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• 1 2020-02-27T15:02:56+00:00 Herman Young's hardware store looted 51 plain 2024-05-30T22:11:11+00:00 After Herman Young locked his hardware store at 346 Lenox Avenue for the night at 9:30 PM, he went to his apartment directly above the business. Around 1:00 AM, the sound of smashing glass woke the fifty-three-year-old white man and his wife, Rose. Young saw four men in the store windows taking merchandise, according to the affidavit charging James Williams with burglary. The couple rushed downstairs, but the men had apparently gone by the time they got to the hardware store. However, they found the “windows cleared out.” After Rose turned on the store lights, she remained on the stoop while Herman went inside. He would be assaulted soon after, when a man tried to push past Rose and get inside the store. After Herman closed the door, the man cursed at him and threw a stone through the glass in the door, hitting the storeowner in the head. Notes in the case file of the man prosecuted for that assault made by the district attorney during the subsequent trial included information from the couple's testimony that provided the details of the events missing from the court documents.
  
  Young’s store was in the heart of the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street where the reported looting was concentrated. That violence had begun around 11:00 PM, so it was somewhat surprising that the he and his wife had not been awakened before their store windows were smashed at 1:00 AM. Young had lived in Harlem for twenty years, spending at least fifteen years living at 346 Lenox Avenue, as he appeared in the 1920 census schedule. At that time his neighbors were white families. Although the 1930 census enumerator recorded only Black residents in the buildings (the Youngs did not appear on that schedule), William Gindin, the white owner of a shoe store a block south at 333 Lenox Avenue, also lived in the building at the time of the disorder.
  
  
  
  An hour later, around 2:00 AM, ten blocks south of the store at Lenox Avenue and West 118th St, an officer from the 28th Precinct arrested James Williams, a twenty-eight-year-old West Indian cook who allegedly had in possession a “quantity of hardware” taken from Young’s store. It was not clear how Williams was carrying the collection of four pots of different sizes, two pans, a pitcher, two pails, a bread box, and a cloth lamp. Young identified those goods as his property. With a combined value of $12.55, they represented only a small portion of the $500 of hardware he reported stolen. Williams may have been en route home from Young’s store. For the last two years, he had lived a block further southwest at 153 West 117th Street.
  
  There was no mention of what caused the officer to arrest Williams. Young told police that he “was seen taking property from the store,” phrasing that suggests someone other than Young witnessed the theft. Young was unlikely to have been directly involved in the arrest. Half an hour earlier he had been in Harlem Hospital having the wound to his head stitched, when Isaac Daniels appeared seeking treatment. Young identified Daniels as the man who had assaulted him, causing officers at the hospital to arrest him for assault.
  
  Williams was one of nine men known to have been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, one-third (9 of 27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27 of 60).
  
  Charged with burglary the morning after the disorder, Williams was brought before a grand jury on April 10. They transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, according to the district attorney's case file, where the judges acquitted him. Despite his losses, Herman Young appeared to have stayed in business. Although he was not included in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935, his store did appear in the Tax Department photograph of the address taken between 1939 and 1941.