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

Regal Shoe store windows broken

Sometime between 10 PM and 11 PM, windows were broken in the Regal Shoes store on the southeast corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue. Edward Wittleder, the assistant manager, closed the store at 10 PM, according to his Magistrate's Court affidavit. By 11 PM the store window had been broken. Around that time, Officer Peter Naton of the 28th Precinct claimed he saw John Vivien, a twenty-seven-year-old Black laborer, reach through the window, and take a pair of shoes from the display. In the interim, crowds had filled the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, pushed there by police trying to clear people from around Kress' store in the block to the west. After Wittleder left, groups from that crowd attacked businesses north and south of the intersection on 7th Avenue and further east on 125th Street, breaking the windows of the businesses on the other three corners of the intersection, Herbert's Blue Diamond jewelry store, a United Cigar store, and a branch of the Chock Full O'Nuts restaurant chain. No one arrested in the disorder was charged with breaking the windows of the shoe store.

The only mention of damage to Regal shoes other than the report of Vivien's arrest was the store's inclusion in a list of businesses with broken windows compiled by a reporter from La Prensa the next day. Regal Shoes continued in business after the disorder. The MCCH Business Survey from the second half of 1935 includes the store, whose address it gives as 2097 7th Avenue rather than 166 West 125th Street as in the reports of the looting. The store also appears in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, of the building labeled 2901 7th Avenue.

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