This page was created by Anonymous.  The last update was by Stephen Robertson.

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

Unknown store window broken

An unknown store at 345 Lenox Avenue had its windows broken during the disorder. The bottom half of the display window to the right of the entrance was gone. That was the only section of the store visible in the Pathe newsreel from the day after the disorder, on the bottom left of footage focused on the damaged window of the Cleaners & Dyers store at 347 Lenox Avenue. No indication of the type of business is visible in the footage, and the MCCH business survey does not record a store at the address in the second half of 1935. By the time the Tax Department photograph was taken, between 1939 and 1941, the Empire Market occupied 345 Lenox Avenue, but there is no evidence that business was there in March 1935. No other sources mention the damage to the store, and no one arrested during the disorder was charged with breaking the window.

This store was located in the middle of a block of Lenox Avenue that saw multiple businesses damaged and looted, although none reported in the five buildings north of 347 Lenox Avenue other than the Cleaners & Dyers on the right hand side of this store. To the left of the store, on the other side of the entrance to upper floors, Sol Weit and Isaac Popiel's grocery store at 343 Lenox Avenue was looted. Further south, on the corner of West 127th Street, the drug store at 339 Lenox Avenue had windows broken, and flying glass injured William Brown. Just around the corner on West 127th Street, a candy store was looted. A reporter for the Afro-American who apparently walked up this side of Lenox Avenue from 125th Street to 128th Street, which included the block on which this store was located, counted twenty-two windows broken, in the approximately forty businesses on that stretch of the street.

This page has tags:

This page references: