Snow had been falling over Harlem since mid-afternoon on Thursday, January 16, 1947, and by evening it had turned the streets into a frozen obstacle course. In a rented room above a furniture showroom on West 135th Street, 31 people gathered in folding chairs to witness something that had never been accomplished before: getting two feuding laundry route operators to sit at the same table. Leonard Pace and Curtis Roads had spent three years locked in a bitter public feud. Pace ran a wet wash route covering blocks from 126th to 138th Streets between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, handling about 2,900 pounds of bundled laundry a week.
Roads, a former plant worker who bought his truck in 1943, operated a route from 138th to 149th Streets and had been pushing south into Pace’s territory for two years. The quarrel began over a single building on 137th Street with 42 apartments. It escalated from stolen bundles to false stories about the other man’s plant, then to vandalism. A tire was cut.
A windshield was broken. In August 1946, a 17-year-old helper working Saturdays on Roads’s truck was struck in the face on Eighth Avenue by someone he could not identify. He lost the sight in one eye and returned to South Carolina to live with his grandmother. Four separate attempts by four separate groups to bring the two men into a room together had failed.
Ellsworth Johnson agreed to make the fifth attempt. At 41, Johnson had been out of Alcatraz for a little over five years and had spent that time building a reputation that did not appear in any registry. People in Harlem asked him to settle things. He settled a dispute between two undertakers, a dispute between a landlord and 11 tenants over a coal allowance, and a dispute between two brothers over their father’s grocery store.
Every settlement had held because both sides believed it would. Johnson prepared for the meeting completely and quietly over 11 days. He rode both routes, watched where bundles came from, and marked on a real estate map every address each man served. He had written a proposal on three sheets of ruled paper dividing the disputed blocks by weight rather than geography so each man ended with a total within 400 pounds of the other.
Neither man would solicit the other’s accounts for two years. The boy in South Carolina would receive $14 a week from the two of them jointly for three years. What Johnson had not accounted for was the man who walked in at twenty minutes to eight. Howard Synindler was the executive secretary of an association of laundry plant owners with offices on West 26th Street.
He had been invited by nobody in the room. A plant that processed the bundles both Pace and Roads collected had told him about the meeting. Synindler walked down the center aisle without taking off his coat. He looked at Johnson’s map and smiled slightly, the way a man smiles at a child’s drawing.
He said the territory under discussion was not the property of either gentleman at the table. Under the schedule adopted by member plants, the area north of 110th Street was allocated to a designated plant. Pace and Roads were not owners of routes at all, he said, but agents operating under a plant agreement terminable at will. Any private division of the area would have no standing whatsoever.
He put a paper on the table—a copy of the relevant page of the schedule. Then he looked at Ellsworth Johnson and said that he understood a gentleman had been kind enough to volunteer his services as a mediator. He said this was a commercial matter between licensed businesses that would be handled in the ordinary commercial way through the association’s own procedure. Whatever arrangements were customary on these streets in other kinds of affairs, he said, had no application here.
He shaped the word “gentleman” carefully. It did not sound like a compliment. Nobody laughed. That was worse than laughter.
Thirty-one people sat in a heated room in their coats and looked at the floor or at the fogged windows or at their hats. Johnson did not raise his voice. He did not move toward the table. He said in a normal tone that he thanked Mr.
Synindler for coming out in the weather and that the room would take note of the schedule. That was all he said. Synindler waited two seconds for something else. When it did not come, he nodded to the younger man with the portfolio, and the two of them left.
A car started below the windows and pulled away through the snow. The meeting did not recover. Leonard Pace stood up and said he was going home. Curtis Roads folded the copy of the schedule into quarters and put it in his coat.
Outside, two men caught up with Johnson at the corner. One of them said that Synindler could be reached, that a man like that had a home address and a family and habits. Johnson stopped walking. He said nobody was going to speak to Mr.
Synindler. He said it once, in a flat voice, without emphasis. Both men understood they had been given an instruction rather than an opinion. Johnson walked for 40 minutes in the cold.
Over the two days that followed, he thought about the paper Synindler had put on the table. He had spent 11 days measuring the weight of bundles on four blocks. He had counted pounds. He had never once asked who set the price of a pound, or why the price was what it was, or who had decided that these two men would be agents rather than owners.
He understood something else: the quarrel between Pace and Roads had not been an accident of two hard tempers. Two men had been given agencies over adjoining areas with no written boundary between them, at rates that left neither enough, under agreements that either could lose by letter in 30 days. Two men in that position will fight without being told to fight, and the fighting will look like their own doing, and while it occupies them, nobody will look upward. He had almost helped to make that arrangement permanent.
On the afternoon of Saturday, January 18, Johnson went to see Ida Bell Sharp. She was 70 years old that winter and had walked eight blocks in the snow to attend the meeting. A driver had mentioned she had been asking about it. Her hand laundry occupied the ground floor of a tenement at 249 West 133rd Street.
The front room had a wooden counter, shelves holding brown paper parcels tied with string, and a coal stove near the back wall with two flat irons standing on it. The air was warm and damp and smelled of starch and hot cotton. She had run the place since 1911. She had come to New York from Edgecombe County, North Carolina in 1899 at the age of 22 and worked in a steam laundry on the west side for 11 years before opening her own shop.
She gave him a chair and a glass of water and said she had expected him sooner. Then she went into the back room and came out with a cardboard box that had once held canned peaches. It was full of paper. Every sheet was the same, and every sheet had a signature on it.
It was a printed form, four by six inches. It said that the undersigned resident of the address written below chose the driver named below to collect and return the undersigned’s laundry. That the choice was the undersigned’s own and could be changed at any time by writing the name of a different driver on a new card. That no company and no other person had any right to transfer the undersigned’s business to anyone else.
And that a copy of the card was on file at 249 West 133rd Street. Mrs. Sharp said there were 412 of them in the box. Six hundred ninety had been signed altogether.
The rest were with the families who had signed them. She had a ledger with every name and address written in it because paper burns. She had begun in June of 1944, three months after a woman on 137th Street had come into her shop crying because two men had stood in her hallway arguing over her bundle while it sat on the floor between them. Mrs.
Sharp had concluded that the argument had a simple cause: everyone involved believed the customers were property that could be owned and traded, and the customers themselves had never been asked. She had gone to a lawyer on Seventh Avenue named Wilbur Graves and paid him $4 to look at the wording. She got the cards printed. Then she walked the blocks in the evenings after she closed, floor by floor, for 11 months, knocking on doors and explaining what the card was.
She had never announced any of it. The dispute, so far as the paper in that box was concerned, had been settled in the spring of 1945. Neither of the men fighting over it knew. The association on West 26th Street did not know.
The plant on East 132nd Street did not know. It had never occurred to any of them that the question of who owned four blocks of Harlem laundry business could be answered by an old woman with a coal stove and a box of printed cards. A route, she explained to Johnson, is a list of people. A list of people is not a thing a company can sell, because the people are not the company’s.
The only reason a route can be bought and sold is that everybody has agreed to pretend otherwise. Her cards did not create a right. They recorded one that already existed and that nobody had bothered to write down. She said that in her experience, most of the power in the world sits in exactly that gap—between a right that exists and a right that has been written down.
Johnson left the shop at half past five with two of the cards in his pocket. He went to the office of Wilbur Graves and the two of them sat in an unheated office with their coats on until nine that night. Graves said the card was good. In fact, he said it was the strongest document anyone in the room above the furniture store had possessed on Thursday night.
A customer’s written designation of the person she wishes to do business with is not something an association of plant owners can override by a vote in an office on West 26th Street. And then Graves explained the reason the schedule mattered. An agreement among competing companies to divide territory among themselves and fix the price at which each will serve its assigned territory is not merely unfair. It is illegal.
It had been illegal under federal law since 1890 and under the law of New York for longer than that. The state had a bureau in the attorney general’s office in Albany and in New York City that existed for the purpose of stopping it. Synindler had walked into a room full of witnesses and placed on a table a written copy of exactly such an agreement. He had done it because he was so certain of his standing that it had not occurred to him that the paper was evidence.
Johnson asked one question: whether a complaint like that would be believed if it came from him. Graves said no. It would be believed if it came from 30 customers, four route owners, a minister, a union, and a lawyer, all saying the same thing on the same day with documents attached. The identity of the person who had assembled them would not appear anywhere in the file.
The work was organizational, and it took four months. Johnson went to plant workers first, because the people inside a building always know what the building is doing. Sylvester Pool was 31, a shop steward at a laundry on East 129th Street and an officer in the laundry workers local. Pool distrusted Johnson on principle and said so directly at their first meeting.
What changed his mind was that Johnson brought him the rate question rather than the route question. The plant’s Harlem rate was 2. 5 cents a pound above the rate below 110th Street, and none of that difference reached the people who ran the washers. Pool could show on paper that the differential had no basis in the cost of doing the work.
He agreed to prepare a cost statement and to say nothing about where the request had come from. Johnson went to the church because the church had the lists. Reverend Oscar Tinsley had a congregation of about a thousand families on 132nd Street and 18 women in a missionary society who had been walking those blocks for 20 years and knew every hallway in them. Tinsley asked directly whether anyone was going to be hurt.
Johnson told him that nobody was going to be hurt and that if anyone was hurt on either side, the whole thing would stop. Tinsley also suggested that the cards be signed after service in the church basement rather than at doorsteps, because a woman signing a paper in a church basement in front of her neighbors is not a woman who can later be told she was tricked. Johnson went to the money next. Emmitt Sparrow ran a credit union chartered in 1938 with about 900 members and assets of a little over $60,000.
What Johnson proposed was a class of loans the credit union had never made: equipment loans to route owners secured by the trucks themselves at rates below what the plants charged, with collections handled weekly. Sparrow studied it for nine days and brought it to his board on February 4. It was approved with one condition: no borrower could be in arrears to any plant at the time of the loan. Johnson went to the competition, which is the step most people forget.
Sixty percent of the wet wash plants in the city were not members of the association. Julius Marquetti ran a plant on Fulton Street in Brooklyn with capacity for 140,000 pounds a week and was running at about 90. Marquetti had no interest in Harlem’s problems and a very great interest in 50,000 idle pounds of weekly capacity. His terms were 7 cents a pound at the volume discussed, delivered and collected at his loading dock.
The conversation took 20 minutes. Johnson went to the press last among the outsiders and deliberately. Cora Neans was 28 and wrote for one of the Harlem weeklies. She had been trying for two years to get anyone to talk to her about the laundry trade.
Johnson gave her a set of documents and a date and asked her to hold everything until she could confirm every figure independently. If she published early, he told her, the campaign would fail and she would have a small story instead of a large one. She held it for nine weeks. The last people brought in were the two men who had started the quarrel, and they were brought in last on purpose, because neither of them could be told anything until there was something to tell.
They were brought together on the evening of Sunday, February 9, in the basement of Reverend Tinsley’s church. Leonard Pace arrived expecting to be asked to make peace and had prepared himself to refuse. Curtis Roads arrived expecting to be blamed. Neither man was asked for anything at all for the better part of an hour.
Instead, the documents were put in front of them in order: the page of the schedule Synindler had laid on the table in January, Pool’s cost statement, the rate comparison Neans had assembled, Marquetti’s Brooklyn quotation at 7 cents, Sparrow’s board resolution, and last, one of Mrs. Sharp’s cards signed in June of 1944 by a woman who lived in the building on 137th Street over which the two of them had been fighting for three years. Pace read the card three times. He asked whether it meant what he thought it meant.
Graves said it meant the woman had chosen a driver and could change her choice by writing a name on a new card. She had chosen Curtis Roads in 1944 and had been served by Leonard Pace since the following spring because the two of them had traded her back and forth without asking her. Curtis Roads put his hands over his face and sat like that for a while. Then he said that he had been fighting Pace for three years over property that had never existed, and that the only person in Harlem who had understood the business he was in was a 70-year-old woman with a coal stove.
Both men signed the cooperative papers on February 12. The strategy that carried through the spring had four parts. The economic part was the consolidation of weight. A route owner delivering 3,000 pounds a week to a plant is a supplicant.
Sixty-one route owners delivering 41,000 pounds a week to a plant are a customer, and a customer can ask for a price. The cooperative was incorporated on April 3, 1947 under the name Harlem Cooperative Laundry Service with 61 charter members, a $5 membership share, and bylaws providing that no member’s route could be transferred without the written designation of the customers themselves. It bought soap, starch, bluing, string, and brown paper in common at a saving of about 19 percent. It rented a garage on West 134th Street.
It hired one bookkeeper, a woman named Hattie Boone, whose only instruction was that every figure had to be right the first time because every figure would be looked at by people who wanted it to be wrong. The social part was the cards. Between February 16 and April 27, in 11 church basements, three union halls, two school auditoriums, and the back rooms of nine grocery stores, 2,441 cards were signed. Each card was recorded in a ledger by address, driver, and date, and each signer kept a copy.
The whole file was kept in the church safe rather than at any business address, because a church safe is harder to reach with a subpoena or a burglary. The legal part was the complaint, assembled with great care over seven weeks. Graves prepared it in the names of 31 customers, nine route owners, the cooperative, and the local union, with the page of the schedule attached, the rate comparison attached, Pool’s cost statement attached, and 11 sworn affidavits from customers describing how their business had been transferred between drivers without their consent. It alleged an agreement among competing plants to allocate territory and to maintain a differential rate for the allocated territory north of 110th Street.
It was filed with the antitrust bureau of the attorney general’s office on March 31, 1947. The competitive part was Brooklyn. Weight began moving to Marquetti’s plant on Fulton Street in the week of March 3, starting with 9,000 pounds and rising every week thereafter. The trucks left the garage on 134th Street at 5 in the morning and were back by 9.
The cost of the longer haul was real, calculated, and published to the members every Friday on a single mimeographed sheet along with the week’s poundage. Continental Wet Wash noticed in the third week of March when its Harlem intake dropped from about 52,000 pounds a week to about 38,000. What followed was four weeks of pressure applied in the ordinary way. Continental cancelled the plant agreements of 11 route owners by letter on March 24.
All 11 were already delivering to Brooklyn. The cancellations cost the cooperative nothing and provided Graves with 11 more documents. The supply house on Park Avenue that had sold soap and starch to Harlem route owners for 19 years declined to fill the cooperative’s April order. Sparrow’s credit union advanced the cooperative $1,100 and the order was placed instead with a wholesaler in Long Island City at a price 4 percent lower.
The finance company that held the paper on Curtis Roads’s truck demanded the full remaining balance of $46 on April 9. The credit union paid it on April 11 and refinanced it at a lower rate. A driver named Arthur Keyes was followed on the night of April 15 by two men who caught him near the garage on 134th Street and beat him badly enough that he spent nine days in Harlem Hospital with a fractured jaw and three broken fingers. What must be recorded is what did not happen next.
Within two hours, a number of men had gathered at the garage, and it was clear what they intended. Ellsworth Johnson came down to 134th Street at a quarter to eleven that night and stood in the doorway. He told them that anybody who touched anyone would be finished with the cooperative and finished with him. He told them the campaign would be over in a month and that everything they had built would be lost in a night if one person was hurt.
He stayed until the last of them left. Graves then filed a supplemental affidavit describing the assault, the hospital record, and its date in relation to the cancellations, and served a copy on the attorney general’s office and on the association’s counsel. Reverend Tinsley named the incident from the pulpit on Sunday, April 20, and asked his congregation to pray for a man in Harlem Hospital. The hospital bill was paid by the cooperative.
Arthur Keyes drove again on May 5. No one was ever charged. The pressure failed because there was nothing left to squeeze. A plant can cancel an agreement with a man who needs the plant.
It cannot cancel an agreement with a man who is delivering to Brooklyn. Each of the four pressures had been anticipated and answered before it was applied. After the fourth had been applied and answered, the only thing left was violence, and violence had produced a hospital record, a sworn affidavit in an antitrust file, a sermon, and no other result at all. Howard Synindler asked for a meeting on April 24.
It was held on Tuesday, April 29, 1947 at 11 in the morning in a conference room on the ninth floor of a building on Chambers Street, in the offices of the Attorney General of the State of New York. Present were Philip Heric and two assistants for the state. Synindler and counsel for the association. The general manager and counsel for Continental Wet Wash.
Wilbur Graves for the complainants. Sylvester Pool for the union. Leonard Pace and Curtis Roads for the cooperative. And Ida Bell Sharp, who had ridden the subway downtown in the black cloth coat with the thin fur collar, carrying the cardboard peach box on her lap because she would not check it and would not leave it.
Ellsworth Johnson was not in the room. He had made that decision in February. He was in a coffee shop on Reade Street, two blocks away, and he stayed there for three hours. The meeting began with the association’s position: the schedule was an internal administrative document, it had been misunderstood, and in any case it was not enforced.
Heric asked how a document that was not enforced had been carried to a meeting in Harlem in January by the association’s executive secretary and placed on a table in front of 31 witnesses for the announced purpose of cancelling two men’s routes. Continental’s counsel argued higher collection costs, greater distances, more stops per pound. Pool put his cost statement on the table and went through it line by line: wages per hundredweight, water, power, coal, depreciation, and the actual measured stop density on the Harlem routes, which was higher than downtown rather than lower. The differential had no cost basis, and after 90 minutes, nobody was seriously claiming that it did.
Mrs. Sharp was asked a single question: whether the cards in the box were genuine. She said that they were, that there were 3,131 of them counted as of that Sunday, that each was signed by the person named, that a ledger existed, that she had personally witnessed 690 of them, and that any signer could be asked. She then said one thing more, which was not asked for and which was not objected to.
She said she had not printed the cards to fight anybody. She said she had printed them because two men had once stood in a hallway on 137th Street arguing over a woman’s laundry while the woman stood there and was not spoken to, and that in her judgment the argument had not been about laundry. An agreement in principle was reached that afternoon and reduced to writing over the following week. The final documents were signed on Monday, May 12, 1947.
Continental Wet Wash agreed to a single published rate schedule with no geographic differential effective June 1 at 6. 75 cents per pound for wet wash service, to accept direct accounts from any route owner or cooperative without a designated agent requirement, to refund route deposits held from 22 Harlem agents totaling $2,640, to cancel no agreement except for cause stated in writing with 30 days to cure, and to recognize in writing that the written designation of a customer determined which driver served that customer and that no transfer of any account between drivers was valid without it. The association executed an assurance of discontinuance with the attorney general’s office filed June 10, 1947, under which the territorial schedule was struck from its practice. The member plants were notified that no allocation of territory or maintenance of differential rates would be enforced.
Two further things were agreed that were not in the antitrust file. Continental hired four workers into the plant on East 132nd Street at the union scale, which Pool had asked for. And the $14 a week for the boy in South Carolina, which had been the third paragraph of a proposal written on ruled paper in January and never read aloud, was paid by the cooperative rather than by two men, out of the general fund by vote of the membership, for four years. The verifiable results can be stated in plain figures.
The price of wet wash service in Harlem fell from 9 cents a pound to 6. 75 cents on June 1, 1947. On about 44,000 pounds a week, that came to roughly $1,000 a week left in the hands of the households of that district. The cooperative had 61 charter members in April of 1947 and 94 by December.
Its trucks were financed at 4. 5 percent by a credit union rather than at 11. 5 percent by finance companies. Twenty-two men who had been agents terminable by letter became owners of routes recorded in their own names.
The territorial schedule ceased to exist. When a similar quarrel arose in 1949 between two route owners on Amsterdam Avenue, neither man cut a tire. Both men went to the cooperative office and asked for the cards to be checked. The cards were checked and the matter was closed in nine days.
Leonard Pace and Curtis Roads were elected to the cooperative’s board in 1948 on the same slate. They were never friends. They served together for six years. Ida Bell Sharp kept her hand laundry at 249 West 133rd Street until 1955, when she was 78 and her hands had begun to fail her.
She never held office in the cooperative and declined nomination twice. The peach box went to the church safe and then to a steel file cabinet in the cooperative office. By 1952, the file held more than 9,000 cards. The practice of asking a customer to name her own driver in writing had spread to the coal trade, the ice trade, and two moving companies.
Ellsworth Johnson never spoke publicly about any of it. His name does not appear in the complaint, in the assurance of discontinuance, in the cooperative’s certificate of incorporation, or in the columns Cora Neans published. But in every dispute he was asked to settle afterward, he asked one question before he agreed to sit down with anybody: who had signed what, and where the paper was kept. The lesson that Harlem drew from the spring of 1947 was not that a plant had lowered its price, though it had.
The lesson was narrower and more useful. A quarrel that will not end is usually a quarrel that somebody else has arranged. And the way to end it is not to divide the thing being fought over, but to find out who decided that it could be divided at all, and to ask that person in writing, on the record, with witnesses, by what authority.
