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

[Photograph] "Steel Fence Smashed," Afro-American, March 39, 1935, 17.

Full caption: "Clothing store from which gate was torn away in order to get to the plate-glass windows. The whole store front was demolished."

This photograph can be seen in Google New Archive at: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=UBnQDr5gPskC&dat=19350330&printsec=frontpage&hl=en [page 17]

In the Afro-American

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Wohlmuth Tailors clothing store looted Wohlmuth Tailors clothing store at 477 Lenox Avenue, on the southwest corner of West 134th Street, was looted sometime during the disorder. The Afro-American published a photograph of the damaged store on March 30. Both the name of the store and its street number were visible in the image. Wohlmuth Tailors was a national chain of approximately fifty stores, with seven in Harlem listed in this detail from an advertisement in the New York Amsterdam News. The company was one of the few white businesses that advertised in Harlem's Black newspapers in the 1930s. There was only one reported looting further north than this store, on the corner of the next block, West 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. The clothing store was located on a block on which almost three-quarters of the businesses were owned by whites, as was the case with the other blocks of Lenox Avenue north of West 125th Street.

The store must have been closed at the time it was attacked, as the iron gate in front of the store was torn away, and can be seen lying on the street in the photo. The caption referred only to the store front being demolished, and the windows can be seen broken and empty, with the door appearing intact. It was possible that means that the interior of the store was not looted. The image appeared to have been one of a number taken of damaged buildings, primarily on Lenox Avenue, the day after the disorder.

The only other mention of this store being looted was a vignette that Adam Clayton Powell included in an article the New York Post published to "present the Negro's point of view on the recent disturbances in Harlem."
"Witness a young man step through the window of Wohlmuth's Tailoring Establishment at 134th and Lenox Avenue dressed on that cold, rainy night in nothing but a blouse, pants and an excuse for shoes. He comes out a moment later wearing a velvet collar Chesterfield and a smile upon his face - first overcoat this winter."

This was the most specific of Powell's three vignettes of looters in the article and the only one to give a specific location. The others featured an adult man carrying two pieces of salt pork taken from a butcher's window and two "young lads" lugging two sacks of rice and sugar. The account did not clarify if the interior of the store was looted. In stepping through the window, the unnamed man may only have entered the display, not the store itself.

No one arrested for looting was identified as having stolen goods from the store, although there are no details of the circumstances that led to the arrest of twenty-nine of those charged with burglary.

This branch of Wohlmuth Tailors remained in business after the disorder. It appeared both in the MCCH business survey from the second half of 1935, and in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.