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

Philip Jaross' Tailor's shop looted

Sometime during the disorder, Philip Jaross' Tailor's shop at 531 Lenox Avenue, between West 136th and West 137th Street. Jaross is recorded as the complainant in the prosecution of Earl Davis, a twenty-six-year-old Black man, for Petit Larceny in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court. There is no mention of this event in any other sources. It is the northernmost reported looting of the disorder, one of a small number of events north of West 135th Street. A charge of petit larceny suggests that Davis was not alleged to have broken the store window or otherwise gained entry to the building, just to have stolen merchandise of low value.

Davis is among those named as charged with petit larceny in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette (he is not in the list published in the New York Evening Journal). When Davis appeared in court on March 20, Magistrate Ford held him for the Court of Special Sessions, on bail of $100. There is no record of the outcome of that prosecution.

The investigator for the MCCH Business survey noted that Jaross' Merchant Tailors was a "Store operated by two Jewish men. Carry a cheap line of tailor made clothes. Been here 3 1/2 years." Its presence in the survey indicates that it continued to operate after the disorder, and was still doing so when the Tax Department photographed the building between 1939 and 1941.

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