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

Regal Shoes looted

Edward Wittleder, the assistant manager, closed Regal Shoes, on the southeast corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, at 10 PM, according to his Magistrate's Court affidavit. By that time store windows had been smashed the length of the block of 125th Street to the west, between 7th and 8th Avenues. Police trying to clear people from the street had pushed them toward the intersection on which Regal Shoes sat, creating large crowds, as well as concentrating the officers and riot control trucks there. After 10 PM, small groups had begun to attack businesses north and south of the intersection on 7th Avenue and further east on 125th Street. By 11 PM the store window had been smashed (a reporter from La Prensa included Regal Shoes among the businesses he saw with broken windows the next day). So too had the windows of the businesses on the other three corners of the intersection. Two of those stores, Herbert's Blue Diamond jewelry store and the United Cigar store had police guarding the storefronts that appear to have protected them from being looted. Police do not appear to have taken up positions in front of the shoe store, but were close enough to watch the store. Around 11 PM, 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 shows from the display. Naton then arrested Vivien, who he said still had the shoes in his possession. Wittleder identified them as coming from the store and being worth $5.50.

Vivien lived at 483 Manhattan Avenue, two blocks west of Regal Shoes, near the corner of West 120th Street. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, where Magistrate Renaud held him for the grand jury on bail of $1000. The Home News reported those proceedings; the remainder of his prosecution is recorded only in legal records and police records. Vivien appeared before the grand jury on April 4, according to his District Attorney's case file; they sent him to the Court of Special Sessions rather than indicting him, indicating a lack of the evidence that he had broken into the store required for a charge of burglary. A charge of larceny was likely the alternative, with the items valued well below the $100 required for a felony charge. The judges in that court then convicted him and suspended his sentence, an outcome recorded in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter.

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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