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

Romanoff Drug store looted

Sometime during the disorder, the Romanoff Drug Store at 375 Lenox Avenue, on the northwest corner of West 129th Street, was looted. J. Romanoff was recorded as the complainant when Oscar Austin, a twenty-nine-year-old Black man, Jacob Bonaparte, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, and Sam Nicholas, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, were arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court. The docket book entry was the only source that mentioned the drug store. It was located on a block that saw multiple stores reported looted; in only one of those cases was there information on the timing of the attack, just before midnight. The drug store was likely attacked around the same time and the three men arrested some time later. Bonaparte lived nearby, in the block of West 128th Street between Lenox and 7th Avenues. Austin lived on the same street, just west of 7th Avenue, and Nicholas lived four blocks south, on West 124th Street, also west of 7th Avenue.

The same officer from the 28th Precinct arrested all three men, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book; the clerk's handwriting is too messy to decipher his name. After being arrested for burglary, all three men were charged with disorderly conduct, an offense not used in cases of alleged looting or breaking windows. The changed charge suggested that they had been in crowds the vicinity of the store but police had no evidence that they participated in looting or attacking the store. When the men appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, Magistrate Renaud acquitted them. While the acquittals indicated that there was no compelling evidence linking the men to damage done to the store, the initial charges do suggest that the store was looted.

The damage the drug store suffered was apparently enough for the owner to join other Harlem business owners in who sued the city seeking damages. While not identified in reporting of the progress of those actions, "Herbert M. Romanoff, pharmacist" was named as one of the seven claimants awarded damages in the New York Supreme Court on March 4, 1936, in a story published in the New York Herald Tribune. Whatever damage the Romanoff Drug Store suffered did not prevent it continuing to operate. It appeared in the MCCH business survey in the second half of 1935, and was visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.

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