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R. J. McBride, "Visit to Louis Eisenberg, June 25, 1935," Harlem Survey: Part III, Chapter V, Box 131-124, Folder 18, E. Franklin Frazier Papers (Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University).
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Greenfield Auto Equipment store looted
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Around 9:00 PM, Louis Eisenberg and three of his staff finished up putting new merchandise and sign cards in the store windows of Greenfield Auto Equipment, at 2150 7th Avenue, and began cleaning up inside the store. They "heard a terrific crash at the front door and saw an angry crowd surging into the store," he told the MCCH in a private interview. Eisenberg and his staff fled out the rear of the store, and on to the street, where they hailed a cab to take them away from the crowd. The timing of that escape varied in different sources. In police records, Eisenberg and his staff fled out a rear window, into the back yard of the store, where they remained until around 11:30 PM. Only then did they avoid the "mob" on the street by jumping in a passing taxi. In his interview with the MCCH, Eisenberg described going from the yard to the neighboring "tailor shop" (actually a cleaning store) and hailing a cab from there. There was no mention of spending time in the yard in the interview, and from the cab he saw only one broken window, which suggested that he and his staff left soon after fleeing the store. That statement contradicted Eisenberg's statements to James Tartar, an investigator for the MCCH, that five windows were broken between 8:30 PM and 9:00PM. Tartar also recorded information from the white owners of four of the six other occupied stores on this block of 7th Avenue, between West 127th Street and West 128th Street, who reported windows broken sometime between 8:45 PM and 11:00 PM. The owner of the cleaning store neighboring Eisenberg's store specified that the windows in the auto equipment store were broken before those in his store, four of which were targeted between 8:45 PM and 9:30 PM.
The time that the windows were broken was early enough in the evening that most of the neighboring stores would still have been open for business, or at least still staffed, as Greenfield Auto Equipment had been. That all the neighboring storeowners interviewed by Tartar could give a time when people threw objects that broke their store windows indicates they were present. The Black-owned Cozy Shoppe at 2154 7th Avenue, on the corner of 128th Street, was undamaged; someone from that store had written "Colored Shoppe" on the store window. Tartar included the "Cozy Shop" on his drawing of the block, together with a Black-owned beauty parlor to the left of the auto equipment store, but neither appear in his list of looted businesses, suggesting the beauty parlor may also have been undamaged.
The storeowners also provided the value of the stock stolen from their stores. Eisenberg put the value of stock stolen from his store at $850; when he reported the theft to police, he provided a two-page list of merchandise without information on its value. While Eisenberg's account of men rushing into his store implied that goods were stolen as soon as the window was broken, the more fragmentary responses Tartar recorded from the other store owners suggested that looting may have happened later, as more general narratives in the press related. The owner of the saloon on the corner of West 127th Street, the Harlem Grill, reported one window broken around 9:00 PM, and two more at least an hour later. Crowds smashed windows in stores on the opposite side of the street apparently without looting them around 9:45 PM, when a police officer arrested Leroy Brown for urging a group of people to follow his lead after he threw a tailor's dummy through a window. Whenever the looting started, by around 11:00 PM, when Howard Malloy passed the store, all the goods in the display window had been taken, he told Tartar in an interview on April 5. On March 20, Detective O'Brien visited the store and reported that he found "five (5) windows of the store broken and merchandise strewn about the floor and window. Also noted that the street in the immediate vicinity was littered with broken glass, bricks, stones and other heavy objects."
Information on the Greenfield Auto Equipment store, and those store neighboring it, appeared in the records of the MCCH because of what happened after the looting, or at least after the looting had started. Around 12:55 AM, two police officers in a squad car traveling south on 7th Avenue reported hearing smashing glass, and seeing Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black student, standing in the store window passing merchandise to a crowd of people on the street. They stopped their car, and Patrolman McInerney chased after the crowd. As Hobbs ran west across 128th Street, McInery shot the boy in the back. Although the officers transported him to Harlem Hospital, Hobbs died on March 30. He and his younger brother, Russell, had been at a show at the Apollo Theater until 12:30 AM, when they emerged to find "general disorder and many broken windows." Russell told Tartar that they wanted to "see and hear what was going on," so walked along 125th Street and up 7th Avenue, passing a crowd in front of Eisenberg's store at the time the police car arrived. Both boys denied Lloyd had looted the store; they had simply joined the crowd in running when the police car stopped, and McInerney had shot Lloyd without warning when he split from the group and turned west on 128th Street, back in the direction of the family home. Three Black eyewitnesses, including Howard Malloy, confirmed that account. Police insisted Hobbs had stolen goods from the store, but they did not produce the items they claimed to have found on him — a horn and socket set — until several weeks after the shooting. The grand jury twice declined to indict McInerney for shooting Hobbs, accepting his claim that it was a justifiable homicide. The MCCH did not agree, and Hobbs became a central part of their report on the events of the disorder.
No other people were arrested or charged with looting the Greenfield Auto Equipment store, or the other stores on this block of 7th Avenue. Eisenberg "was on the point of closing after the riot but was persuaded to stay on," he told an MCCH investigator who visited the store on June 25. He had been in business for sixteen years, with a staff of four, two of whom were Black men. A white-owned auto supply store was recorded in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 (mistakenly located at 2152 7th Avenue rather than 2150 7th Avenue). By 1939, however, the store was gone, with a billiard parlor in its place in the Tax Department photograph. -
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Investigations (May 4-May 17)
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As neither Jackson Smith, the manager of the Kress store, nor Louis Eisenberg, the owner of store allegedly looted by Lloyd Hobbs, had appeared at the May 4 hearing, the subcommittee’s investigation of the events of the disorder had to continue until the next hearing, scheduled for May 18. The appearance of both men was secured in the interim.
MCCH members meeting on May 7 did agree to take further action to have Smith testify. A. Phillip Randolph proposed they write to Mayor La Guardia requesting he write to the company "asking them to cooperate by having the manager of their 125th Street store present at the next meeting." No such letter is in the files. It may have been unnecessary. Hays was not at that meeting, so the outcome of his discussions with the Kress company attorneys was likely not known to the other MCCH members.
Louis Eisenberg took up Hays’ offer to avoid the public hearing. He would later tell an MCCH investigator surveying his business that he opposed the hearings because they “permitted any Tom, Dick, and Harry to cross examine people.” The private hearing that heard his brief testimony on May 18 was recorded by a stenographer, but otherwise did not appear in records of the MCCH’s work. To the contrary, compilations of the Subcommittee’s activities by MCCH staff recorded that it held no private hearings.
Securing the store owner’s testimony was not the only additional investigation of the killing of Lloyd Hobbs undertaken by the MCCH notwithstanding the grand jury’s decision not to charge Patrolman McInerney. James Tartar continued to pursue information on the whereabouts of the items that the police officer claimed the boy had stolen and that he had recovered next to him after he was shot. An interview with ADA Price confirmed that McInerney brought the horn and socket set to the DA's office on April 1st, while a visit to the property clerk's office at police headquarters revealed that those items were not delivered there until April 8, 1935. For Tartar and Hays, the interval of almost two weeks before anyone saw those items supported the testimony of eyewitnesses that Hobbs had nothing in his hands when shot, calling into question a justification for his shooting. Getting answers about those items became part of the program for the May 18 hearing.
Three additional witnesses to McInerney shooting Hobbs were also located. Just how is not clear. Tartar claimed credit, somewhat obliquely, although there are no documents related to those witnesses in the MCCH files. "Your investigator,” he wrote in a narrative report of his investigation, “feeling that the case was of such great importance as an example to show how the citizens of Harlem are murdered by police officers and then charged with having committed a crime in order to justify the officer's act, sought to gather more witnesses if there were any." He found four. However, a man called Clarence Wilson would testify that he had been sent by a member of the MCCH to Lawyer Hobbs, the boy’s father, for the addresses of three witnesses. Wilson found the fourth witness when he went to bring those men to the hearing. Those men likely had either approached the Hobbs family, as the three other eyewitnesses had, or been found by them. The boy’s death clearly continued to loom large in the Harlem community’s view of the disorder.
Gathering that information about the events of the disorder took place alongside continued investigation of police brutality and mistreatment. Robert Patterson appeared at the MCCH offices on May 11 to complain that police forced their way into his home and arrested him on the basis of an anonymous complaint on May 5. Charles Romney, who had played a prominent role questioning witnesses, asked to testify about being a victim of brutality. So did James Middleton. The MCCH appeared to no longer be cooperating with Communists groups in investigating cases. Two men and a woman affiliated with Communist groups, Cyril Briggs, “Mr Campbell” and Ethel Lewis, would testify about police breaking up mixed race groups, but came from the audience to do so rather than being on the program.
Surprisingly given the earlier reports that the MCCH had been overwhelmed by complaints of brutality, Hays told the MCCH meeting on May 14 that the upcoming hearing on police brutality would be the last "for some time as he did not have any more material." While he left the door open for hearings at a later date if he had accumulated sufficient cases, on May 28, he would tell the other MCCH members that "he did not see the necessity" for the subcommittee on crime to hold any further hearings. That the investigations of the events of the disorder and of police brutality had not only become intertwined but also ended at the same time likely contributed to Hays' decision to include them both in a single report, notwithstanding his original vision of them as separate topics.