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• 1 2021-08-26T18:09:31+00:00 Hardware store looted and set on fire 94 plain 2024-05-29T21:05:00+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, the hardware store at 431 Lenox Avenue was looted. Between 11:00 PM and midnight the store was set on fire. So too was the business to the store's left, Anna Rosenberg's notion store at 429 Lenox Avenue. Herbert Canter, who owned the pharmacy several stores to the south, at 419 Lenox Avenue on the corner of West 131st Street, arrived at 11:00 PM to try and protect his business. He remained until 5:00 AM, and testified in the Municipal Court in the trial of Rosenberg's suit for damages from the city that he saw the fire but not who started it. What Canter did report seeing was "a "mob" carrying bricks, stones, and bottles, as well as canned goods, march down the street shouting, "Down with the whites! Let's get what we can," and hurling missiles through store windows. A block north, David Schmoockler, the manager of William Feinstein’s liquor store at 452 Lenox Avenue, also saw a crowd of around thirty people. Between 11:00 PM and midnight he watched as they "created disturbances, hurled various missiles, broke store windows, set fire to some stores, pillaged others, and in general damaged property of various merchants in the locality," according to Justice Shalleck's summary of his testimony in the Municipal Court. A similar narrative of how the store was looted and set on fire was provided in the caption to a photograph from the International News Photo agency taken the next day: "A store at 431 Lenox Avenue was put to the torch after rioters had smashed its windows with missiles and had helped themselves to stock in the windows and the store itself. The interior of the shop was a shambles after rioters had passed, and firemen had extinguished the fire." The photograph was not taken at the time of those events, so the source or reliability of the narrative was uncertain. Another fire reported during the disorder was set just after midnight a block to the south at 400 Lenox Avenue. Firefighters would have been able to get to the stores relatively quickly from the firehouse at 180 West 137th Street. No one arrested for looting was identified as having stolen goods from the store.
  
  
  
  A Daily News photograph showed smoke coming out of the store window and doors, and firefighters on the scene fighting the fire. One was swinging an axe at the display window, while a second firefighter stood behind him. A third firefighter was just inside the store, his boots visible beneath the smoke. In the original photograph, cropped from the published version, a hose ran across the photograph to the right in the direction of Rosenberg's notion store. A photograph of the same scene published in the Home News had that hose running to the left in the foreground and another hose going into the hardware store, and three firefighters in the doorway with their backs to the camera. The caption on that photograph misidentified it as a tailor's shop at 429 Lenox Avenue. Two different captions for the Daily News photograph also misidentified the location. The published image is reported as a "tailor shop at 420 Lexington Ave," an address well outside Harlem. The original version from the newspaper's photo morgue (which can be viewed at Getty Images) located the store at 420 Lenox Avenue. The Tax Department photographs of that building make clear that the address was incorrect: those storefronts sit above or below street level accessed by stairs (those buildings also featured in one of Berenice Abbott's 1936 photographs of New York City, which can be viewed in the New York Public Library Digital Collections). Across the street, however, the stores had street level entrances. The Tax Department photograph cataloged as 429 Lenox Avenue showed a six-story building with four store fronts, two either side of the door leading to the apartments on the upper floors. In the MCCH business survey, the beauty salon to the left was listed as 425 Lenox Avenue and the jewelers as 427 Lenox Avenue. The store to the right of the door would therefore be 429; the Hoisery sign visible in the Tax Department photograph confirms that it was Rosenberg's notion store, as hoisery was a name often used for notion stores. The photograph of the store on fire included a portion of the building to the right that matches the windows that would be 431 Lenox Avenue in the Tax Department photograph. (The MCCH business survey, as it did on occasion, jumbled the addresses of the stores next to the jeweler, putting the hardware store at 429 not 431 Lenox Avenue and the stationary store next to it at 431 not 433 Lenox Avenue, and left out Rosenberg's store).
  
  Burned shelves in the window and further inside the store and damaged merchandise were visible in the photograph of the fire. Another Daily News photograph showed the damaged interior of the store the morning after the disorder, and a white man and woman, presumably the owner and his wife, assessing the damage. Boards covering the destroyed windows and the missing glass in the door are visible behind them, together with a white man who appeared to be boarding up the store. Material hanging from the ceiling highlights the damage from the fire. Damaged merchandise covered the floor and the display table in the middle of the store, while the shelves to the right of the couple were still full of stock. Again, the address was misidentified in the caption, this time as 429 Lenox Avenue. However, in the background, the store window can be seen to the left of the door, so on the right from the street side. The Tax Department photograph showed that the doors to the two storefronts are side-by-side, so the store with the window to the right is 431 Lenox Avenue, not 429 Lenox Avenue. The same smashed goods and shelves still full of merchandise were visible, with boarded-up windows and fire damage in the background, in a similar photograph of the damaged store interior published in the Afro-American. The caption to that image identified the business as a hardware store. Two white men stood in the store, the same man in a coat and hat as in the New York Daily News photograph, and a man in a suit and tie. More of the store to the left of the men was visible, showing that the shelves on the wall and the left side of the table in the center have been burned. The fire apparently did not reach much further than the front of the table. A third photograph of the interior, also published in the Afro-American, provided the opposite view, from the door into the store, and showed shelves without any apparent fire damage (the caption gives the store address as 431 Lenox Avenue but misidentified the business as a notion store). The clashes between firefighters and the crowd on the street mentioned in the caption to that photograph were reported by stories in other newspapers as happening at Lash's store a block to the south, not the hardware store.
  
  Two other photographs showed the damaged exterior of the store and the adjacent notion store at 429 Lenox Avenue after the disorder. In an Associated Press photograph, published in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and Afro-American, smashed display windows and doors could be seen in both stores, together with debris piled in front of the hardware store, likely a combination of material from the ceiling and the display window. Notwithstanding the damage to the windows, both stores appeared to still contain significant amounts of merchandise. A police officer and a Black man stood to one side, in front of the distinctive sign of the business to the right of the hardware store seen in other photographs. Patrolmen were stationed outside a number of damaged businesses the day after the disorder so featured in photographs of other locations. The Black man seemed to be posing for the camera, likely at the request of the photographer. A second photograph, published in the Daily Mirror, showed a man on a ladder boarding up the hardware store windows, matching the man and repairs seen in the background of the photograph of the interior damage. (None of the captions to these photographs gave a precise location for the business beyond it being on Lenox Avenue.)
  
  Notwithstanding the damage evident in the photographs, the presence of a hardware store at this address in the MCCH business survey suggested that the store continued to operate in the months after the disorder. The name of the business operating when the Tax Department photograph was taken, between 1939 and 1941, was not visible; the sign did appear to be the one visible in the photograph of the firefighters taken in 1935.