Mirror in the left shoulder, the New York American and Home News in the shoulder, and the New York Times, New York Sun, and New York Evening Journal reported the wound was in his back. Hospital records indicate that a doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated a wound to Boyett's right shoulder before he was placed in a cell. Conn was based at the 30th Precinct; St. Nicholas Avenue was the boundary between that precinct and the 28th Precinct. Rather than taking Boyett to his own precinct, Conn took him to the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, as Boyett appeared in that precinct's police blotter. Both Murphy and Boyett appear in lists of the injured published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, and New York American. Only Murphy appears in the list of injured published in the Home News and New York Post and only Boyett, in a list of those shot, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Herald Tribune.

Groups of Black men allegedly targeted at least three other white men around this time, all, unlike Murphy, in the area where crowds were clashing with police. William Kitlitz reported being attacked by James Smitten in front of Kress’ store, Maurice Spellman being assaulted at 125th Street and 8th Avenue, and Morris Werner at 125th Street and 7th Avenue. All those white men lived west of Harlem, relatively close to where they were attacked, so were likely regular visitors to 125th Street, to shop, seek entertainment, or access public transport, on this evening caught up in the disorder. The area around 125th Street and 7th Avenue would continue to be the location of alleged assaults on white men and women for at least the next three hours, with three men and two women targeted. However, the assault on Murphy represented the western boundary of the disorder, the only event west of 8th Avenue. That section of Harlem was still an area of Black residents.

Murphy was one of four white men and women allegedly rescued from assaults by the intervention of police officers (with some press reports suggesting that this happened more frequently). Only in this case did police also make an arrest. In one of those other cases, an officer also fired shots at the crowd, but in that instance no one was reported as being injured. Police did shoot and kill two Black men, Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, in the latter case also injuring two white bystanders.
10:30 PM to 11:00 PM

Around 10:30 PM, Louise Thompson left her friend’s home and returned to the streets, walking along West 118th Street to 7th Avenue and then north back to 125th Street. She would have passed groups coming in the opposite direction from 125th Street and likely others emerging from the surrounding residences to see what was happening and in some cases to join in the violence. Thompson would also have encountered police deploying from 125th Street, including some radio cars on patrol. At this time the number of police in the area would still have been small. When some officers tried to disperse people gathered at 121st Street, they quickly ran into trouble. Details are sparse, but for some reason the officers began shooting. They were only a block south of where Anthony Cados alleged he had been assaulted by Black assailants minutes earlier, so they may have encountered a group of people unwilling to accept being pushed and hit with batons. Or, being outnumbered, the officers may have decided to try to get people to move by firing in the air, a common tactic, and when that did not work, started firing at those on the street. The account of a group of police pushed to defend themselves by a threatening crowd that shot back at them, published in the New York Evening Journal to justify that shooting, drew on the repertoire of sensational tropes that publication employed rather than reports of what happened. Police officers in Harlem did not feel any need for such justifications to shoot at Black New Yorkers. One shot hit Lyman Quarterman, a thirty-four-year-old Black man, in the abdomen. The wound was serious enough for police to release a report that Quarterman had been killed, which multiple newspapers published. In fact, he was alive but would be hospitalized for at least three weeks. This would not have been the only occasion on which police would have discharged their guns as they ranged over Harlem attempting to clear people from the streets. Gunshots joined the sirens of police vehicles and ambulances, the crash of breaking glass and the shouts of groups on the street in announcing the intensification and spread of the disorder.

While Louise Thompson walked toward 125th Street, groups again broke through the police cordon at the intersection with 7th Avenue. The target for most was the Kress store down the block, but objects were thrown at the windows of other white businesses between the corner and the store. Among the damaged stores were likely Myladys shop, the W. T. Grant department store, McCrory and Woolworths 5 & 10 cent stores, and Chock Full O'Nuts restaurant on the south side of the street, and the Conrad Schmidt Music Shop, Adler Shoes, Scheer Clothing, Howard Suits, Minks Haberdashery, Savon Clothes store, Young's Hat Store, Willow Cafeteria, General Stationery & Supplies store, and United Cigar store on the north side. In front of the W.T. Grant store, an object also struck the head of Thomas Wijstem, a thirty-four-year-old white carpenter, knocking him unconscious. Unlike earlier in the evening, there were now enough police to make arrests in response to those attacks. Douglas Cornelius, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, was arrested for assaulting Wijstem, Claude Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black musician, for breaking a window at the Blumstein department store, and William Ford, a seventeen-year-old Black laborer, for breaking a window at the Kress store. But there were not enough police to apprehend others involved in each of those attacks, let alone prevent the violence. At the Kress store, however, only one window was broken despite a “very large” crowd reportedly gathering. A significant number of police were still stationed there — and it was the headquarters for the senior officers directing the police response. These clashes could also have been when twenty-eight-year-old Andrew Lyons was hit on the head by a police baton, an injury that would eventually kill him.

While the smashing glass made clear that white businesses were the targets of those on 125th Street, the two patrolmen who arrested Jones and Ford both claimed that they had yelled threats against police. They may have been embellishing the charges against the men to make them more compelling to magistrates and judges; certainly no police officers were injured at the time, which would have been expected if they had actually been targeted. It was possible that Wijstem had been mistaken for a police officer. Detectives in plainclothes were now among those on the streets. Police practice in response to riots was to deploy plainclothes officers outside cordons among crowds to identify the individuals creating disorder.

At least one detective, Peter Naton, was outside the police cordon at the intersection of 125th and 7th Avenue at this time. When he saw a crowd of twenty-five to thirty people gathering, he "announced himself as a police officer," necessary since he was not in uniform, and told the group to "move on." John King, a twenty-eight-year-old Black fish and ice dealer, allegedly responded by yelling "I won't move for you this is my Harlem, and we will put that Kress store out of business and punish that man that injured the child." It would hardly have been the first time Naton had heard those sentiments expressed that evening, and they alone would not have justified arresting King. But the detective claimed that King grabbed hold of the billy club in his hand and broke its strap. If King actually did so, it was likely because Naton was hitting him with the club. It was just as likely that the detective arrested King to get him off the street, an option now available to police due to the increased number of officers in the area. The police presence also allowed Naton to quickly process King; the detective would be back at the intersection within half an hour.

A bus traveling up 7th Avenue bound for Boston arrived at 125th Street around this time as it encountered large crowds, "men, women and policemen rushing all around" according to the driver, Joseph Dawber. Then he heard gunfire and bullets began to hit the side of the bus. The twenty or so passengers on board ducked down or dropped to the floor. Eleven bullets holes would be found in the bus. While none of those rounds reached inside, a brick thrown at the left rear window did. Joseph Rinaldi, a white wrestler from Brooklyn traveling to a match in New Bedford, was cut on the face and right wrist by the shattered glass. The brick itself landed by Helen Travis and caused her to faint in shock. With no reports of shots fired by the residents on the streets, the bullets had likely come from police guns being fired in efforts to disperse the crowd. Dawber saw officers with revolvers in their hands in the police radio cars that went by the bus as he tried to navigate the large crowd. He followed those cars up 7th Avenue, avoiding people who had spilled from the sidewalk into the street. It took ten minutes for the bus to get through the crowds. The residents it passed by would have been aware that all the buses traveling through Harlem had white drivers and that this intercity bus likely had white passengers. Throwing objects at it was an attack both on white property and white individuals. It was also possible that at least some of the objects that hit the bus were intended for other targets as was the case with the police bullets.

The Boston-bound bus passed groups on 7th Avenue north of the intersection who continued to break windows in stores and some who had begun to take items from those window displays. Looting did not appear to yet be widespread, perhaps because staff remained in at least some stores. The manager of the Harlem Grill on the corner of 127th Street reported two more windows broken around this time, so he at least was still present. Just over $450 of stock would be taken from the saloon, but that seems to have occurred later as the manager mentioned it separately. The window of the auto supply store, abandoned by Eisenberg and his staff around 9:00 PM, by contrast, had been cleared of merchandise by 11:00 PM, when Howard Malloy walked by on his way to 128th Street. The unidentified businesses owned by Abe Mohr and Joseph Cohen on the east side of 7th Avenue between 126th and 127th Street could also have been looted around this time.

To the west, on 8th Avenue, both crowds and police arrived at least as far south as 122nd Street. There were not yet reports of looting there; instead attacks on white men and store windows continued. Max Newman, a thirty-six-year-old white man, closing his grocer’s store at 2274 8th Avenue for the night, allegedly encountered a group of Black men. He claimed they beat him around the head, leaving him with cuts and bruises on his forehead. An ambulance called to the scene treated Newman's injuries, but there were evidently no police nearby to respond to the attack.

Officers were on the opposite side of 8th Avenue around the same time, however, when an ashcan was thrown through the window of the Lokos clothing store at 2275 8th Avenue. Ashcans could be found on the street, like the rocks and bricks most often thrown at windows, but obviously were larger and did more damage to a window. Several patrolmen must have been driving by or had arrived as two men were arrested in front of the store, with others likely getting away. One of those arrested, William Norris, a twenty-two-year-old Black man, lived on 122nd Street a block east of the store, so may have initially come to the corner to see what was happening. Charles Wright, the other person arrested, a Black man of the same age as Norris, was homeless. While there would be only one more reported event on 8th Avenue south of 125th Street during the disorder, the area may not have been quiet. All the lack of reports means for certain is that the attention of police and journalists was focused elsewhere. But residents too might have been drawn to other parts of Harlem, where there were larger businesses and a greater Black population.

On the other side of 125th Street, crowds on 8th Avenue appear to have continued to break windows. By this time, those on the street, like those on 7th Avenue, would have been a mix of groups coming from 125th Street and residents drawn by the rumors and the noise. It was likely around this time that Rose Murrell, a nineteen-year-old Black woman, allegedly threw a stone that broke a window in a grocery store at 2366 8th Avenue on the intersection with 127th Street. She lived nearby, in the block of 126th Street between 8th and 7th Avenues, so could have either come to the street to see what was happening or have gone earlier to 125th Street in response to hearing rumors about events in the Kress store and been among those coming up 8th Avenue. The business was just over a block north of the stores whose windows were likely broken in the previous half an hour. Patrolmen were now on 8th Avenue, some likely in radio cars patrolling the street. Officer Libman, from the 32nd Precinct based to the north on 135th Street, arrested Murrell. A single arrest from the crowd of people likely around the store was a sign that few police were close enough to respond to the breaking glass. Libman, however, would be involved in the arrest of three other people in this area, so may have been stationed there. At least one of those arrests was also for breaking windows, but as the business was located several blocks further north between 130th and 131st Streets, it likely did not occur until the violence had spread further. While businesses in the surrounding blocks of 8th Avenue would be looted, there was no evidence that merchandise was taken before the widespread turn to looting nearer midnight.

For the first time, people began to move east on 125th Street toward Lenox Avenue, some breaking windows in the white-owned businesses as they went. The Regal Shoe Store on the southeast corner of 7th Avenue was undamaged when the assistant manager closed the business at 10:00 PM (having remained open throughout the clashes between crowds on the street and police on the other side of 7th Avenue). Windows were broken sometime soon after. So likely were windows in the Sylvia Dress shop in the next building, in the Hobbs Dress shop located a building further east, and in the Busch Kredit jewelry store in the middle of the block. The branch of the Liggitt's pharmacy on the southeast corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue may also have had windows broken at this time as all those facing north, on West 125th Street were smashed. That was the extent of the damage reported, suggesting that this block did not suffer the sustained attacks on businesses seen a block to the west. To the contrary, some stores suffered no damage at all, notably the Koch department store, despite its wide expanse of display windows. In contrast to its counterparts on the block to the west, that store had hired black staff in response to the campaigns of the previous year. The manager attributed his store being undamaged to that decision and called that "action of the mob" "one of the finest tributes that could be paid Koch's." The limited damage could also have been the result of fewer people passing along the street during the disorder. The violence that would soon break out on Lenox Avenue appeared to be the work of people coming out on to that street from the surrounding residences more often than groups coming from around the Kress store.

However, the first business on Lenox Avenue reported to be attacked, Toby’s Men’s shop on the northwest corner of 125th Street, likely was targeted by groups coming from 7th Avenue. It was still open around 10:30 PM when eight Black men burst in and started threatening the owner, Morris Towbin and a clerk named Cy Bear, knocking over fixtures and stealing clothing. The two staff retreated into the basement. Very few of those involved in the disorder went as far as directly confronting staff and robbing them. The men who did so likely were more accustomed to breaking the law than most of those on the streets at the time. The man later arrested with merchandise from the store in his possession, a twenty-six-year-old Black laborer named Edward Larry, did have multiple convictions for pickpocketing and theft, which set him apart from most of those taken into custody. However, the extensive damage and large loss of merchandise that the store suffered could not have been the work of the group who burst in alone. The intersection of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue would later be the site of several assaults and attacks on other businesses. Some of those who came to the area also targeted Toby’s Men’s shop as all of its display windows were broken and most of their contents removed. Towbin, however, was not present for those attacks and looting. After the group that burst into the store left, he emerged from the basement and headed to the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street to report the robbery. Although he would be there for at least the next two and a half hours, Towbin was as unsuccessful as most of his counterparts in securing help from the police.
Windows not broken (7) Seven businesses were reported as not having their windows broken. The absence of damage drew attention because of claims that violence had been directed only at white-owned businesses rather than being an indiscriminate attack on property in Harlem. Stories in the Home News, New York Post, New York Evening Journal, and Afro-American made the claim that the windows of Black-owned businesses were generally not broken. The newspapers linked Black-owned businesses being spared to the appearance of signs identifying them in store windows. "It was significant that almost no windows of Negro-owned or Negro-staffed stores were broken," the white New York Post reporter wrote. "Many Negro storekeepers scrawled on their windows, with soap, the word "colored" and the heat of the mob was never sufficient to cause the Negroes to attack their own." Attacks on stores were initially indiscriminate in the account published in the New York Evening Journal, as "the mob made no choice, at first, of victims,...[a]nd then one colored man who owned a small restaurant pasted a sign in the window. It bore one word: 'Colored.' The mob passed him by and when others saw how the 'miracle' was worked, signs flashed up in store windows throughout West Harlem. Those owned by Negroes, in most cases, were not broken into." The Black reporter for the Afro-American similarly portrayed the crowd as less controlled and less discriminating. “Stores owned by colored persons in the rioting area had to rush improvised signs reading ‘Colored,' 'Black,' 'This Store Owned by Colored,' in order to be spared in the rain of bricks, whiskey bottles, and other missiles. At that, several colored establishments suffered." That description appears to have reflected the reporter's treatment among the crowds on the street, whose "ring leaders," he complained, "were ready to jump on the reporters of 'the Uncle Tom press' as they would on many whites.” The mention in the Home News appears to have confused the nature of the signs displayed. Explaining how it was that "Most of the damage was done to shops which were known to be operated by white persons," the reporter claimed "The colored persons who owned stores protected their shops against vandalism by picketing their establishments. They carried signs stating that the store was operated by colored people." No other sources mention pickets in front of Black-owned stores.

The official police account of the disorder, likely reflecting information shared with journalists, did not mention Black-owned businesses being attacked. Instead, in a “Report of Disorder” to the police commissioner, Inspector Di Martini, the commanding officer of the Sixth Division, described the “vandals who continued to break windows on 125th Street, Seventh Avenue, Lenox Avenue, 8th Avenue, Fifth Avenue” as targeting “stores occupied by whites.” However, the MCCH initially concluded that the violence against businesses was indiscriminate: the "Subcommittee which Investigated the Disturbances of March 19th" reported on May 29, 1935, "Nor is it true that stores owned by Negroes were spared. There is no evidence of any program or leadership of the rioters." The final MCCH Report was less definitive, but argued that any discrimination displayed by those on the streets faded over time. "While, of course, many motives were responsible for the actions of these crowds, it seems that as they grew more numerous and more active, the personality or racial Identity of the owners of the stores faded out and the property itself became the object of their fury. Stores owned by Negroes were not always spared if they happened to be in the path of those roving crowds, bent upon the destruction and the confiscation of property." That chronology is the reverse of the narrative in the stories in New York Post and Afro-American, in which the appearance of signs stopped attacks on Black-owned businesses.

Four of the businesses reported with undamaged windows displayed signs identifying them as Black-owned, in line with the chronology offered in the press rather than that in the MCCH Report. The Monterey Luncheonette, Winnette’s Dresses, and the Cozy Shoppe did not suffer any damage. In the case of the Cozy Shoppe, all five white businesses on the same block of 7th Avenue had windows broken and merchandise taken, evident in newsreel footage and information gathered by MCCH investigator James Tartar. Less detailed information is available on the block of Lenox Avenue where Winnette’s Dresses was located, but two white-owned stores were reported looted, and multiple other white-owned businesses were damaged or looted in the blocks to the north and south. While there were only two reported white-owned businesses with windows broken near the Monterey Luncheonette, it was located further north, on 7th Avenue and West 137th Street, an area north of West 135th Street where there were few white-owned businesses: only 8 of 24 businesses on the block on which the restaurant was located, and only 10 of 38 and 6 of 29 businesses on the blocks occupied by the damaged white-owned businesses. The fourth business, the Williams drug store, did suffer broken windows in its storefront facing 7th Avenue, but the windows facing West 128th Street, on which someone painted “Colored Store, Nix Jack” were not broken. The drug store was across 7th Avenue from the Cozy Shoppe, in an area where white businesses were significantly damaged and looted.

Three additional businesses reported as undamaged were white-owned. The Koch Department store and the Empire Cafeteria had both not been attacked, according to newspaper stories, because they had hired Black employees in 1934 during the boycott movement. White-owned businesses that employed Black staff drew some general attention in newspaper descriptions of attacks on businesses, distinguished from the businesses targeted for attack. The only white newspaper to make that distinction, the New York Post, reported "It was significant that almost no windows of Negro-owned or Negro-staffed stores were broken." The Pittsburgh Courier likewise reported that when "window smashing" extended beyond West 125th Street, "Most of it [was] directed against stores not employing colored clerks (with no mention of Black-owned businesses). Two other Black newspapers reported the opposite situation, although with a qualification. "Many white business houses which employ colored help in high positions were pillaged, " according to the Afro-American, and "Those employing Negroes in high positions were not spared," according to the Norfolk Journal and Guide. Just which businesses the stories referred to is uncertain. One possibility is that "high positions" referred to salespeople, rather than the porters and cleaners more commonly employed by white-owned businesses. Those positions had been the focus of the boycott movement in 1934. A survey by the New York Age a month after the disorder, likely not an accurate picture of the situation at the time of the disorder as there are reports of stores moving to hire Black staff after the disorder, found only 101 Black clerical staff in 134 stores (with the larger chain stores generally refusing to provide information). Harlem's Black newspapers made no mention that stores employing Black staff were not damaged, other than the New York Age publishing the interview in which the manager of Koch's asserted that his store was undamaged. The Empire Cafeteria hired Black staff after a campaign by the Communist Party, and its condition after the disorder is only reported in their newspaper, The Daily Worker. Although the story fitted the Party's efforts to show they had support from Harlem's Black residents, it is unlikely they would have made a claim that could so easily be checked unless it was true. It seems more likely that only they had any reason to give particular attention to that business.

The state of the other white-owned business identified as undamaged had nothing to do with its staff. Stan Katz's business was reported to have been protected rather than spared. A group of Black "boys" stood in front of the shop, "shouting to passing crowds that he was a friend of the Negroes," according to the New York Post. Neither of the two newspaper stories that mention the shop made clear if or how the boys knew the store owner.
11:30 PM to 12:00 AM While violence continued on 8th Avenue and 7th Avenue north of 125th Street, it appeared to intensify on Lenox Avenue and on 7th Avenue south of 125th Street. When Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe, in charge of uniformed police in the borough of Manhattan, was driven through Harlem just before midnight, he saw “thousands of persons were staying in the streets late,” although he judged that “most of them appeared to be spectators.”

As an ambulance from Knickerbocker Hospital traveling down 7th Avenue arrived at 117th Street to treat Alice Gordon, groups in the area continued to attack white individuals they encountered on the street and turned their violence against white businesses. Around 11:30 PM, William Burkhard, a forty-three-year-old white man, alleged a group of Black men assaulted him around a block north of where Gordon had been attacked. He too suffered lacerations to his face before apparently escaping east along West 118th Street. It was midway along that block that the crew of an ambulance from Bellevue Hospital treated him. Burkhard, like Gordon, was a long way from home, which in his case was 533 East 12th Street at the opposite end of Manhattan. Police were in the area but evidently not in the vicinity of the attack as they made no arrests. Some officers did intervene as groups in the area turned their attention to white-owned businesses. However, police found it difficult to — or perhaps were not concerned to — distinguish those attacking stores from residents watching events on the street. Five or so people who threw objects at the windows of Mario Pravia’s candy store near the corner of West 118th Street were among those beginning to seek merchandise rather than targeting businesses with violence. As the Uruguayan-born Pravia and his German wife Gertrude watched from inside the store, the window shattered and some of those outside reached in and took merchandise. Officer Harmon and Detective Harry Wolf also saw the windows broken and arrived at the store in time to arrest Amie Taylor, a twenty-one-year-old Black butcher. The officers claimed to have seen Taylor throw a stone and reach into the window and take something. They found eighteen packets of chewing gum, valued at 3 cents each, in his possession. However, Taylor was likely part of the crowds on 7th Avenue into which those who had been attacking the candy store fled when police approached, as he was ultimately acquitted of the charges Harmon and Wolf made against him. He may have come from his home eight blocks to the south at 1800 7th Avenue to investigate the noise and disorder rather than from 125th Street.

Windows were also broken in Ralph Sirico’s shoe repair store a block north at 1985 7th Avenue. Among those on the street near the store was C. T. Berkeley, the superintendent of the apartments above the business. He did not recognize those who threw objects at the store. Soon after, two men climbed through the broken windows and began to throw merchandise out on to the street. In all, “18 or 20 hats which had been cleaned and blocked by [Sirico]; about 25 pair of shoes which he had repaired; 5 or 6 pairs of unfinished shoes; one dozen leather soles; two and a half dozen rubber heels and a quantity of polish and shoe laces” were taken. Attacks likely also began on the branch of the Butler grocery store chain in the block between Pravia’s candy store and Sirico’s shoe store that was also looted during the disorder. Not until later, around midnight when observers recognized the outbreak of looting, would merchandise likely begin to be taken from the stores whose windows were broken in the blocks between West 118th Street and West 125th Street.

Across 125th Street, crowds were moving up 7th Avenue, watched by residents, like Marshall Pfifer, gathered on the sidewalks and by police radio cars patrolling the avenues. Groups likely continued to break windows in white businesses, but police made no arrests and details of exactly what was happening are lacking. The situation on 8th Avenue was even less clear. Some of the looting in the blocks immediately north of 125th Street may have occurred around this time, and police may have made arrests in response, although more likely that would not happen until after midnight as part of the outbreak of looting noted by observers. Julius Narditch, a thirty-four-year-old white man did report being “jumped” by three black men on 8th Avenue near 147th Street. While such an attack was in keeping with the violence of the disorder, the location was well beyond the area where crowds were on the street at this time. In fact, there was no evidence of any other incidents related to the disorder north of 145th Street. Narditch reported the alleged assault to police, so it was in the records they shared with journalists. However, there was no indication that police limited the cases they included to incidents that they could link to the disorder. Rather than an element of the disorder, the assault on Narditch is better seen as a reminder that attacks on whites visiting Harlem were not limited to the disorder.

While there were crowds on 7th and 8th Avenues north of 125th Street, it was on Lenox Avenue that the violence was centered by this time, likely drawing a greater police presence that contributed to the lack of information about what was happening elsewhere. The group around 131st and 132nd Streets increased the violence of their attacks on white-owned businesses. With windows broken, some of those on the street began taking merchandise from the displays. Some went further, setting fire to Anna Rosenberg’s notion shop at 429 Lenox Avenue and the adjacent hardware store. Those efforts were somewhat at odds with the attempts of others to get items that they needed but lacked the money to buy, contradictory endeavors that highlighted the variety of people now on the streets. While the fires could have been lit only after the businesses had been emptied of merchandise, the episodic nature of most looting in the disorder made it unlikely the stores had been ransacked so quickly. More likely, they had been set on fire as an extension of efforts to destroy white-owned property. Once started, the fires drew crowds, with more residents coming on to the street when the response of the Fire Department added another set of sirens to the noise. While the closest fire company was at 180 West 137th Street, near the intersection with 7th Avenue, fire trucks likely also came from companies outside Harlem as white journalists and photographers were also at the scene of the fire. Uniformed police and detectives converged to manage the crowd. Spectators pressing forward to see the fire got in the way of firefighters, encounters sensationalized in the New York Evening Journal and New York Herald Tribune as efforts to prevent them from putting out the fire were accompanied by chants of “Let them burn.” While the fires were extinguished, the attention they drew let other groups attack and loot surrounding businesses with less interference from police arriving in the area. David Schmoockler, the manager of William Feinstein’s liquor store, watched as police drove groups attacking stores from one side of the street only to have them rush to the other side and continue to break windows in Estelle Cohen’s clothing store, the Gonzales jewelry store, and likely other businesses in the block.

Two blocks south on Lenox Avenue between 128th and 129th Streets, the situation had changed such that forty-eight-year-old Russian-born Benjamin Zelvin was unwilling to close and leave his jewelry business as his neighbor Louis Levy had done only half an hour earlier. Instead, he boarded up the windows to protect them and the stock inside, called the police station, and waited half an hour for officers to arrive, before he left his store at 372 Lenox Avenue. Such precautions indicated Zelvin likely had seen more people than usual on the streets, at least some of whom attacked white men and women they encountered. A group attacked William Ken, a white man going into the bar and grill where he worked, the Blue Heaven Restaurant, just two storefronts north of Zelvin’s business. Two unnamed Black coworkers intervened, pulling Ken inside before he was injured, and convincing the group to move on. Zelvin had likely also seen or heard windows being broken in nearby businesses. It was likely around this time that a window was broken in the grocery store across the street at 371 Lenox Avenue, leading the thirty-six-year-old Russian-born owner Irving Stekin to also call police (he waited two hours for officers to respond). The Peace Food Market south of Zelvin's jewelry store and the South Harlem Rotisserie and a laundry on the other side of Lenox Avenue would suffer damage. Michael D’Agostino’s business at 361 Lenox Avenue, Irving Stekin’s second business at 363 Lenox Avenue, and the Romanoff Drug store on that side of the street would also be looted, as would businesses owned by Samuel Mestetzky and Irving Guberman just around the corner on West 129th Street, although efforts to take merchandise likely had not yet begun. It was likely that the four Black-owned businesses on this block were not targeted. That the Chinese owners of the laundry at 367 Lenox Avenue reportedly put a sign in their windows that read "Me Colored Too," emulating those displayed by some Black businesses, suggests that they saw Black-owned businesses being spared from attacks.

Benjamin Zelvin could also have heard glass shattering in the block south of his store between 127th and 128th Streets. Groups coming from 125th Street and residents on the street could have moved into this block to avoid the police officers who had recently arrested Julian Rogers a block further south at 333 Lenox Avenue between 126th and 127th Street. Detective Perretti likely arrested two twenty-eight-year-old Black men on the northwest corner of 127th Street around this time. He allegedly had seen Arthur Bennett and James Bright throw stones through the window of a drug store at 339 Lenox Avenue. Other officers must have been with the detective for both men to have been arrested at the same time. On the block north of the drug store, businesses at 348 Lenox Avenue owned by Michael D’Agostino, Jack Stern and Sam Apuzzo, a grocery store at 340 Lenox Avenue, the cleaners across the street at 347 Lenox Avenue, an unknown store at 345 Lenox, Louis Levy’s store, and Harry Schwartz's laundry just off the avenue on West 128th Street, at least, would have windows broken during the disorder. It likely took until later for the windows to be damaged enough for some of those on the street to begin to reach into the displays and enter the stores to take merchandise.

Although beyond earshot of Zelvin, attacks on businesses close to 125th Street continued. Objects thrown at George’s Lunch and Harry Piskin’s laundry on 126th Street did further damage to their windows even as more police began to arrive on Lenox Avenue. Windows likely also continued to be targeted in the blocks of Lenox Avenue south of 125th Street. With few businesses in the blocks below 123rd Street, and few police apparently present, the groups in this area may have continued to focus their violence in the blocks immediately south of 125th Street. Bricks did continue to be thrown through the windows of Mrs. Salefas' delicatessen on the corner of 123rd Street, given that she spent some time in the rear of her shop taking shelter. Even if those attacks had started around 11:00 PM, they could still have been occurring around 11:30 PM.
Businesses that did not survive (5) The white-owned newspapers the New York Sun and the New York Evening Journal, the Black-owned Afro-American and the Spanish-language publication La Prensa reported that businesses in Harlem might close as a result of the disorder. The New York Sun implied that racial conflict motivated such decisions: "It is reported that many white merchants of the Harlem district have signified their intention of leaving the neighborhood just as soon as they can arrange for the disposition of their stocks." La Prensa reported a similar sentiment, that "it is impossible to continue doing business in areas that are exposed to racial outbursts and radical controversies." The statement in the New York Evening Journal was speculation linked to the losses suffered: "The looting of stores reached such proportions that small merchants feared they would be thrown into bankruptcy." The Afro-American's correspondent offered a similar assessment: "[Many businesses] probably will never open again because their owners are bankrupt as a result of the looting of stores and lack of insurance to cover the losses."

A similar claim was made by Barney Rosentein, the attorney representing more than half of the 106 business owners who sued the city to recover losses they suffered during the disorder. "Many of his clients, Mr Rosenstein said, were completely wiped out by the wave of robberies which followed the beginning of the riots," the New York World-Telegram reported. The New York Sun reported the same claim without attributing it to Rosenstein. In newspaper stories about their suits against the city, only five business owners are identified as saying that they had gone out of business due to the damages they suffered. This group included the two owners who made the largest claims for damages, Harry Piskin ($14,125) and George Chronis ($14,000), and the owners who made the fourth and seventh largest claims, Harry Levinson ($4,805) and Irving Stekin ($2,068). The remaining owner, Manny Zipp, claimed only $721 in damages, below the median claim of $733.13 for the twenty-six owners identified in newspaper stories. Piskin and Chronis both told the city comptroller that extensive damage to their stores had put them out of business. Piskin said "they looted his laundry, broke all of his machinery and drove him out of business," the New York Sun reported, while Chronis said his lunchroom had been "completely demolished," according to the New York World-Telegram. Zipp and Levinson emphasized lost merchandise. Zipp told the city comptroller "everything in his store was taken," forcing him out of business, in a story in the New York Post, while Levinson said the "mob cleaned out" his store, forcing him to retire, the New York Sun reported. In Stekin's case, no explanation was given; a story in the New York Sun simply said he was not in business anymore.

Indirect evidence of what happened to other businesses can be found in the MCCH business survey undertaken between June and December 1935 and the Tax Department building photographs taken between 1939 and 1941. However, the survey and photographs do not provide certain or comprehensive evidence. While the survey identified more than 10,000 businesses, other sources do indicate that it did miss some businesses and sometimes incorrectly recorded addresses. In most cases, the owner and the business name were also not recorded, so they cannot be matched to looted businesses with certainty. In addition, some of the Tax Department building photographs taken between 1939 and 1941 are taken from a distance or angle that does not show the storefront of the address that was looted.

Twenty-one additional business owners who sued the city are identified in newspaper stories, seven of whom continued to operate their businesses after the disorder, appearing in the MCCH business survey and/or the Tax Department building photographs. Those businesses reported damages ranging from $453.90 to $1,273.90, lesser amounts than all but one of the businesses that closed. Those sources do not offer information on the remaining fourteen businesses identified as the subject of damage suits. Four of those owners claimed damages higher than those that remained in business: Samuel Mestetzky claimed $5,860.50; Irving Guberman claimed $3,967; Benjamin Zelvin claimed $2,685; and Sam Lefkowitz claimed $1,610.64. The scale of those damages makes it possible that these men may also have gone out of business.

The losses for twenty-six additional businesses reported in legal records and the press were, with one exception, less than those of the businesses reported as suing the city, ranging from $10-12 to $1,000 (and one with losses of $10,000), with a median loss of only $100. Nineteen of those businesses reopened after the disorder; there is no information on the other seven businesses.

In addition to the twenty-six business owners identified as suing the city, an additional eighty others also filed suits. Some of those businesses may be among those who appeared in legal records. There is no information on the scale of the damage they suffered, so no indication of whether any likely did not reopen.

In total, nearly ninety percent (40 of 45) of the businesses reported as having being looted that can be identified in the sources reopened after the disorder.
Paul Boyett arrested Around 9:00 PM, Patrolman George Conn arrested Paul Boyett, a twenty-eight-year-old Black garage worker, for assaulting Timothy Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old white rock driller. Conn testified in the Magistrates Court that he had come upon a crowd attacking Murphy on West 127th Street between 8th Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue. He may have been in a radio car as the New York Amsterdam News reported "police drove up." After firing his pistol into the air to scatter the crowd, he then called on Boyett to halt, and when he did not, shot him. Although the bullet struck Boyett in his back or shoulder, he was able to continue running toward his home, only a few buildings away at 310 West 127th Street. Conn pursued him, eventually catching him in the building hallway. Boyett denied assaulting Murphy, testifying that he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance," the New York Amsterdam News reported, and “struck no one at that time.” In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave when police appeared, a bullet hit him.

Conn was based at the 30th Precinct; St. Nicholas Avenue was the boundary between that precinct and the 28th Precinct. Rather than taking Boyett to his own precinct, Conn took him to the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, as Boyett appeared in that precinct's police blotter. Hospital records indicate that a doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated Boyett's wound before he was placed in a cell. That hospital record and New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Associated Press reported Boyett had been shot in the right shoulder. Several newspapers reported other locations for the injury: the Daily Mirror in the left shoulder, the New York American and Home News in the shoulder, and the New York Times, New York Sun, and New York Evening Journal reported the wound was in his back.

Boyett appear in lists of the injured published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, and New York American, and in a list of those shot in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Herald Tribune. He also appears in the lists of the arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Daily News, New York American, and New York Evening Journal.

Boyett appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with felonious assault. The docket book indicates that he was remanded until March 22, and then again on March 25 and April 1, before Magistrate Renaud sent him to the grand jury on April 9. Unusually, Boyett did not appear in any of the newspaper stories about the legal proceedings after the disorder. On April 23, the grand jury heard the case against Boyett, according to the district attorney's case file records; they indicted him for first degree assault. His trial in the Court of General Sessions occurred just over a month later, on May 29, where his lawyer was William T. Andrews, a prominent member of Harlem's elite elected to the New York State Assembly in 1934. Boyett testified he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance," the New York Amsterdam News reported, and “struck no one at that time.” In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave as police appeared, a bullet hit him. There is no mention in that story of what evidence was presented at Boyett's trial. Whatever it was, the jury acquitted Boyett, an outcome that indicated they accepted his account.

The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the outcome of that trial but the only source for details is that brief story in the New York Amsterdam News. Headlined "Wins Acquittal in Disturbance Charge," the story only summarized Boyett's testimony and included no details of the alleged assault on Murphy or Conn's account of the shooting. In that way it fit with the approach Black newspapers took of not reporting alleged violence against whites during the disorder. The story mistakenly identified the complainant as Kennedy Murphy rather than Timothy Murphy, and mispelled Boyett's last name as Boyette.
Lyman Quarterman shot At around 10:30 PM, Lyman Quarterman, a thirty-four-year-old Black man, was part of a crowd at 121st Street and 7th Avenue that police were struggling to disperse when he was shot in the abdomen. A few minutes earlier, Anthony Cados, a thirty-four-year-old white man, reported being assaulted nearby by "some unknown colored person or persons." While Cados lived approximately ten blocks to the south, Quarterman lived at the other end of Black Harlem, at 306 West 146th Street.

Hospital records of the ambulance called to attend Quarterman simply recorded he had a "gunshot wound of the abdomen received when shot by some unknown person at the scene of riot." The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York American, Brooklyn Citizen, and Daily Mirror, and the Associated Press, reported on March 20, and the Chicago Defender on March 23, that Quarterman had died, a mistake the Home News attributed to "many conflicting reports during the night," and the New York Evening Journal attributed more specifically to a "report having been sent out on the police teletype." By late on March 20 the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle listed Quarterman among the injured, as did the Atlanta World on March 27 and the Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide on March 30. He was one of eight men still in hospital on March 21, the New York Herald Tribune reported, and still there as late as April 8 according to the New York Age, but there are no reports that he died.

The New York Times headlined the story it published on March 20, "Police Shoot Into Rioters; Kill Negro in Harlem Mob." However, the story itself was less definitive, saying only that the "police launched an investigation to determine who fired the fatal shot." However, other white newspaper stories discounted in various ways the possibility police shot Quarterman. The New York Herald Tribune, reported that no policeman in the vicinity could remember discharging his revolver, whereas the Times Union said many had, but “only into the air to frighten the mob.” The New York Evening Journal story made an oblique reference to shots being fired into the crowd, as the culmination of a narrative justifying police actions as a response to escalating violence, in which officers from the 123rd Street station surrounded by a crowd, first drew their nightsticks “to save their own lives,” and when the crowd armed themselves with baseball bats and clubs, drew their guns and exchanged shots with the crowd. No other newspapers reproduced this narrative. The New York American simply said Quarterman had been shot by an unknown assailant, the Daily Mirror by a “stray bullet,” and the Daily News reported his assailant had escaped, stories which all implicitly assumed the police were not responsible for his death. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle explicitly expressed such an assumption in reporting Quarterman had been shot “presumably by rioters.” Only the Brooklyn Citizen stated directly that “Whether he had been shot by police or other rioters could not be determined.”

Four of the six others shot and wounded during the disorder were Black men like Quarterman, one of unknown race, and one white police officer. As in his case, no one was arrested for any of those shootings (the man with whom the police officer struggled, James Thompson, was shot and killed by police).
Crowds incited by Black women (3) Women made up a large proportion of those inside Kress’ store when Charles Hurley and Steve Urban grabbed Lino Rivera, and in the crowd inside and outside the store in the hours immediately after. During that time, three woman allegedly incited crowds, but not by calling for action. Two unnamed women, one inside Kress' store and one on 124th Street, shouted that Rivera had been beaten or killed rather than the direct calls to act attributed to men. Knocking pans to the floor, as Margaret Mitchell allegedly did, was a similarly indirect way of causing a crowd to gather, different from the speeches and pickets attributed to men.

The prominent place of women in the events that began the disorder was unusual; men typically initiated outbreaks of violence, joined later by women. In this instance, however, the site was a store in a retail district, realms of shopping and consumption associated with women. However, the women were not presented calling for action, so not cast as leaders in the same way as the men alleged to have incited crowds. Some newspapers amplified that distinction by casting these women in stereotypical terms as not entirely in control of their actions, as “emotional” in the New York Sun, as “frantic” and “excitable” in the New York Herald Tribune, as “hysterical” in the New Republic, as screaming rather than shouting in the New York Evening Journal, New York American, New York Post, and New York Sun, and the New Republic and Newsweek, as having “shrieked” in Time and “shrilled” in the New York Times, their cries as “gossip-mongering” in the New York Herald Tribune.

The women who alerted those around them to Rivera being beaten and the hearse arriving were effectively acting as protectors. Historian Marilynn Johnson has pointed that women's experiences in the racial disorders of the first half of the twentieth century included that role, as well as being victims of violence, and from mid-century, participants in looting. Where Johnson's examples are women acting who tried to protect family or loved ones from white violence, in 1935 Black women sought to protect a boy unrelated to them. Those actions were within societal expectations of women's roles, as Johnson noted, but by extending beyond family, they echoed the extension of women's role in consumption to include the political act of picketing white businesses the previous year.

Away from the store where Rivera was apprehended, and from 125th Street, no women shouting or leading crowds are mentioned in newspaper stories or arrested by police, with one exception, Roi Ottley's column in the New York Amsterdam News. He described women as inciting men to looting: “Women stood on the fringes of the mobs and dictated their choice to their men folk, who willingly obliged by bringing forth the desired article.” Ottley also cast women as inciting violence without joining the crowds on the streets in an earlier column: “Women hanging out of windows screamed applause to the reign of terror...and prodded their men-folk on with screeching invectives.” No other source reported such scenes. Writing a column rather than a news story, Ottley’s account was impressionistic rather than specific, making it difficult to link to other evidence. He also presented women in secondary roles, with men acting on their behalf, which may echo attitudes toward women as much as their behavior. Certainly, the women in and around Kress’ store took action themselves. There were also a small number of women among those arrested for activities other than inciting crowds, three for looting and three for breaking windows. There are also three women among those reported as injured/treated for injuries during the disorder

The presence of Black women in the crowds beyond 125th Street indicated by those arrests was recorded in some accounts and photographs of the disorder. The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. The Daily News highlighted their presence among those who broke windows in a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” without mentioning women breaking windows in the story itself.

Other papers, however, such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram, and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender, included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Photographs also captured only the women’s presence on 125th Street, in a crowd facing a patrolman swinging his baton, among a group being scattered by police, and knocked to the ground. Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, or New York Age.
Billiard parlor windows broken The billiard parlor at 151 Lenox Avenue, between West 117th Street and West 118th Street, is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa after he walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. The billiard parlor was one of at least six Black-owned businesses that responded to that damage by displaying signs identifying it as a "colored" business, according to another story published in La Prensa. (The MCCH business survey undertaken after the disorder also recorded the billiard parlor as having Black owners). Such signs were not an effort to establish a racial divide in the neighborhood, to segregate Black and white residents, as the author of that story claimed, but an attempt to protect stores from being the target of violence, according to stories in the Home News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, New York Post, New York World-Telegram, and Afro-American. Those in the crowds on Harlem's streets appear to have largely avoided attacks on Black-owned businesses: only five appear in the sources as having windows broken. In the case of the billiard parlor, as happened with the Williams drug store, the signs may have stopped further damage and prevented looting. There were no Black-owned businesses among those identified as having been looted.

Two other business just north of the billiard parlor appear in the La Prensa reporter's list of those that had broken windows, a branch of the Wohlmuth Tailors chain at 157 Lenox Avenue and the Castle Inn at 161 Lenox Avenue. Additional businesses in the area also likely had broken windows, as the La Prensa reporter concluded the list by noting that it did not include those that 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 one arrested during the disorder was identified as breaking the store's windows.
Black women arrested for breaking windows (3) Three Black women are among the twenty-six individuals arrested for breaking windows. They represent just under half of the women arrested, with three women arrested for looting and another for inciting a crowd. (No women identified as white are among those reported as arrested during the disorder.) Few details of their arrests and alleged actions are recorded, but the outcomes of their prosecution indicate that at least two did not actually break windows. Rose Murrell and Louise Brown were both arrested in the same area, on 8th Avenue, around 127th Street, by the same police officer. However, the different outcomes of the women's prosecutions suggest that police only produced evidence that Murrell broke a window. She was convicted in the Court of Special Sessions and sentenced to one month in the Workhouse. By contrast, Brown had the charge against her reduced to disorderly conduct, suggesting that police did not have evidence that she had broken a window but only that she had been part of a crowd on the street. While Magistrate Ford convicted her, he suspended Brown's sentence, further indicating a lack of evidence she had been responsible for damage to a store. Although newspaper stories reported that Viola Woods, the third woman, had broken a window, when she appeared in court she was charged instead with disorderly conduct. Police again appear not to have produced evidence Woods had broken a window, but in this case, Magistrate Renaud discharged Woods. That Woods was not instead convicted of disorderly conduct might be the result of being represented by a lawyer, a rare occurrence in the Magistrates Court.

The presence of Black women in the crowds on Harlem’s streets is recorded in most accounts of the disorder, but they are only rarely mentioned as participants in attacks on stores (and looting). The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. Other papers such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Their presence at the outbreak of violence distinguishes the disorder in Harlem from those that followed in subsequent decades, in which Marilynn Johnson argues women became involved after men had initiated the violence. Women's early involvement in Harlem resulted from the disorder beginning in a store, at a time when only women were present to witness what happened to Lino Rivera. (Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, or New York Age.)

Women are explicitly mentioned as participants in breaking windows in only four newspapers. The Daily News published a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” but did not include women in descriptions of attacks on store windows. The New York Times described “a riot in which roving bands of Negro men and women smashed 200 plate-glass store windows.” Two general descriptions of the disorder included women, making them participants in both breaking windows and looting. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle's description of the disorder included "smashing more than 200 windows" among other activities of "Bands of men and women, in some cases joined by whites." In the Black press, the Atlanta World included women in crowds that broke windows in a similar manner: “the members of the mob needed little provocation to start on the rampage. Using whatever weapons that were to hand, men, women and children in the mob broke hundreds of plate glass windows in stores belonging to white merchants, scattered and stole merchandise and destroyed fixtures.”

While these stories, and the photographs that accompanied them, indicate that women were part of the crowds on March 19, it remains unclear whether those women did not participate in breaking windows or did and were not recorded by reporters or arrested by police focused on men they likely considered more threatening. From a broader perspective more removed from the events of the disorder, the MCCH appeared to have concluded that women did participate, noting in its report: "Even some grown-up men and women who had probably never committed a criminal act before, but bad suffered years of privations, seized the opportunity to express their resentment against discrimination in employment and the exclusive rights of property." However, this section of the report was part of an effort to frame the disorder as less violent and threatening than it appeared in the initial newspaper stories. While noting that "it seems indisputable that the criminal element took advantage of the disorders," the previous sentence argued, "it seems equally true that many youngsters who could not be classed as criminals joined the looting crowds in a spirit of pure adventure." An earlier discussion of crowds in the disorder made a similar claim, that "Some of the destruction was carried on in a playful spirit." Including women as participants in "playful" behavior did not run counter to gender roles and stereotypes in the way that their participation in violence did. The only other place women appear in the MCCH report's discussion of the events of the disorder is as shoppers in the Kress store.
Businesses that survived (43) Both the white-owned newspapers the New York Sun and the New York Evening Journal and the Black-owned Afro-American reported that businesses in Harlem might close as a result of the disorder. The New York Sun implied that racial conflict motivated such decisions: "It is reported that many white merchants of the Harlem district have signified their intention of leaving the neighborhood just as soon as they can arrange for the disposition of their stocks." The statement in the New York Evening Journal was speculation linked to the losses suffered: "The looting of stores reached such proportions that small merchants feared they would be thrown into bankruptcy." The Afro-American's correspondent offered a similar assessment: "[Many businesses] probably will never open again because their owners are bankrupt as a result of the looting of stores and lack of insurance to cover the losses."

There is little direct evidence that businesses actually closed as a result of the disorder. Indirect evidence of which businesses continued to operate in Harlem after the disorder is provided by the business survey undertaken by the MCCH between June and December 1935. While the survey identified more than 10,000 businesses, other sources do indicate that it did miss some businesses and sometimes incorrectly recorded addresses. In most cases, the owner and the business name were also not recorded, so they cannot be matched to looted businesses with certainty. In addition, some of the Tax Department building photographs taken between 1939 and 1941 are taken from close enough to allow individual businesses to be identified. In other cases, the photographs are taken from a distance or angle that does not show the address of the business that was looted.

Forty-six of the sixty-six addresses reported as having being looted can be identified in those sources; forty-one stores continued in business after the disorder. Among that group are seven of the businesses whose owners sued the city for damages after the disorder; five of those owners did go out of business, and in fourteen cases there is no evidence to establish what happened (an additional eighty owners who filed suits are not identified in the sources).
James Wrigley assaulted At 12:45 AM, forty-nine-year-old James Wrigley, a white security guard from Teaneck, New Jersey, suffered a serious head injury. Several newspaper reports identified Wrigley as an employee of the Holmes Protective Agency, which apparently provided private police officers (security guards) for one or more of the stores on 125th Street.

The conflicting press accounts of how he came to be injured put the case in different categories of assault. As only the New York Times provided a specific time for the assault on Wrigley, and a detailed account of his injuries, Wrigley has been categorized here as having been hit by rocks. The newspaper’s story included Wrigley among the victims of “stone-throwers,” “struck by a stone at 126th Street and Seventh Avenue, receiving cuts about both eyes and a serious head injury, possibly a concussion of the brain.” The Home News likewise cast him as “another victim of the rock hurlers,” but then proceeded to report Wrigley was “set upon by several colored men [and] beaten into unconsciousness before he was able to draw his gun.” The New York Evening Journal also reported Wrigley had been “seized and beaten,” an attack that apparently did not draw attention as the story went on to recount that “Radio patrol cars found him lying on the pavement, unconscious, suffering from concussion of the brain.” The Daily News, which published no details of the assault, was the only other publication to report Wrigley was found unconscious in an alley. The Associated Press reporter’s brief summary opted for this second narrative that Wrigley had been attacked by a gang. The New York American, Daily News, New York Post, New York Evening Journal, and Home News only included Wrigley in their lists of the injured. He also appeared in lists of the injured in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. Wrigley's injury was apparently serious enough that he was one of the eight men that the New York Herald Tribune reported was still in the hospital on March 21.

The area around the intersection of 7th Avenue and West 125th Street where Wrigley was struck down saw a cluster of assaults on white men and women throughout the disorder, including other civilians and police hit by rocks, as well as crowds breaking windows and looting. Those hit by objects commonly suffered head injuries, as Wrigley did, although no others were reported as having been knocked unconscious.
William Ken assaulted William Ken, a white employee of the Blue Heaven Restaurant, was attacked by a group as he went to enter the business at 378 Lenox Avenue, near 129th Street. He was hit several times before two Black coworkers dragged him into the store and convinced the crowd to move on. Ken was not injured enough to seek medical attention.

When this alleged assault took place was not reported. Crowds had arrived on this block of Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street by 11:30 PM and remained for several hours. Four other assaults allegedly occurred in the area between midnight and 2:00 AM, suggesting crowds on the street that could have targeted Ken in that period. The MCCH business survey undertaken after the disorder described the business as a bar and grill, so Ken may have been arriving to start a night shift. If so, the alleged assault most likely took place around midnight. Ken lived in East Harlem, at 2085 Lexington Avenue, so would not have encountered signs of the disorder until he reached the vicinity of Lenox Avenue.

The only evidence of this attack wa a brief account in the New York Evening Journal, a publication that focused more of its reporting on violence against whites than any other newspaper. In all, the New York Evening Journal and New York Post reported six assaults on whites that appeared in no other sources. The story presented Ken as an example of a particular group of white victims of violence, “those regularly employed in Harlem establishments.” The label implied indiscriminate racial violence. To the contrary, given the grievances of residents regarding the failure of white businesses to hire Black staff, whites who worked in Harlem like Ken seemed to be the very likely targets of violence.
Castle Inn saloon windows broken The Castle Inn saloon at 161 Lenox Avenue, between West 117th Street and West 118th Street, is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa after he walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. The saloon was one of at least six businesses that responded to that damage by displaying signs identifying it as a "colored" business, according to another story published in La Prensa. Such signs were not an effort to establish a racial divide in the neighborhood, to segregate Black and white residents, as the author of that story claimed, but an attempt to protect stores from being the target of violence, according to stories in the Home News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, New York Post, New York World-Telegram, and Afro-American. Those in the crowds on Harlem's streets appear to have largely avoided attacks on Black-owned businesses: only five appear in the sources as having windows broken. In the case of the saloon, as happened with the Williams drug store, the signs may have limited the damage and prevented looting. There are no Black-owned businesses among those identified as having been looted. However, it is possible that the Castle Inn was not a Black-owned business. The MCCH business survey undertaken after the disorder recorded the saloon as having white owners. A notice of a liquor license published in the New York Age in November 1934 identified the owner as John Diodato.

Two other business just near the saloon appear in the La Prensa reporter's list of those that had broken windows, a branch of the Wohlmuth Tailors chain at 157 Lenox Avenue and a billiard parlor at 151 Lenox Avenue. Additional businesses in the area also likely had broken windows as the La Prensa reporter concluded the list by noting that it did not include those that 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 one arrested during the disorder was identified as having broken the store's windows.
Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted (Part 2) 11 plain 2024-01-28T01:16:31+00:00
Until police found Rivera, newspapers described the boy caught shoplifting as a younger Black child, in line with the rumors and leaflets circulating in Harlem. Louise Thompson heard from the women she spoke to in Kress' store that a "colored boy" aged ten to twelve years had been beaten. The signs carried by the Young Liberators who picketed the store an hour or so later referred to a "Negro child," while the leaflets their organization distributed another hour later later described a "12 year old Negro boy." The first newspaper stories repeated those descriptions. The New York American mentioned a "colored boy" and a "10-year-old Negro boy," the Daily News a 12-year-old "colored boy," the New York Evening Journal a 15-year-old "Negro boy," the Daily Mirror a "little colored boy," the Home News a "young colored boy," and the New York Sun a "Negro boy." Early stories in some Black newspapers featured similar descriptions, a "small Negro boy" in the Norfolk Journal and Guide and a 10-year-old "colored boy" in the Indianapolis Recorder on March 23, or simply referred to the boy's age, not his race, a 16-year-old boy in the Atlanta World on March 21, a 12-year-old boy in the New York Age, a 14-year-old boy in the Chicago Defender, and a 16-year-old boy in the Afro-American and Pittsburgh Courier on March 23. Newspapers published on March 20 after police found Rivera identified him as a 16-year-old Puerto Rican, in the New York Post, New York World-Telegram, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle or a "Puerto Rican youth" in the New York Herald Tribune, Times Union, and Brooklyn Citizen (although later in that story Rivera was referred to as a "Negro"). (The New York World-Telegram also pointed to the differences between Rivera and the boy of the rumors by putting Negro in quotation marks when reporting the rumors and the text of the Young Liberators leaflet.) By contrast, the New York Times referred to a 16-year-old "Negro boy" even after Rivera had been found, as did the New York Sun and New York Evening Journal. While the New York Times did eventually identify Rivera as Puerto Rican when he appeared in the Adolescents court after the disorder, the New York Evening Journal continued to describe Rivera as "Negro," while the New York Sun made no mention of his race. Those newspapers' persistent use of "Negro" may have been intended to convey that Rivera was dark-skinned; the New York American described him in those terms, as a "dark-skinned 16-year-old Porto Rican" in a story reporting an interview with the boy in his home, while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described him as a "Negro born in Porto Rico." Editions of the other newspapers published after Rivera was found, including the Black newspapers, simply switched to identify him as Puerto Rican. (Historian Lorrin Thomas argued that the New York Amsterdam News "failed to identify Rivera as Puerto Rican, referring to him instead as a 'young Negro boy,'" but did not provide a citation. The March 23 issue of that newspaper is missing the news sections, but the March 30 issue identified Rivera as a "16-year-old Puerto Rican youth.")

Stories in the New York Evening Journal, Home News, La Prensa, and Daily Worker misidentified Hurley and Urban as store detectives. None mentioned the store detective, Smith, perhaps because he was not bitten and therefore not identified in any official records. He may also have been confused with Jackson Smith, the store manager. Many stories gave the manager a larger role than he played, involved in grabbing Rivera and making the decision to release him with Rivera in this office. That expanded role came at the expense not only of the store detective but also the police. Only the Daily News, and a vague statement in the New York Post story of what Rivera said mentioned that officers were at the store. The Daily News included only Eldridge, misidentifying him as the officer who released Rivera. Rivera said “two policeman came in” after he bit the men, the New York Post reported. The New York Evening Journal, Daily News, Atlanta World, and Philadelphia Tribune stories quoting Rivera omitted that statement.

Several newspaper stories included a Black woman interceding or screaming when the store staff grabbed Rivera, which some accounts claimed precipitated broader disorder. The statements of those on the scene suggest any outcry came when Donahue and Urban took Rivera into the basement. Rivera testified in the public hearing that a woman screamed “They’re going to take him down the cellar and beat him up!” While Hurley made no mention of that scream, L. F. Cole, a thirty-year-old Black clerk, did testify that when he saw Donahue and Urban taking Rivera to the basement “a woman made a statement that the boy had been struck.” Cole's choice not to describe the woman as screaming suggests the possibility that the woman simply called out, with the gendered language of the press rendering any shouting by a woman as a scream. "They're beating that boy! They're killing him!" were the “screams” reported by the New York Evening Journal. Speeding up events, the New York American, New York Post, and Atlanta World, and the New Republic, describe the woman as running into the street, screaming "Kress beat a colored boy! Kress Beat a colored boy!" according to the New York American. The New York Sun made this response collective: “Emotional Negro women shouted that the boy was being beaten and this information was quickly relayed to the curious crowds which had gathered in front of the store.” Rather than reacting, the woman intervened in the narrative presented in Home News and La Prensa, and was pushed aside by Hurley, after which she screamed.

Margaret Mitchell was identified as the woman who reacted to Rivera being grabbed in the New York Evening Journal, Home News, Philadelphia Tribune, and La Prensa (and later in stories about those arrested in the New York Amsterdam News, Afro-American, New York Post, and New York Times). Here journalists with a truncated timeline of events were assuming that as she was arrested in Kress’ store it must have been when Rivera was grabbed. However, Donahue told the public hearing he had not made an arrest, and none of the store staff mentioned an arrest at this time. The circumstances of Mitchell's arrest recorded by police, the testimony of Louise Thompson, and the New York Sun story suggest that it took place after the store was closed, as police tried to clear out the women who remained inside, with an officer named Johnson making the arrest. Similarly, in describing customers struggling with Hurley and Urban or attacking displays as Rivera was taken away, the narratives of the New York Sun, La Prensa, and the Home News collapsed together events that took place at different times. Testimony in the public hearings identified that struggle as coming later, when Kress’ manager decided to close the store and police cleared out those inside.

Several newspapers also published statements by Rivera made either at the West 123rd Street station after Eldridge, awoken at 1:30 AM, had located him and brought him to a police station around 2:00 AM, or in his home the next day that provided more details of what happened before and when he was grabbed than the broad narratives. The New York Evening Journal, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, New York Post, New York Sun, Atlanta World, and Philadelphia Tribune quoted Rivera at the police station describing biting the men and the threat to beat him that had precipitated that struggle. In an ANS agency photograph of Rivera standing with Lt. Battle taken at that time, journalists can be seen taking notes. It’s not clear if they questioned Rivera directly, or recorded answers he gave to police officers: the Daily News reported his statements as told to Deputy Chief Inspector Frances Kear, the New York Evening Journal and New York Sun reported he talked to Captain Richard Oliver, and the New York Herald Tribune quoted Eldridge rather than Rivera. The New York Evening Journal story also mentioned the reporter speaking with Rivera. The New York World-Telegram and New York Herald Tribune published stories quoting statements made by Rivera at this home later on March 20; a New York American story combined statements from the station and at his home. The Daily News simply published a photograph of Rivera flexing his biceps, presumably to demonstrate that he was unharmed. The information that before entering Kress', Rivera had gone to Brooklyn looking for work, having left high school six months earlier, that his mother needed help because his father was dead, was reported in the interviews published in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune. His father's death was also reported in La Prensa and the Brooklyn Citizen. Only the New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, and New York Sun reported that Rivera went to a show after returning from Brooklyn. Only La Prensa reported that Rivera had a job when he first left school. That interview with Rivera in his home focused on emphasizing his lack of responsibility for the disorder and willingness to try to pacify the crowds had he been asked, and contained no details of what had happened in the store as he did not want to talk about them. That focus was in line with La Prensa's concern to distance Puerto Rican residents from the disorder. Rivera gave an account of what happened in the store again when he appeared in the Adolescents Court on March 23 for inserting slugs in a subway turnstile before the disorder, in answer to questions from the magistrate.

The MCCH public hearings elicited more details of the assault, with Rivera, the two police officers, and Hurley all testifying, together with Jackson Smith, the store manager. Provided in five separate hearings spread over nearly six weeks, that testimony described the roles of Officers Donahue and Eldridge, which were missing from the initial newspaper reports. Few newspapers included these new details in their stories about the hearings. The most extensively reported hearing was the first, on March 30, in which Donahue testified. A majority of newspapers highlighted Donahue’s decision to release Rivera through the rear of the store rather than in view of concerned customers as a mistake, with several reporting that Donahue had admitted that mistake. However, the hearing transcript did not include such a statement. Instead, it was Edward Kuntz, one of the ILD lawyers in the audience, who offered that assessment while questioning the officer. After Donahue testified that crowds on 125th Street caused him to take Rivera into the store, Kuntz commented, “If you had let the boy go at that time there would not have been any excitement.” Eldridge and Hurley did not testify until three weeks later, and Jackson Smith until two weeks after that, when they were not given any attention in the briefer newspaper stories about those hearings.
- Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted in secondary sources
- Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted (Part 1)
Woolworth's 5 & 10c store windows broken Woolworth's 5 & 10c store at 210 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 Woolworth's store was one building to the west of the corner of 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "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). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out; the three department stores immediately west of Woolworth's store are included. The reporter for La Prensa identified a total of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. Where the other newspapers mentioned only stores between 7th Avenue and Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, the La Prensa reporter walked all the way to 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").

The only other mention of windows broken in Woolworth's store is a passing reference in the New York Evening Journal: "Windows were smashed and the rioting Negroes swarmed into stores. First the Woolworth "five and ten" then McCrory's and then the department store right and left in both sides of the street.” (No other sources reported such looting, so that claim was apparently a product of the sensationalization and exaggeration that marked that publication's stories about the disorder.) No one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. Woolworth's 5 & 10c store appears in the MCCH business survey and is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.