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

Ralph Sirico's shoe repair shop looted

Around midnight, as Detective Jeremiah Duross of the 6th Division drove a police car on 7th Avenue, the sound of breaking glass drew his attention to a group of people in front of Ralph Sirico's shoe repair store 1985 7th Avenue. As the detective pulled his car up next to the store, the crowd in front of it scattered. He leapt out of the car and claimed he saw Charles Saunders, a twenty-four-year-old Black unemployed elevator operator, jump out of the store window and run down the street. Duross gave chase and arrested Saunders, who he alleged had been drinking and had a fresh cut on his hand, which he implied had resulted from breaking glass in the window. While the Probation Department investigation report stated that the arrest took place at 2:00 AM, that appeared to be an error as the remainder of the narrative referred to events around midnight. A short time earlier, between 11:30 PM and midnight, the superintendent of the apartments above Sirico's store reported that the shoe repair shop window had been smashed. Around that time, there were attacks on nearby businesses at 1953 7th Avenue and likely at 1974 7th Avenue, as well as an assault on a white man named William Burkhard.



Saunders offered a different account than Duross, according to the Probation Department investigation report. He lived nearby, in a furnished room at 1967 7th Avenue a block south of the store, with Anna Gregory. Around midnight, Saunders left home to buy cigarettes. Walking toward a crowd in front of Sirico's store, he saw shoes and hats being thrown through the broken window on to the street, where people in the crowd were picking them up. While there are few accounts of goods being thrown into the street, there are descriptions of merchandise spread over sidewalks and streets, suggesting that some of those who attacked goods destroyed or distributed goods in this manner rather than taking them themselves. Saunders claimed he followed the lead of those around him, and picked up a pair of shoes, cutting his hand on glass on the street in the process, and headed home. At that point Duross arrested him. Saunders denied having been drinking; the detective said Saunders did not have a pair of shoes in his hands when arrested. Berkeley supported Saunders' account to the extent that he said he was not "one of the two men who went through the broken window" of the store. The building superintendent said he could identify those men.

None of stolen goods were recovered, according to the Probation Department investigation report. Nonetheless, Saunders appears to have been charged with taking all the goods that Sirico said had been stolen: "18 or 20 hats which had been cleaned and blocked by him; about 25 pair of shoes which he had repaired; 5 or 6 pairs of unfinished shoes; one dozen leather soles; two and a half dozen rubber heels and a quantity of polish and shoe laces," with a total value he estimated as $66.75. While the district attorney's case file is missing, the Probation Department investigation report summarizes the indictment against Saunders as accusing him of taking merchandise worth $66.75. The two newspaper reports of the case are less specific, with both the Home News and Daily Worker reporting the charge as stealing "several pairs of shoes." On April 1, Saunders pled guilty to petit larceny. In other cases after the disorder in which defendants did not have goods in their possession when arrested, a district attorney generally offered a plea bargain for a different charge, unlawful entry. On April 30, Judge Nott gave him a suspended sentence and placed him on "indefinite" probation on the condition he go to Savannah to live with his sister.

Sirico had insurance that paid the cost of replacing his store windows. The business was included in the MCCH business survey in the second half of 1935. Sirico was still operating the store when he registered for the draft in April 1942, giving his first name as Raffaele. He had arrived in New York City in 1919. Sirico appeared likely to have been in business in Harlem by the time of the 1930 census, when the census enumerator recorded that he worked in a shop. At that time he lived at 293 East 155th Street in the Bronx, with his wife and four children aged between eight years and fifteen months.

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