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

[Photograph] "The Shoemaker Suffered, Too...," Afro-American, March 30, 1935, 17.

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Full caption: "THE SHOEMAKER SUFFERED, TOO -- As is shown by this white cop in front of the shattered window and empty store front. Few white stores in Harlem were unharmed."

This photograph was part of the Bettman Collection, which has been absorbed into Getty Images, where it has been made available for embedding in non-commercial websites.

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Shoe Repair store looted The shoe repair store at 2062 7th Avenue, on the northwest corner of West 123rd Street, was looted at some time during the disorder. The Afro-American published a photograph of the damaged store on March 30, the only source in which it was mentioned. No one arrested for looting was identified as having stolen goods from the store; there are no details of the circumstances that led to the arrest of twenty-nine of those charged with burglary. Attacks on the store likely began around 11:15 PM. A crowd of twenty-five to thirty people was observed by Detective Peter Naton on 7th Avenue around 123rd Street at that time smashing store windows and attacking white men and women. The plainclothes officer arrested one member of the group, but the others continued along the street.

The photograph published in the Afro-American was a cropped image reprinted from another unidentified newspaper. The full image, in the Bettman collection, available in Getty Images, extended to show the top of the store's doors, on which the street number that allowed the identification of the business was visible. The two images have very different captions. The Bettman collection image caption offered a summary of the disorder: "An unfounded rumor that a Negro boy had been badly beaten in a 5-10-25 cent store on West 125th Street as he was caught taking a cheap bag of candy, precipitated the worst race riots that Harlem has experienced in 25 years this afternoon and tonight (March 19). The boy was later found, uninjured, but even that did not stop the rioting, and as a result many persons suffered injuries; shop windows were broken all through the district, and much looting of exposed window displays added to the trials of the police. In this photograph a police officer is shown putting his club through the broken window of a shoe store repair shop." The contextual detail suggested the image may have been presented on its own. The Afro-American captioned the image without such detail, reflecting its publication in a page of images — a photo story — from the disorder: "THE SHOEMAKER SUFFERED, TOO -- As is shown by this white cop in front of the shattered window and empty store front. Few white stores in Harlem were unharmed." While the original image caption mentions only the broken window, the Afro-American caption highlights the "empty storefront," evidence of looting not just attacks on the store.
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Even in the original image, it was not possible to make out if the interior of the store had been looted. The police officer's nightstick was resting on a broken edge of the window, making clear that the windows had not been entirely smashed. As a result, entry to the store by that means would have been difficult. The windows on the other side of the doors showed similar damage, while the doors appeared intact. Like several other images of damaged stores, the photographer appeared to have had a police officer pose in front of the store (as one did in the photograph of the Lafayette Market on the southern corner of the block south of the shoe repair store published in the Daily News and Pittsburgh Courier). Unlike most images of damaged and looted businesses, this one appeared to have been taken in darkness so likely during the disorder given that the caption for the original photograph indicated it was published on March 19.

The store sat between two blocks with a roughly even mix of white-owned and Black-owned businesses. Those blocks were part of a section of 7th Avenue from West 125th Street south to West 121st Street which saw multiple reported incidents of assaults on pedestrians and vehicles, clashes between police and crowds, and stores that had windows broken and stock looted, including two directly across the avenue from the shoe repair store.

Despite the damage it suffered, the white-owned shoe repair store was still in business when investigators conducted the MCCH business survey in the second half of 1935. The Tax Department photograph showed a business operating in the storefront sometime between 1939 and 1941, but not what the business was.