In the Heat of the Summer by Michael W. Flamm

Author:Michael W. Flamm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2016-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 14. A police officer restrains an angry demonstrator at the corner of Fulton and Nostrand. Photo by Stanley Wolfson. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.

Between 6 P.M. and midnight the Fire Department reported more than sixty false alarms. The police switchboard was also inundated with bogus calls, either because the perpetrators had already fled when officers arrived or because the callers wanted to distract attention from looters. Police were convinced that it was mostly the latter. Still, officers had no choice but to respond, and at times it almost resulted in tragedy. At Broadway and Fulton, patrol cars arrived simultaneously from several directions only to find themselves in an ambush as a barrage of glass and rocks rained down on them from nearby roofs and the elevated station. By sheer luck there were no injuries and only a windshield was smashed.47

The incident was not isolated—officers were increasingly the targets of projectiles because after three nights of vandalism most businesses had covered their windows, broken or unbroken, with plywood and taken other measures to protect property. “I saw [the teenagers] throwing rocks,” recounted Jones after his foray into the riot. “They would come up, look around, see if a cop was nearby, or sometimes just stand across the street and heave, or they would come running along and heave it running. They’d laugh, and then run away. They didn’t even bother to loot. The looters were the moochers and the same elements that operate after floods and catastrophes.”48

After three nights of twelve- to eighteen-hour shifts, the police were exhausted and angered by the unrelenting physical and verbal abuse they had to endure. Fortunately, shortly after midnight rain began to fall and the crowds started to dissipate. By 1 A.M. the littered streets were empty and the mounted officers redeployed to the communications outpost across from Girls High. In the middle of the intersection at Nostrand and Fulton a group of police and reporters gathered. “Rain, rain, rain, come on and rain,” said an officer as a photographer urged him to pose like the patrolman in the classic number in Singing in the Rain, the 1952 musical with Gene Kelly. “I don’t know why it is,” observed another patrolman. “Some of these people aren’t afraid of horses, of nightsticks, even of guns. A couple of drops of rain and they run.”49

In Central Harlem on Wednesday night it was quiet—quieter than usual, in fact. No arrests were made and only five windows were broken. Traffic flowed smoothly as the police lifted barricades and unsealed streets. Restaurants and bars were open. The only injury reported was to an officer who stopped his police car to remove trash cans from the intersection of 129th Street and Fifth Avenue and was struck on the hand by a tossed bottle. The only looting reported was at 127th Street and Lenox Avenue, where a grocery store was robbed by a dozen or so people who broke through a plywood barrier.50

But a major clash again took place in Lower Manhattan.

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