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• 1 2021-04-21T18:58:52+00:00 Morris Towbin's haberdashery store looted 36 plain 2024-05-29T16:30:39+00:00 Around 10:30 PM, a group of eight men entered Morris Towbin's haberdashery store on the corner of West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. Towbin and a clerk named Cy Bear were in the store, apparently still open for business despite the crowds around Kress' store and windows being broken in other stores one block west on West 125th Street. In his affidavit in the Magistrates Court Towbin described the men using “force and fear and…threatening to kill” to steal goods from the store with a value of $5,000, breaking windows and store fixtures in the process. A Probation Department investigation by G. H. Royal used more sensational language to also describe a robbery, in which “the defendant and a group of hoodlums…brandished knives with which they threatened [Towbin] and his clerk, demolished fixtures and perpetrated other acts of vandalism,” after which they forced the men into the basement of the store. However, the police blotter and newspaper reports of the arrest of a man who allegedly took part labeled the event as looting, without mention of threats of violence. The Home News report of the Magistrates Court hearing included no mention of the force in the affidavit, describing Towbin’s store as looted, the goods carried out, and the windows smashed, and not noting that the charge brought was robbery, not burglary. Reporting of Towbin’s statements as president of Harlem Merchants Association after the disorder likewise referred to a looting, with the Daily News identifying his store as one “into which hoodlums broke and stole several thousand dollars worth of merchandise,” and the Home News as “one of those wrecked during the disorder.” Moreover, the arrest of the man charged occurred away from the store, and was based on the goods he had in his possession, as in the other arrests for looting away from the scene of the crime. He was not charged with possession of a knife, so did not have the weapon Towbin alleged had been used and provided the legal basis for charging robbery, not burglary. Given this evidence, the thefts from the haberdashery store have been categorized as looting, not robbery.
  
  
  
  A photograph published in the Home News, captioned as a haberdashery located at Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, likely showed the damage to the store's display windows. No glass appeared to be left in the windows and little merchandise was in the display. Towbin initially reported losses of $5,000, but, after taking an inventory, told the Probation Department officer that only $2,000 of goods had been stolen. His insurance paid $1,000 for the goods taken from inside the store; the policy did not cover the goods taken from the store window. That payment was unusual in that insurance policies typically excluded losses due to riot, which is why many other business owners in Harlem filed claims for damages from the city. Another insurance company replaced the smashed plate glass windows, at a cost of $226.89, but the damaged fixtures, Towbin estimated, would cost an additional $1,000 to replace. That he was well-insured suggested that Towbin’s business was more established than many of those on Harlem’s avenues. It certainly occupied a prime location, next to an entrance to the 125th Street subway station, through which crowds entered and exited the neighborhood. Towbin’s leadership of the Harlem Merchants Association, an all-white organization established during the picketing of white business on West 125th Street in 1934, also suggests his standing in the white business community. It is not surprising, then, that he remained in business in the years immediately after the disorder.
  
  At 1:00 AM, Patrolman William Clements observed Edward Larry, a twenty-six-year-old Black laborer, traveling in a taxi at West 123rd Street and 7th Avenue. He stopped the taxi, and found that Larry had a box containing eight shirts, with a value of $12. Not satisfied with Larry’s explanation that he had found the shirts on the street at West 129th Street and Lenox Avenue, Clements took him to the 28th Precinct for further questioning. He was one of nine men arrested away from the store they had allegedly looted, a group making up one third (9/27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27/60).
  
  Towbin was at the police station, where he had gone to report the theft from his store once the group of men fled. It is not clear how he had spent the two and a half hours since the men entered his store; it would have taken some time for a group of men, even if joined by others, to remove $2,000 of goods, so he may have been in the basement for much of that time, and given the growing scale of the disorder, he also may have had to wait some time at the 28th Precinct station to report the theft. Regardless, he saw Larry there, and identified him as one of the men who had threatened him, and the shirts in Larry's possession as from his store. That encounter was described only in the more detailed account included in the Probation Department investigation, not the Magistrates Court affidavit. Had Towbin only identified the property, Larry would have been charged with burglary; the allegation of force changed the charge to robbery. That the the charge against Larry was recorded in the police blotter as burglary suggests that Towbin's identification came after Larry's initial booking, as police charged others arrested away from looted stores in possession of goods suspected of being stolen with burglary.
  
  Arraigned in Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 and held without bail, Larry was indicted for robbery by the grand jury. Rather than go to trial, he agreed to plead guilty to attempted grand larceny in the second degree. The judge sentenced Larry to a term of between fifteen months and thirty months in the state prison. That was the longest sentence given to anyone arrested in the disorder, a reflection of the charge, and of Larry’s criminal record, which included three convictions for pickpocketing in the three years before the disorder, and most significantly, a conviction for grand larceny in West Virginia in 1928.