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Windows broken (69)
[Historian Cheryl Greenberg & ?] have argued that decision had the opposite effect to what the judge intended, shutting off an outlet for discontent and protest, and leaving Harlem’s residents with fewer alternatives to violence. The events in front of Kress’ store before someone threw the object that broke one of its windows replicated/recapitulated those tensions. Four men had been protesting the store employees’ treatment of Lino Rivera by walking in front of the store with banners – picketing – before stopping to try to speak to the crowd. Police officers arrested the group and a fifth man, shutting down that means of protest. On this occasion, unlike earlier protests, members of the crowd attacked the store.
The objects thrown at store windows were most often described as rocks or stones, and less often as bricks – the objects recovered from the windows of Herbert’s Blue Diamond jewelry store displayed by a clerk for a Daily News photographer the day after the disorder.
All those objects could be found around Harlem. An employee of the Blackbird Inn told a reporter for the New York Post that much of that material came from the [“parkway”] that ran down the middle of 7th Avenue, where stones and debris left after the paving of the street had been dumped. Other larger objects found on the street were sometimes used: ashcans and trash cans or their lids. (The tailor’s dummy used in one case likely came from another damaged store) In a handful of cases, the missiles were objects likely brought from home, such as bottles clubs, and hammers, or items individuals happened to have with them, such as umbrellas (there was rain on the night of the disorder). At least two windows were simply kicked in (generally when a store was also looted?). The reports that specified whiskey bottles were [refer to their general character, other features], so their mention of those items may be an element of those stereotypes rather than a description of the objects used to break windows. While the NYEJ made whiskey bottles the first item in a list of missiles, ahead of the more frequently used rocks, the BDE crafted a vignette to highlight those objects and place them at the origin of the disorder: “What was believed to be the first missile hurled in the Harlem excitement was still nestling amid an artificial flower display behind broken plate glass at the Kress store on 125th St. It was a whiskey bottle.” (3/20/35, 2) No other story noted that detail; most others did describe the object that broke that window as a bottle, and a few as a stone or rock, with brick in a later attack.
While newspaper reports routinely described store windows as “smashed,” the extent of the damage they suffered varied. A single object generally broke and created a hole in a window rather than shattering it entirely, as is evident in a photograph published in the Daily News that shows a white police officer and a white store manager speaking through a hole in an unidentified shoe store.
It took more than one object, which usually meant more than one person, to remove most or all of the glass from a display window, depending obviously on the size of the window. Stores on West 125th Street, particularly the department stores and those that wrapped around the corners of the intersections with 8th, 7th and Lenox Avenues had far larger windows than the smaller businesses on the avenues themselves. More extensive to windows appears to have been associated with looting. A section of Lenox Avenue in a photograph published by the Daily News shows some of that variety: a rental agency with a hole in its window, which still contained the ashcan that created it, that does not appear to be looted; and, to its, left, two grocery stores and a [cigar store] whose windows are almost entirely gone, and whose contents have been taken.
The sources do not offer a clear picture of the extent of the damage to the stores identified as having broken windows: the reporter for La Prensa who listed thirty-five businesses with broken windows on Lenox Avenue, West 125th Street and 8th Avenue, ended their list by alluding to an unspecified number of other stores not on the list that suffered relatively little damage compared with those listed. There are no details for just under half of those identified (33 of 69) in the sources; of the remainder, fragmentary information suggests fourteen businesses could have been suffered limited damage. The additional sixty looted stores identified in the sources likely suffered more extensive damage. Efforts to damage stores may also have extended to destroying merchandise by throwing it into the street, on a night when it rained. The Afro-American most directly reported that practice, in which “the goods was dragged in the wet sidewalk and destroyed.” The New York Times and Atlanta World reported goods taken out of windows and “strewn” and “scattered” on the sidewalk without mention of the intention, as did Betty Willcox, speaking to the New York Evening Journal about what she saw on West 125th Street, “goods thrown all over the place.” Goods scattered on the street could also have been a byproduct of looting rather than attacks on businesses, thrown or carried out of stores so they could be taken.
The sixty-nine businesses identified in the sources as having broken windows, and the additional sixty stores looted as well as damaged, amount to around 29% of the total number estimated to have had windows broken. Newspaper stories offered a range of initial assessments of the damage. By noon on March 20 the New York Plate Glass Service Bureau, “whose member companies do 98 per cent of the glass insurance business in the city,” told a reporter for the New York Post that 110 clients had reported broken glass, a fraction of the expected total damage. Other newspapers published totals for the number of windows broken, not stores effected: “at least 130 costly plate gas windows,” according to the New York American; 200 plate-glass store windows according to the New York Times, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Chicago Defender and Norfolk Journal and Guide; and “more than 250 windows” according to the New York Herald Tribune, 300 in AA, and “more than 1,000 panes of glass” in the New York Post. A later survey of forty-seven insurance companies by the National Bureau of Casualty and Surety Underwriters, reported by the New York Times and Pittsburgh Courier etc (& AP?), combined the two counts, reporting claims for 697 plate glass windows in 300 businesses, amounting to two-thirds of the broken windows. With the uninsured glass included, the total damage would have been just over 1000 windows in around 450 businesses.
“Breakages were most numerous on 125th street, near Seventh avenue,” according to that survey, but also occurred in an area that extended “from 114th to 143rd streets, between Fifth and Eighth Avenues. Several thousand businesses were located in that area, the MCCH business survey found, so attacks away from 125th Street were clearly less extensive [unlike 1943?]. Newspapers stories consistently identified West 125th Street as the most damaged area, with NYA specifying the two blocks from 8th to Lenox Avenues, and the NYHT identifying the block between 8th and 7th Avenues, on the Kress’ store was located (in line with reported events, which are concentrated on that block, with fewer on the block between 7th and Lenox). Those blocks were where the disorder originated, and the largest crowds gathered; where Harlem’s largest stores were located; and where all the businesses were white-owned. Beyond 125th Street, newspaper stories varied in how far the damage reached, perhaps reflecting the limits of what their reporters saw/investigated or, in the case of very wide area, a lack of investigation?. Only NYDN identified an area as extensive as the insurance survey, from 110th to 145th Streets. The NYEJ and NYHT only encompassed as far south as 120th Street, and as far north as 138th Street. Two newspapers focused only on 7th Avenue, the PC reporting smashed windows from 116th to 140th Streets, and the DM only from 120th to 125th Streets. The Black newspaper’s area fits the reported events, and suggests an investigation throughout Harlem; the white newspaper included only a portion of that area, the blocks closest to 125th Street. Eighth Avenue attracted special attention in the NYHT, which reported “windows broken in virtually every other store and glass covering the sidewalk” from 124th Street to 130th Street, and less damage in the blocks further north. Lenox Avenue, where the reported events are concentrated, drew particular attention only from the AA, which offered the only specific count, that “In the three blocks from 125th to 128th Street, west side Lenox Avenue, there were twenty-two windows broken.” That Black newspaper also published several photographs of damaged businesses, [?] from this area of Lenox Avenue and the blocks immediately to the north. No newspaper other than La Prensa mentioned damaged stores on West 116th Street. Together with the tendency to draw the boundaries of the damage further north, beginning at 120th Street, the result was to effectively leave Spanish-speaking areas of Harlem out of discussions of the disorder. A small number of Black-owned businesses are among those identified as having windows broken, but they were evidently not the target of most of those on the streets. Those that identified themselves with signs appear not to have had windows broken, and no black-owned businesses are among those later looted.