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• 1 2021-09-16T19:29:44+00:00 Arrests for looting (60) 78 plain 2024-02-12T19:45:36+00:00 Details of the circumstances in which police made arrests for looting can be found for twenty-seven of the sixty people taken into custody. Police officers most often had seen crowds in front of stores or heard glass breaking, resulting in twelve arrests. Less often they saw individuals reaching into windows or coming out of stores, making six arrests. Officers had to come from some distance to make an arrest — from cars patrolling the streets, from positions on intersections, or from guarding stores across the street. As a result, officers often fired guns at suspected looters — both the individuals police killed, Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, allegedly had been seen looting — and did not get to the scene in time to arrest all those involved before they ran off. On only two of the twelve occasions police saw crowds taking goods from stores was there evidence that they arrested several people at the same time, three men at the A & P grocery store at 510 Lenox Avenue and two men at 1916 7th Avenue. A man and a woman were also arrested at the same time at 340 Lenox Avenue, but there were no details of the circumstances of those arrests. There are two other police officers that the Magistrates Court docket book recorded as each having arrested three men at the same address, the Romanoff Drug Store at 375 Lenox Avenue and the Butler Food Market at 1974 7th Avenue, likely indicating they were arrested at the same time, but no sources provide details of those arrests. More than one person was arrested for looting four other stores, at 372 Lenox Avenue, 374 Lenox Avenue, 400 Lenox Avenue, and 200 West 128th Street, but those arrests came at different times. Police also made nine arrests away from the business the men had allegedly looted. There was no information on the circumstances of the remaining thirty-one arrests for looting.
  
  Several of those police did arrest, at least, denied they had been involved in looting (details are not available for all those arrested). Arthur Merritt and Hezekiah Wright said they had been part of a crowd drawn to the scene as police had been. Others admitted having done only some of what police alleged: Arnold Ford and Horace Fowler said that they had taken merchandise but not broken windows to gain access to a business; Charles Saunders and Edward Larry said that they had not gone into a store but had picked up merchandise off the street (which Arnold Ford later told his probation officer that he had done); and Carl Jones and Thomas Jackson said that they had broken windows but not taken merchandise. Others may have offered similar statements in the police line-up the morning after the disorder; a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote “Many in the lineup still carried things they admitted picking up in the street, but denied reaching into broken shop windows to secure" [sic?]. Cigarettes were the favorite item "found." A story in the New York Sun included a similar claim, that “Many admitted thefts from stores damaged during the riot, stealing everything from toothbrushes to shirts and groceries, but all denied breaking the store windows, insisting that they had picked up the articles from the street after others had thrown them out of stores.” In court such admissions warranted lesser charges than burglary. More broadly, they distinguished those who made them from looters, from those who attacked stores and created disorder, and associated them instead with onlookers and passersby whose behavior was less out of the ordinary.
  
  Merchandise that police allegedly found in an individual’s possession provided the basis for officers to make arrests, and was central to the arrests of the nine individuals police did not allegedly witness taking goods from stores. This was the case often enough that police estimated “that the plunder recovered so far today will fill a ton truck,” according to the New York Sun. Photographs showed individuals arrested for looting carrying the merchandise they had allegedly stolen. The image below published in the New York Evening Journal shows a man in the foreground carrying a full shopping bag labeled as coming from Rex Food Market at 348 Lenox Avenue, as well as what appears to be an alarm clock and at least one other item. Behind him a second man carries three metal boxes in his left hand, and in his right hand, just visible in the background, a full shopping bag of the same design as the first man. The Afro-American incorporated the details of the photograph, which it did not publish, into a story: to illustrate the claim that "Police arrested pillagers wherever they could," the reporter added "One man was arrested carrying three new steel cash boxes taken from a stationary store. Another had a shopping bag full of loot." (The New York Herald Tribune published an Associated Press image of the same scene taken a second earlier or later, showing the man in the foreground with his head turned slightly more toward the police officer behind him, and that officer with his nightstick raised slightly higher, in front of his face.)
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  A third man arrested for looting photographed by the New York Evening Journal was carrying even larger items, a tall bin containing at least four or five pots of various sizes, with perhaps more merchandise not sticking out the top. The police officer following him is carrying two wooden poles, perhaps brooms or mops also found in the man's possession — although it's not clear he could have carried any more than he did in the photograph. The man in the images may be James Williams. Among those arrested for looting for which there was information on goods allegedly found in their possession, only he was charged with taking hardware.
  
  The arrested men in the photographs are carrying large amounts of merchandise that would have attracted the attention of police looking for looters. Three of those arrested away from looted stores allegedly had a similar quantity of goods in their possession. James Williams was carrying four pots of different sizes, two pans, a pitcher, two pails, a bread box and a cloth lamp. Edward Larry had a box containing eight shirts (although the police officer may not have been able to see them as Larry was in a taxi). Jean Jacquelin had two ladies’ suits and two pairs of trousers in his possession, at 5:40 AM. Police similarly alleged that some those arrested at looted locations carried bulky items: Lawrence Humphrey had a 50lb bag of rice; Thomas Babbitt had two cases of soap.
  
  However, police evidently also stopped four others they had not allegedly seen looting who had nothing obvious in their possession. Arnold Ford had a package that cannot have been large; it contained three cakes of soap, a can of shoe polish, two pairs of garters, six spools of thread, a jar of Vaseline, and three packets of tea, with a value of $1.15. John Henry and Oscar Leacock between them had $75 of jewelry. Patrolman William Clements stopped Edward Larry after observing him in a taxi without being able to see if he had anything in his possession. The relatively indiscriminate nature of police arrests for looting was also evident in a comment made during the line-up of those arrested before they were taken to court. “One Negro woman still had in her possession five milk bottles,” a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote. “Police were doubtful that she drank as much milk as all that.” Storeowners claims to be able to identify the goods found in the possession of those arrested away from the scene as coming from their stores are more credible in the case of jewelry and clothing than more commonplace items such as pans or soap. Merchandise police claim to have found in the possession of several of those arrested at looted stores was even more unexceptional and unlikely to have been able to be identified by a storeowner — unless it was in a labeled shopping bag like those visible in the the New York Evening Journal photograph: Amie Taylor had eighteen packets of gum; Arthur Merritt had two cans of beans, a can of milk, and a can of tuna fish; Joseph Wade had several toy pistols; Milton Ackerman had two rolls of paper, worth five cents, and eight cents' worth of napkins; Raymond Easley had an unspecified number of cigars. Perhaps more noteworthy in the context of the disorder were the man’s suit and a lady’s coat carried by Horace Fowler and the bag of laundry in Lamter Jackson’s possession.
  
  On three occasions, police effectively, and in one case apparently literally, found goods when none were in the possession of an individual when an arrest was made. Officers claimed Hezekiel Wright and Thomas Jackson had dropped items before they got to the men. With merchandise thrown from stores spread over many sections of Harlem’s sidewalk, goods would likely have been nearby anyone police confronted. Police took until sometime in early April to mention the looted horn and socket set they claimed Lloyd Hobbs had in his possession when Officer McInerney shot him, after not recording them as evidence at the time of the shooting. After police witnesses produced the items during testimony before the MCCH in May, the New York Age, New York Amsterdam News, and the New York World-Telegram reported that police could not explain where that evidence had been before it was delivered to the District Attorney. Witnesses at the scene said Hobbs had not been carrying anything.
  
  While the newspaper reports of the police line-up suggest that many of those arrested still had the goods they had allegedly stolen in their possession as they were being taken to court, in three cases, police apparently could not produce allegedly stolen merchandise or convincing evidence that it existed, as prosecutors reduced the charge against those individuals from burglary or larceny to unlawful entry and disorderly conduct. (A lack of evidence of looting may also be why ten of those named in published lists of those arrested for looting did not appear in court.) Magistrates transferred an additional seven defendants to the Court of Special Sessions, indicating that prosecutors did not provide adequate evidence of at least one element of a burglary charge.

  Arrests (128)

• 1 2021-04-08T15:59:19+00:00 Arrests for looting away from the scene (9) 65 plain 2024-02-11T03:51:21+00:00 While police arrested most of those they alleged had been looting at the scene, having witnessed their actions, one third (9 of 27) were arrested at other locations at least several blocks from the business that had been looted. (For just over half of the arrests (33/60) the sources do not provide a location of arrest, although the looted store is identified in fourteen cases). Two of those arrests occurred the day after the disorder; the other seven are on the map below.
  
  
  
  What caused police to stop these men is not made clear in any sources. The most likely reason is that they were carrying goods that police suspected might have been looted, but photographs in newspapers of police reportedly searching Black men for weapons suggest that officers more indiscriminately stopped people on the street. Certainly police treatment of Black residents of Harlem at other times indicates that they would not have felt any need to have a justification for stopping and searching those they encountered during the disorder. Such policing extended to vehicles as well as pedestrians. Police had stopped a car to search its occupants for weapons in an image taken by a New York Evening Journal photographer, and one of those arrested for looting, Edward Larry, had been observed in a taxi. 
  
  Two photographs of men arrested for looting show individuals carrying large amounts of merchandise that would have attracted the attention of police on the lookout for looters. The men are not identified. The two men in a photograph published in the New York Evening Journal are carrying shopping bags from the Rex Food Market at 348 Lenox Avenue, one of the businesses whose owner sued the city for damages, so could be two of the sixteen men arrested for looting an unknown location.
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  The man in the second photograph, also published in the New York Evening Journal, carrying a tall bin containing at least four or five pots of various sizes, with perhaps more merchandise not sticking out of the top, might be James Williams. One of three men arrested away from looted stores who allegedly had a quantity of goods in their possession, the affidavit recorded Williams was carrying four pots of different sizes, two pans, a pitcher, two pails, a bread box and a cloth lamp. Edward Larry had a box containing eight shirts (although the police officer may not have been able to see them as Larry was in a taxi). Jean Jacquelin had two ladies’ suits and two pairs of trousers in his possession.
  
  However, police evidently also stopped others they had not allegedly seen looting who had nothing obvious in their possession. Arnold Ford had a package that cannot have been large; it contained three cakes of soap, a can of shoe polish, two pairs of garters, six spools of thread, a jar of Vaseline, and three packets of tea, with a value of $1.15. John Henry and Oscar Leacock between them had $75 of jewelry, most likely watches and rings rather than anything more bulky. The relatively indiscriminate nature of police arrests for looting is also evident in a comment reportedly made during the line-up of those arrested before they were taken to court. “One Negro woman still had in her possession five milk bottles,” a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote. “Police were doubtful that she drank as much milk as all that.”
  
  Storeowners claimed to be able to identify the goods found in the possession of eight of the nine men arrested away from the scene of their alleged looting. Those statements are more credible in the case of jewelry and clothing than more commonplace items such as pans or soap — although identification of such items might have been helped if they were in shopping bags like those being carried by the men in the New York Evening Journal photograph. In the case of Larry, the storeowner also identified him as one of the men who had robbed his store.
  
  None of the reports of the arrest of Joseph Moore mention what items, if any, he had in his possession when Patrolman Louis Frikser arrested him. A few minutes earlier Frisker had arrested Arnold Ford, who was carrying a small package. The two men were prosecuted together, charged with taking merchandise from Harry Lash's 5c and 10c store, although the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge against Moore as "Acc'd stolen goods during the riot" not "Burglarized store during riot" as in Ford's case. The first charge suggested Moore had not obtained whatever goods he had allegedly stolen directly from the store, a version of events not mentioned anywhere else. Prosecutors erased any distinction in the charges against Ford and Moore in the Harlem Magistrate Court, charging both with burglary.
  
  Frisker arrested Ford and Moore on the Third Avenue Bridge, a distance from store. It is not clear if the patrolman had been deployed on the bridge in response to the disorder or the location was a part of a regular patrol. Both men lived in the Bronx, near to the bridge, which was one of five thoroughfares between 127th Street and 155th Street connecting Harlem to the Bronx. 
  
  Police arrested six other men on the major avenues running through Harlem; Henry and Leacock and Williams on Lenox Avenue, Larry on 7th Avenue, and Jacquelin on 8th Avenue. Williams was the farthest from the store he had allegedly looted; Henry and Leacock were the closest. Police arrested all three, and Edward Larry, in areas which saw clusters of attacks on stores and violence, bringing numbers of police who the men would have had to pass by. All four, and Ford and Moore, may have been on their way home as they were arrested between the stores they allegedly looted and their homes. Police arrested Jacquelin on Eighth Avenue at the very end of the disorder, when cars were patrolling the avenue. Ten minutes earlier officers in a patrol car on the avenue a block north had shot and killed James Thompson while trying to arrest him for allegedly looting a grocery store. Jacquelin lived close by, several buildings to the east on West 127th Street, so was leaving home rather than returning there.
  
  The remaining two men police arrested without witnessing their alleged looting were arrested in the late afternoon of March 20, after the disorder. Detective Mark Redmond of the 28th Precinct first arrested arrested Clifford Mitchell at his home, 362 Lenox Avenue, although the address the Magistrates Court clerk recorded for Mitchell, likely in error, is 363 Lenox Avenue, a building across the street. An hour later, Detective Frank McKenna, also from the 28th Precinct, arrested Daughty Shavos at his home at 40 West 119th Street. Between them, Shavos and Mitchell allegedly had $50 of clothing in their possession, which Louis Levy identified as coming from his store. What led police to the men's homes is not mentioned in any sources. They may have attracted police attention trying to sell the clothing. It is also possible that Mitchell gave police Shavos' name.
  
  Judges in the Court of Special Sessions convicted two of these men, Henry and Leacock, and acquitted two others, Williams and Jacquelin. Shavos was also tried in the Court of Special Sessions, but there is no record of the outcome. The grand jury dismissed the charges against Mitchell, and indicted Moore, Larry, and Ford. The later two pled guilty in the Court of General Sessions, while the judge dismissed the charges against Moore.
• 1 2022-09-03T17:48:37+00:00 Arrests (128) 51 plain 2024-06-03T21:35:22+00:00 Police records, legal records, and newspapers contained information on 128 arrests made by police across a period of approximately twelve hours from around 5:00 PM to 5:40 AM. The sources included information on the precise timing of only forty-seven arrests, just over one-third (37%) of the total. Most of those occurred between 10:30 PM and 1:30 AM. The final arrests of the riot, at 5:00 AM and 5:40 AM, came after a two-hour period without arrests with known times, and an hour after Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe had declared the streets quiet. They were made by patrolmen patrolling the avenues in radio cars. Three arrests were made after the disorder. Police arrested two men arrested in their homes and a third man in an unknown location.
  
  Few of those arrests were made in the early hours of the disorder when it was concentrated on or around 125th Street. For much of that time, there were relatively few police on the street so they were perhaps too outnumbered to make arrests, as Lt. Battle later told his biographer Langston Hughes. However, two newspaper stories did suggest that some of the forty-nine arrests for which there was no information on time or location could have been made during this time. The New York Herald Tribune reported that "By 11 p.m. both the West 123d Street and West 135th Street police stations were filled with suspects arrested for alleged assaults with rocks, bludgeons, knives and revolver butts." The Home News included a similar statement in its story: "By midnight both the W. 123d St. and W. 135th St. stations were filled with suspects arrested for assaults with rocks, knives and clubs." The New York Herald Tribune story mentioned a total of fifty arrests, likely a number police gave a reporter around the same time so an interim total reflecting when that edition of the newspaper was finalized. The New York Times, a morning newspaper like the New York Herald Tribune, also reported fifty arrests in its story. Only sixteen arrests with a known time occurred before 11:00 PM, with an additional five arrests before midnight. Newspapers published later reported larger totals closer to the number identified here: "100 or more under arrest" in the New York Evening Journal; "113 men and women, mostly Negroes, under arrest" in the New York Post; "120 prisoners" in the New York World Telegram; "more than 120 arrested" in the Times Union; "more than 125 arrested" in the Home News; "127 prisoners" in the New York American; "more than 150 under arrest" in the New York Sun; and "150 arrests" in the weekly Afro-American published on March 23. Many of those numbers would have been provided by police when those arrested were arraigned in the two Magistrates Courts that had jurisdictions over sections of Harlem. If there were additional people arrested beyond the 128 men and women identified here, they likely were not prosecuted as the research included the docket books that listed all those who appeared in the Magistrates Court.
  
  There were locations for seventy-nine of the 128 arrests, 62% of the total. Police made arrests across a wide area of Harlem, with concentrations on 125th Street, where Kress' store drew crowds, on Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street, and on 7th Avenue between 125th and 130th Streets, where extensive damage and looting was reported.
  
  Only eleven (14%) of those arrests took place above 130th Street; however, the proportion may have been greater. Those arrested north of 130th Street were arraigned in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court as that street was the boundary between the 28th Precinct based at West 123rd Street station and the 32nd Precinct based at the West 135th Street station. Thirty-two of the 115 (28%) people arrested whose names appeared in docket books were arraigned in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court indicating they had been arrested north of 130th Street. That proportion was in line with a story in the Home News that more than 90 arrests had been made by police at the West 123rd Street station. The docket books showed that statement was not accurate in the sense that officers based at that station made that many arrests, but it would reflect the number of arrests made within the precinct’s boundaries, the area south of 130th Street.
  
  
  
  Police most commonly alleged that those they arrested had been looting, in sixty of the 100 arrests (60%) for which that information can be found. Despite their relative frequency, arrests for looting related to only a small proportion of the looted stores. Of the sixty-five looted businesses identified here, police made arrests related to twenty-eight (43%) locations. Police made an additional eighteen arrests for alleged looting that could be related to one of the other thirty-seven businesses identified as having been looted in the sources. However, those sixty-five businesses did not represent all those that were looted: only twenty-seven of the 171 businesses who sued or tried to sue the city were identified in the sources, meaning that a total of at least 133 businesses were looted (assuming all 65 of the identified businesses are among those that filed suits), with arrests related to at most 21% (28 of 133). The next most frequently alleged activity was breaking windows, in twenty-six arrests (24%, 26 of 109), with seven of those individuals allegedly also inciting others to attack stores or police. Those arrests related to only 24% (17 of 72) of the businesses identified in the sources that suffered damage. Again, those businesses represented only a proportion of the total with damage, estimated at around 450. Some of those businesses would also have been looted; if around 300 businesses only had windows broken, the total arrests would be related to only about 9% (26 of 300) of the damaged stores. Taken together, arrests for alleged looting and breaking windows related to only about 13% of the approximately 450 damaged businesses. Police arrests for alleged assaults were in a similar proportion to those for attacks on businesses. Despite the attention given to assaults in some white newspapers, police alleged only thirteen of those arrested (13%, 13 of 100) had committed such violence. Seven of those arrests related to one of the fifty-four reported assaults, around 13%. Similarly, despite newspaper reports of those on Harlem’s streets being armed with various weapons (including the claims that those arrested early in the disorder had used weapons quoted above), only four of those arrested allegedly had weapons in their possession. For an additional nineteen of those arrested (15%, 19 of 128) there is no information on what police alleged they had done.
  
  Police violence was a routine part of arrests in Harlem. Newspapers treated the injuries of those who had been arrested as unremarkable. The New York Post reported that “prisoners were herded in police stations when they did not require hospital treatment” without any additional comment. Similarly, the New York Sun described several of those being transported to court the next day as “bruised and beaten and their clothing was torn.” Injured prisoners are also visible in several photographs published in the press. Mentions of police hitting people with their nightsticks in the Times Union and New York Herald Tribune focused on them being used on people in the streets not during arrests. However, five of those arrested also appeared in lists of the injured, four Black men and a white man. Details existed only in the case of the white man, Harry Gordon, who told a hearing of the MCCH that he was beaten with a nightstick while being arrested, again in a radio car while being transported to the precinct, and one more while being placed in a cell. The only other evidence of the circumstances of an arrest was a photograph published in the Daily News. Two officers are visible, on the southeast corner of Lenox Avenue and 127th Street, with one standing over a Black man seated on the ground on the ground. He is “dragging a recalcitrant rioter off to prison,” according to the caption; he may also have knocked him to the ground. That officer has his nightstick under his arm, while the officer in the foreground has a revolver in one hand and a nightstick in the other, indicating that they employed those weapons while apprehending the man. In addition, the New York Evening Journal published two photographs of police officers searching Black men for weapons according to the captions. Presumably, if they had found anything, the photographs would have been of the subsequent arrests. In one, the officer was a detective in plainclothes searching a single man. In the other, police have stopped a car and a uniformed patrolman was searching one man standing next to it with his hands in the air while a second man sat in the car lifting his hand to hide his face from the camera.
  
  Other photographs of police with individuals they arrested were taken as they were entering police stations not during the arrest itself. The officers walked alongside the arrested men, in one image grasping a man’s arm and pushing him with a nightstick. Three images, two of the same group, including the one below published in the New York Evening Journal, showed Black men under arrest for looting carrying merchandise they had allegedly stolen.
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  By contrast, there was nothing in a photograph published in the New York Evening Journal captioned “Suspected Rock-Tosser” to indicate that was the charge against the Black man in the image. Police arresting Charles Alston on Lenox Avenue and 138th Street were photographed by men working for both the International Photo service (the image below) and the Daily News as they brought him to the street for transport to the precinct. They alleged he had been part of a group of men that shot at police; the photograph captions, however, identified him as having been arrested for looting. That arrest was at the very end of the disorder, after the streets were quiet, when more journalists began to venture beyond 125th Street.
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  Police almost always arrested individuals even when they described seeing groups. In only nine instances did police make multiple arrests at one time, three people on four occasions and two people on five occasions. Those arrests amounted to 16% of the identified arrests (21 of 128). Although a single arresting officer was identified in seven of those incidents, they almost certainly involved multiple officers as the arrest of the three picketers in front of Kress’ store did. Details of these arrests were limited but do suggest one explanation for why police did not make multiple arrests more often: officers had to chase the group of which David Smith and Leon Mauraine were part and caught up with those two men several buildings away. Others in the group obviously outran police, which may have happened on other occasions. It could also have been that there were too few police to make additional arrests. Just how many officers were present for an arrest was difficult to establish as legal sources focused narrowly on the arresting officer who appeared in court.
  
  Police overwhelmingly arrested Black men during the disorder, 102 of the 117 (87%) of those arrested with a recorded race, together with only seven Black women and eight white men (eleven of the arrested men are of unknown race). Women were a larger proportion of the crowds on Harlem’s streets, particularly on 125th Street, in most accounts of the disorder than of those arrested. However, they are only rarely mentioned as participants in attacks on stores or the looting that occurred away from Kress’ store. Given the prominence of women in stories about the disorder in Harlem in 1943, only eight years later, it was possible that their involvement in 1935 was overlooked by reporters and police focused on men they likely considered more threatening. Those women police did arrest were allegedly involved in breaking, windows, looting and inciting crowds; none were accused of assault. The four alleged Communists - Daniel Miller, Harry Gordon, and the two picketers -  who police arrested at the very beginning of the disorder amounted to half of the white men taken into custody during the disorder. Police also arrested one of other four white men early in the disorder, Leo Smith, for breaking a store window. He may also have been part of the Communist protests. There was little evidence that white men were in the groups police encountered attacking and looting stores later in the disorder. There are details of only one of the other arrests, the last of the disorder, when a patrolman arrested Jean Jacquelin carrying clothing allegedly stolen from tailor on the block where he lived.
  
  Only a small number of those arrested in the disorder lived outside Harlem.
  
  Most of those arrested lived local to the disorder. Although a cluster resided around 7th Avenue south of 125th Street, those arrested came from throughout the neighborhood.
  

  Events

• 1 2020-12-04T16:53:19+00:00 Looting of miscellaneous consumer goods (14) 48 plain 2024-01-28T05:14:56+00:00 Aside from food and drink and clothing, businesses selling a variety of other consumer goods had stock stolen (14 of 57). There is also a photograph of a looted jewelry store at an unidentified location, which may be an additional looted business or an image of an already identified looting. The merchandise sold by these businesses is a mix of household items akin to food and clothing, such as cigarettes, soap, and pots, and goods such as jewelry likely taken for their value rather than for everyday use.
  
  Newspaper accounts of looting mentioned only two items other than food and clothing: cigarettes and toothbrushes. The New York Post  imputed motives while identifying cigarettes as a target, describing looting as “the glamorous opportunity of snatching food and coats and liquor and tobacco from behind the broken panes." Cigarettes also featured in stories about the police line-up the morning after the disorder. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that many of those paraded before police and reporters admitted to taking cigarettes. Neither of the other stories about the line-up mentioned cigarettes; instead both the New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun listed toothbrushes alongside clothing and groceries. Those items capture only some of the businesses selling miscellaneous goods that are reported as having being looted to do these match with reported looting; drug stores and cigar stores (some stationery stores also sold cigarettes and tobacco products, and 5c and 10c stores possibly sold toothbrushes). Jewelry, hardware, auto supply, and optician stores did not attract the attention of newspaper reporters, but items likely from a hardware store are visible in the photographs of men being arrested. A tall bin containing at least four or five pots of various sizes, with perhaps more merchandise not sticking out the top appears in one photograph published in the New York Evening Journal. A clock and three cash boxes are visible in the photograph below, also from the New York Evening Journal.
  
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  Legal records offer a similar mix of broad and individual pictures of the merchandise taken. Two business owners not selling food and clothing are among those identified who sued the city for damages, with losses of $2,685 for Benjamin Zelvin's jewelry store and $572 for the Sav-On Drug store. Zelvin's damages are significantly higher than those suffered by all but two of the nine owners of stores selling food and drink who also sued the city, and than the damages suffered by most of the clothing stores. (The nature of eleven of twenty-eight businesses identified in suits against city are unknown, so could include additional stores selling food and drink.) Details of the losses of an additional seven businesses are identified in legal proceedings. The value of the merchandise in those cases is less than the losses of those who sued the city: $1,000 for Lash's 5c & 10c store; $850 for the Greenfield Auto Equipment store, $500 for Herman Young's hardware store; $300 for Harry Farber's stationery store, $100 for Jack Garmise's cigar shop, and $33 for Lazar's cigar store.
  
  Seven individuals arrested for looting miscellaneous items allegedly had only small amounts of that merchandise in their possession. With the exception of the $75 of unspecified jewelry that police claimed John Henry and Oscar Leacock had in their possession when arrested, that merchandise had little value: Thomas Babbitt had two cases of soap; James Williams had four pots of different sizes, two pans, a pitcher, two pails, a bread box, and a cloth lamp, with a value of $12.55; Arnold Ford had three cakes of soap, a can of shoe polish, two pairs of garters, six spools of thread, a jar of vaseline, and three packets of tea, with a value of $1.15; Raymond Easley had an unspecified number of cigars; Milton Ackerman had two rolls of paper and napkins; and Robert Tanner had a pipe.
• 1 2021-05-18T20:55:45+00:00 Michael D'Agostino's market looted 28 plain 2024-06-03T21:14:03+00:00 Michael D'Agostino's food market at 348 Lenox Avenue was looted during the disorder. There are no details of those events other than the amount of the owner's claim for losses: $146.75. No one among those arrested for looting was identified as taking goods from this store. However, two unidentified men arrested for looting are both carrying full shopping bags labelled Rex Food Market, 348 Lenox Avenue, in the photograph below published in the New York Evening Journal. Those bags suggest that two of the sixteen men arrested for looting unidentified locations had taken merchandise from D'Agostino's market. Two other businesses at the same address were also looted and appear among those whose owners made claims for losses, stores owned by Sam Apuzzo and Jack Stern. The business in the neighboring building to the south, Young's Hardware at 346 Lenox Avenue was also looted, although Young was not among those identified as suing for damages.
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  D'Agostino appeared twice in a list of the first twenty white business-owners who filed claims for damages published in the New York Sun and New York Amsterdam News with a second business at 361 Lenox Avenue. In 1930, the federal census records that D'Agostino lived at 363 Lenox Avenue, a building anomalous in this area of Harlem in being home to only white residents. The six other households included three headed by men who owned stores in Harlem later looted during the disorder who joined D'Agostino in claiming damages from the city, William Gindin, Jacob Saloway, and Irving Stekin. There was no evidence of whether D'Agostino still lived there in 1935; Gindin at least had relocated to another building on Lenox Avenue by the time of the disorder. By the time the city Comptroller heard testimony from those bringing suit, 106 owners had sought damages. D'Agostino was not among those whose testimony appeared in newspaper stories about that proceeding. However, he was one of seven store owners in the case before the Supreme Court in March 1936, identified as having received the lowest award. The two newspaper stories on those decisions differed on the details of the award; the New York Amsterdam News reported D'Agostino received $24 for the losses he claimed at 348 Lenox Avenue, whereas the New York Times reported he received $70, for claims at "248-261 Lenox Avenue," likely a misrecording of 348 and 361 Lenox Avenue, for which he had claimed a total of $343 in losses.
  
  
  
  The claim for $146.75 in losses was one of the smaller claims reported in the press, well below the median claim of $733. However, D'Agostino did appear to have been able to remain in business. The New York Times identified D'Agostino as a fruit dealer, so he was likely the owner of the white-owned food market at 348 Lenox Avenue identified in the MCCH business survey in the second half of 1935. The Tax Department photograph of the address in 1939–1941 also showed the Rex Food Market.