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• 1 2021-10-14T12:37:57+00:00 Winnette’s Dresses windows not broken 55 plain 2024-05-29T17:48:06+00:00 Winnette's Dresses at 340 Lenox Avenue, on the southeast corner of West 127th Street, did not suffer damage during the disorder, likely because of the signs in the store windows identifying the business as a "Colored Store." Leo and Winifred Richards, who owned the business, likely put up the signs around 11:00 PM, when crowds arrived on Lenox Avenue and began to smash windows. The store was not mentioned in any newspaper reporting on the disorder but did appear in two photographs, one taken during the night of the disorder published in the Daily News, and one taken the next morning published in the Afro-American. The store's address was not visible in either image nor mentioned in their captions. However, Vere E. Johns gave the location of the store, the southeast corner of West 127th Street, and the address on Lenox Avenue, in his column in the New York Age in June 1934 (for some reason the building on the northeast corner also has the address 340 Lenox Avenue or 340A Lenox Avenue).
  
  
  
  In the Daily News photograph from the night of the disorder, Winnette's Dresses appeared in the background behind two white police officers. One officer was dragging a Black man sitting on the ground who the caption identifies as having been arrested. Four signs attached to the store windows were visible, all reading "COLORED STORE." Those windows were not damaged. The caption asserted that the signs were to "protect [the store] from raiding marauders." That reference came at the end of the caption, which focused attention on the police and the gun just visible in the right hand of the patrolman in the foreground: "Grim Work! Policeman at left draws his revolver as the rioters grow increasingly ugly. His comrade is dragging a recalcitrant rioter off to prison."
  
  Three additional signs were visible in the image taken the morning after the disorder published in the Afro-American, also reading "COLORED STORE." Those signs were the focus of that photograph, not a background, framed by passersby likely asked to pose. Four Black boys faced the camera on one side of the window, and a Black man with his back to the camera looked at the window on the other side. In the context of the damages stores around it on Lenox Avenue, where reported broken windows and looting was concentrated, it was the intact windows of Winnette's dress shop that make it worthy of being photographed. "The store was not touched," the Afro-American captioned the photograph. The Associated Press explicitly connected the window signs and the undamaged windows in a caption that asserted that the signs "saved this shop from destruction."
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  The full name of the store was visible in the uncropped version of the photograph published in the Afro-American. Almost a year earlier, New York Age columnist Vere Johns had used Winnette's Dresses as an example of a Black-owned business that Harlem's Black residents should be patronizing instead of going to the white-owned Blumstein's department store:

  At 340 Lenox Avenue (southeast corner of 127th Street) is a neat little ladies dress shop. In it you will find Leo and Winifred Richards, a cultured, educated young couple who offer to their race a fine assortment of dresses, hats, hosiery and gloves. The[y] call it “Winnette’s-Exclusive but not Expensive.” Their tale, my friends is a sad one. For two years they have managed to keep their doors open at an awful sacrifice of health and energy. One or the other has always been forced to work as a menial downtown so as to help balance the books. The goods they sell as in every way as good as Blumstein’s and the prices just as cheap, and yet in that two years thousands of Negroes have passed by their door and walked to 125th street to spend thousands of dollars at Blumstein’s. Mrs Richards told me she tried to have at least one colored girl but her small sales couldn’t stand it.

  By April 1940, when the census was taken, Leo and Winifred Richards lived at 1 West 126th Street; if that was also their home in 1935, it was only a block east of Winnette's Dresses. Whether they were in the store or at home when the disorder began, they would have been well placed to put signs on the windows. Both were born in the West Indies around 1901. They may not have been formally married in 1940, as the census enumerator recorded Winifred as a lodger, and her last name as Coward, while also recording both she and Leo as married. Winifred was identified as the source of that information. Leo's occupation was recorded as dress shop manager, Winifred's as a dress maker employed in a dress factory. Her job suggested that the store was not bringing in sufficient income to support them both, as had been the case in 1934.
  
  Winnette's Dresses was at 340 Lenox Avenue in the MCCH business survey from the second half of 1935, although identified as a Black-owned "Hoisery shop," not by name. It was still at that location when the building was photographed by the Tax Department sometime between 1939 and 1941.