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Shoe Repair store looted
The photograph published in the Afro-American is a cropped image, reprinted from another unidentified newspaper. The full image, in the Bettman collection, available in Getty Images, extends to show the top of the store's doors, on which the street number that allows the identification of the business is visible. The two images have very different captions. The Bettman collection image caption offers a summary of the disorder: "An unfounded rumor that a Negro boy had been badly beaten in a 5-10-25 cent store on West 125th Street as he was caught taking a cheap bag of candy, precipitated the worst race riots that Harlem has experienced in 25 years this afternoon and tonight (March 19). The boy was later found, uninjured, but even that did not stop the rioting, and as a result many persons suffered injuries; shop windows were broken all through the district, and much looting of exposed window displays added to the trials of the police. In this photograph a police officer is shown putting his club through the broken window of a shoe store repair shop." The contextual detail suggests the image may have been presented on its own. The Afro-American captioned the image without such detail, reflecting its context, a page of images - a photo story - from the disorder: "THE SHOEMAKER SUFFERED, TOO -- As is shown by this white cop in front of the shattered window and empty store front. Few white stores in Harlem were unharmed." While the original image caption mentions only the broken window, the Afro-American caption highlights the "empty storefront," evidence of looting not just attacks on the store.
Embed from Getty Images
Even in the original image it is not possible to make out if the interior of the store had been looted. The police officer's nightstick is resting on a broken edge of the window, making clear that the windows had not been entirely smashed, making entry to the store by that means difficult. The windows on the other side of the doors show similar damage, while the doors appear intact. Like several images of damaged stores, the photographer appears to have had a police officer pose in front of the store (including one of Lafayette Market on the southern corner of the block south of the shoe repair store published in the New York Daily News and Pittsburgh Courier). Unlike most images of damaged and looted businesses, this one appears to have taken in darkness, likely during the disorder given that the caption for the original photograph indicates it was published on March 19.
The store sat between two blocks with a roughly even mix and white-owned and Black-owned businesses. Those blocks were part of a section of 7th Avenue from West 125th Street south to West 121st Street which saw multiple reported incidents of assaults on pedestrians and vehicles, clashes between police and crowds, and stores that had windows broken and stock looted, including two directly across the avenue from the shoe repair store.
Despite the damage it suffered, the white-owned shoe repair store was still in business when investigators conducted the MCCH Business survey in the second half of 1935. The Tax Department photograph shows a business operating in the store sometime between 1939 and 1941, but not what the business was.