This page was created by Anonymous.

This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

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

[Photograph] "Many a larder was filled during the all-night riot....," Daily News, March 21, 1935, 30.

Full caption: "Many a larder was filled during the all-night riot. Here are policemen guarding store at 2044 Seventh Ave., after windows were smashed and contents looted."

Pittsburgh Courier, March 30, 1935, 3 - headline: "One of Stores Looted by Harlem Rioters," with the same caption.

Afro-American, March 30, 1935, 17 - caption: "Many Chickens Freed--Cop guards what was left of this poultry store after the riot swept through. Live and dressed poultry was plentiful and free for once."

This copyrighted photograph can be seen at Newspapers.com: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/114672099/many-a-larder-was-filled-during-the-all/

In the Daily News
In the Pittsburgh Courier
In the Afro-American

This page is referenced by:

Lafayette Market looted The Lafayette Market at 2044 7th Avenue, on the northwest corner of West 122nd Street, was looted at sometime during the disorder. The Daily News published a photograph of the damaged store on March 21. All the market's display windows were missing in the photograph, although there was no glass and little other debris visible. It was likely that store staff had cleaned up and swept the street before the photograph was taken, sometime the day after the disorder given that the image was taken in daylight and published the next day. The window displays had been emptied of goods, but the photograph did not offer a clear view of the extent of the looting of the store's interior — although it did indicate that the store could have been accessed through the corner window display. The caption's phrasing also left ambiguous the extent of the looting; the statement that "windows were smashed and contents looted" could refer to the contents of the windows or the store more broadly. (The caption of the photograph in the Afro-American described the business as a "poultry store." The signage, cropped out of that version of the photograph, indicated it sold a wider range of groceries.) Channing Tobias, the fifty-three-year-old Black secretary of the Colored Division of the National Council of the YMCA, lived in the building next to the Lafayette Market, at 203 West 122nd Street. Interviewed there after the disorder by E. Franklin Frazier, he mentioned that "there was not a whole window in this store right here" after the disorder, likely a reference to the market.

Crowds pushed off the block of West 125th Street around the Kress store toward 7th Avenue later moved up and down the avenues, leading to multiple reports of assaults, broken windows, and looting in the area around the Lafayette Market. When some of that violence took place was not specified in the sources, but a cluster did occur between 11:00 PM and 12:30 AM, including the assault of a white man a few buildings west of the market on 122nd Street and rocks thrown at Fred Campbell's car as he sat stopped at the traffic lights at the intersection across the avenue from the market, as well as the looting of a delicatessen a block north. Campbell described considerable disorder in the area around Lafayette Market, crashes and shots being fired, store windows shattering, and police trying to disperse crowds. Channing Tobias, awake in his home in the next building, heard "smashing of glasses [sic] and the firing of guns" between midnight and 1:00 AM. The gunshots he heard suggested that looting of the store began around midnight, the time observers noticed such attacks intensified.

Almost as many Black-owned as white-owned businesses operated on the block on which the Lafayette Market was located. The stationery store visible in the storefront next to the market was one of those Black-owned business, according to the MCCH business survey. It was a "[n]eat store, carries full line of cigars, cigarettes and candies" according to the investigator who visited it. That store did not appear to have been attacked or looted, as the windows visible in the photograph were intact, offering evidence that crowds avoided Black-owned businesses during the disorder.

Although the caption described the police officer standing in front of the market's doors as "guarding" the store, he was more likely to have been patrolling the area monitoring passersby, or stationed at the intersection, behind where the photographer stood to take the image. There were far too many damaged and looted businesses in Harlem for police to be guarding them individually the day after the disorder. Police officers featured in several other photographs of damaged buildings taken after the disorder (and some taken during the night).

Albert Bass, a twenty-seven-year-old Black man, was likely arrested in the vicinity of the market during the disorder sometime after midnight. Salvatore Marrone, with his address recorded as 2044 7th Avenue, was the complainant against Bass in the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book. While both the list published in the New York Evening Journal and the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge against Bass as burglary, when he was arraigned in the Magistrate's Court he was charged with Disorderly Conduct. That change indicated that police had encountered Bass been on the street in the area of the looted store but had no evidence he had either broken windows or taken merchandise. Magistrate Renaud convicted Bass and ordered him to pay a $50 or spend five days in the Workhouse, according to the docket book. The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the sentence as a fine of $25, which suggested he took that option.

The Lafayette Market continued to operate after the disorder. The store was included in the MCCH business survey in the second half of 1935, categorized as a white-owned meat market. The investigator's notes described it as "Very neat - hires one Negro as clerk." It was also visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.