Several luxury stores were smashed and ransacked Sunday night after looting broke out in Soho.
The next morning, the area was filled with workers boarding up stores while curious onlookers snapped photographs and peered into shattered glass windows. The action proved wise, as looting intensified across Manhattan later that night. (Check back for coverage.)
At Coach, a high-end leather goods store on Prince Street, the front door had been broken in and mannequins were strewn across the floor.
At Louis Vuitton on Greene Street, which had been boarded up since March, workers in high-visibility T-shirts scaled ladders to fortify the boards, one of which had been graffitied with “end wage slavery.” Others were marked “BLM” for Black Lives Matter.
Some retailers had already removed stock from their stores, and others were in the midst of doing so. At French Connection on West Broadway, workers could be seen wheeling racks of clothes out onto the street, where they were loaded into a branded truck.
The looting, an apparently unrelated offshoot that followed hours of largely peaceful protests over the death of George Floyd, resulted in more than 400 arrests, according to the New York Times.