Harlem’s Hidden History: The Real Little Italy Was Uptown
Harlem was once home to the largest Italian population in the country — a look at its past and present
By Matthew Small
They call New York the Big Apple, but it’s more like an onion, one layer on top of another, hundreds of years of history and culture lying hidden beneath the surface. During the late 19th century and early 20th century, waves after waves of people came here, searching for a home, creating communities out of thin air, and sometimes leaving little trace of their existence to those who came after. You can find this American ritual of migration and assimilation in Italian Harlem, the original Little Italy, arguably the most important historical Italian American community; one that influenced the fabric of their culture as well as the greater culture of New York.
In East Harlem, over a hundred years ago, tens of thousands of Italians escaped the poverty of Southern Italy for the economic opportunities of America. They crammed into decrepit tenement buildings, some with little intention of staying long-term. From East 96th to 125th Street, they recreated the traditional village life of Southern Italy, with the same food, music, festivals, cultural institutions and influences, quickly becoming the most residentially segregated European nationality in the United States. By the 1920’s, 100,000 Italians lived in Harlem (three times the size of Little Italy in lower Manhattan), the largest Italian American community in the United States. The neighborhood replicated life in Southern Italy, even the regional divisions and the villages, notes Dr. Gerald Meyer, a professor at CUNY’s Hostos Community College, who is an expert on Italian Harlem. In the 1930’s on East 112th Street, there was a settlement from Bari, in south east Italy; on East 107th Street between First Avenue and the East River lived people from Sarno near Naples; on East 100th Street between First and Second Avenues, resided Sicilians from Santiago; on East 100th Street, a group from Piscento in northern Italy; and on East 109th Street, a large group of Calabrians from the southern tip of Italy. Italians in Harlem had their own restaurants, churches, banks, funeral parlors, and social groups, an elaborate cultural infrastructure that thrived in the cultural melting pot of New York City. “It was like village living” notes Dr. Meyer. “You know everybody, you say hello to everybody. You’re constantly saying hello and goodbye to people… and the families are all operating with the same set of mores”.
Walking down Pleasant Avenue today, the remnants of the old neighborhood remain. A heavy set man with one eye sits on a stoop, an elderly Italian guy named Tony, who chose not to reveal his last name. “This is Italian Harlem right here” he said, as he reminisced about the good old days. “It was like a family, people used to look after each other, not like it is now.”
Harlem’s Italian Past
The first Italians arrived in Harlem in 1878 from Salerno in southwest Italy, and settled around East 115th Street. At the time Harlem was a mix of Irish, Jewish, and German immigrants, but by the turn of the century the area was predominately Southern Italians and Sicilians, especially east of Lexington Avenue between 96th and 116th Streets and east of Madison Avenue between 116th and 125th Streets. It became known as Italian Harlem shortly after and was the first area in New York designated “Little Italy.”
Social clubs and mutual aid societies sprung up around the neighborhood, where a sense of intense community, like family, pervaded through the streets, “they provided recreational and religious activities, death benefits, sometimes sickness and accident benefits, and aid in seeking work”, writes Dr Meyer. Italian restaurants of all kinds opened up; barber shops, bakeries and meat markets were established; churches were built by the Italian craftsmen that worshipped at them, emulating the architecture of their homeland.
Tony’s father arrived in East Harlem in 1901 from Naples and became employed as a “gandy-dancer”, an old term for a worker who set and maintained the railways. He was born in 1932 in the middle of the Great Depression, and still lives in the same apartment that he grew up in. He lamented the decline of the neighborhood, commenting that a local church, The Church of the Holy Rosary, had just closed and the nuns it housed relocated to Our Lady of Mt Carmel Church. Tony explained that most of the remaining Italian families in East Harlem still go to the Sunday mass at Our Lady of Mt Carmel Church, which has been a cultural hub to the community for over a hundred years, from the very beginning of Italian Harlem.
The neighborhood was devastated by the Great Depression, which crippled the blue collar industries that employed the community, such as construction and steel production. Only the incredible culture and deep familial ties kept the community together as long as it did. The neighborhood began to change in the 1950’s, a result of many factors, including substandard housing. Overcrowded and poorly designed, Harlem tenements housed thousands of people packed into dank, inhospitable buildings. “Most lacked toilets and bathtubs within the apartments,” writes Dr. Meyer. “As late as 1939, in the most Italian census tract, 84 percent of the dwellings were without central heating, 67 percent lacked a tub or shower, and 55 percent a private toilet.”
World War II played the biggest role in the decline of Italian Harlem. “The ethnic group who had the largest percentage of GI’s were the Italians,” says Dr. Meyer. “Huge numbers of the young guys went into the army, — and so they were removed from the community.”
Many discovered a world outside of Italian Harlem. “They were based in other places in the United States, they mingled with other nationalities which they generally didn’t do [and] it had a way of diluting their Italianness or their attachment to traditional life,” says Dr. Meyer. “When they returned, they were eligible for VA benefits, they could go to school and could get very cheap mortgages- and began to move out”.
The majority of residents of Italian Harlem had left by the 1970’s, moving mainly to Astoria and Pelham Bay. By 2010, almost all the families had moved and most of the few remaining businesses had shuttered, unable to afford the ever increasing rents and discouraged by the death of their beloved neighborhood. They were replaced by several generations of Puerto Rican immigrants fleeing the poverty of their homeland like the Italians before them.
The Cultural Legacy of Italian Harlem
During the height of Italian Harlem, no church was more important to the community then Our Lady of Mt Carmel Church on 115th St and Pleasant Ave. It was and still remains the center of the Italian American community in Harlem. The church cornerstone was laid on Sept. 20th, 1884 and the church continues the rich cultural heritage of Italian Harlem by holding an annual feast every July 16th in honor of the Virgin Mary, which has run uninterrupted for over a 120 years. In its heyday of the 1930’s, the Festa brought over 500,000 revelers from across North America. A visitor in the 30’s described the festival:
A band heads the parade, which is then followed by members of the Society of Monte Carmelo. The image of the Madonna is carried by four men. Immediately following the Madonna come the Verginelle (little virgins), young girls all dressed in white wearing fine white veils … Following them is a banner [on which] are pinned all the dollars which the faithful contribute. At the end of the parade marched all those who claim that the Madonna had healed them of some malady or performed some other miracle for their benefit, many of whom walk barefoot though the streets of Harlem carrying wax images of the parts afflicted to be presented at the church and to be melted down as candles. (According to Dr. Meyers.)
Inside the church is a revered statue of the Virgin Mary, blessed and venerated by the Pope and one of only four such images in the United States. In 1903, “Pope Leo XIII awarded the statue a set of golden crowns (one for the Madonna and one for the Child Jesus) and declared the church a basilica”, one of only two such sites in the United States, the other being Our Lady of Perpetual Help in New Orleans. The church holds another festival in the first week of August, the Dance of the Giglio, in honor of St. Anthony. Italian immigrants from the village of Brusciano, near Naples, brought this cherished tradition with them to America. During the festival, an 80 foot, three ton statue is erected and carried on the shoulders of hundreds of people through the streets of Italian Harlem. The Dance of the Giglio returned in 2000 after a 29 year hiatus caused by the disintegration of the Italian community. According to Father Marian Wierzchowski of Our Lady of Mt Carmel Church, the Dance of the Giglio currently attracts 3,000 visitors annually, many with roots in the community.
You can still find traces of Italian Harlem today. “From 114th St to 118th St and from Pleasant Ave all the way to Lexington Ave, 90 percent of the material culture of that community is there — the storefronts, the churches, the tenements,” notes Dr. Meyer. “What had been Italian banks and funeral parlors are there.”
A few of the most important cultural institutions remain open, like Rao’s on 114th St and Pleasant Ave, a restaurant so exclusive it has a year and half waiting list (the staff told me this when I tried to reserve a table). Patsy’s Pizzeria, which Francis Ford Coppola used as an influence for the Godfather, still serves its trademark thin crust pizza on 118th St and 1st Ave.
Another local institution, Claudio’s Barber Shop, on E. 116th St near the corner of 1st Ave, has operated continuously for 67 years. The shop is filled with history — , old pictures and trinkets line the walls, a 100 year old barber pole stands outside and a 100 year old cash register sits in the back, relics of Claudio Caponigro’s family. “I was born a barber; my grandfather, my father, my brother, me, my nephew, everybody, it runs in the family, five generations”, Mr. Caponigro exclaims with pride in a thick Italian accent.
Born in Pollo, south of Naples, Mr. Caponigro came to America in 1950 at the age of 20, the son of an Italian-American barber from Jamaica, Queens who had lived in Italy and returned to America while his son was a child. When he arrived in the neighborhood, it was almost all Italian. “I see all the Italian people, all the Italian restaurants.” says Mr. Caponigro. “It was a beautiful neighborhood and since then I never move out, I’m still here and I’m 86 years old.”
Despite changes in the community and in his life, Mr. Caponigro says he’s in Harlem to stay. “I went through a lot of problems; I had cancer, prostate cancer, all the year and a half was rough for me,” he says. “That’s life, but I’m strong today, I’m ok, I enjoy what I do, and I’m gonna be here a long time yet”.
Claudio has been there so long, he remembers every facet of the old neighborhood. He knew all the local celebrities from the neighborhood like Vito Marcantonio, the radical politician who represented East Harlem in Congress, Jimmy Durante, the famous comedian, (“He was my paesano!), and Patsy Lancieri, the original owner of Patsy’s. “Patsy Lancieri was my dear friend, family friend,” says Mr. Caponigro. “We used to play cards together, we used to go to the track together, we used to go bouncing around together, and he was a great man.”
Patsy Lancieri established his famed pizzeria in 1933 with his wife Carmine, and it quickly became an integral part of the neighborhood. When Tony was a kid, pizza was only 5 cents a slice. Eventually Patsy’s became a hangout for Italian celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Tony Bennett. A huge portrait of Sinatra adorns the wall like the portrait of a great king, the centerpiece of the old school trappings of Patsy’s. Sinatra even sang its praises on the stage, where he declared Patsy’s pizza “the greatest in the world”.
Patsy’s looks straight out of a scene from “The Godfather,” and it would have been if Patsy Lancieri had not denied a request from Francis Ford Coppola to shoot one of the film’s most iconic scenes there. Patsy did not want his restaurant to be associated with mafia violence and refused, but Coppola brought the cast to eat there to get a feel for authentic Italian American culture. Another famous scene from “The Godfather”, where Sonny Corleone beats his abusive brother-in-law in the street, was shot only a few blocks away on Pleasant Ave, where Al Pacino was born in 1940.
Beside “The Godfather”, Italian Harlem touched popular culture in other ways. It is mentioned by Al Pacino in “Carlito’s Way” and by Robert DeNiro in “Analyze That.” Its well known that The American Mafia operated in the area for over a hundred years, particularly the 116th Street Crew of the Genovese crime family. The crew was founded by the Morello brothers in the 1890’s who arrived from Corleone, Sicily. Older residents speak in whispered tones about the Genovese crime family which controlled East Harlem from 96th St to 125th St near Pleasant Ave. for decades under the leadership of the infamous mobster Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno.
Now the neighborhood is mostly a mix of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, African Americans, and growing numbers of young white professionals, and immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Little is left of what used to be Italian Harlem. “They put a Costco where the Washburn steel factory used to be,” says Tony with a cynical laugh, describing the huge new shopping complex, with a Target and a Costco, that cropped up a few years ago near E. 117th St. and Pleasant Ave, replacing a run-down wire factory that once employed many of the Italian residents of Harlem. The famed Morrone and Sons Bakery closed down in 2007 but its sign remains with an Italian flag, a reminder of the long Italian presence in Harlem. When asked what he missed the most from the old neighborhood, Claudio exclaimed, “The people, the people; at one time it was like family and now it’s not.”
Walking down the streets of old Italian Harlem today you might not even realize such a place ever existed, no plaques commemorate it, no statue or historical marker. “It deserves to be memorialized,” says Dr. Meyer. “There’s not a single plaque,” even though most of the buildings of Italian Harlem remain. With the passage of time, memories fade, people pass away, and the past recedes, but this forgotten chapter of Harlem’s history deserves to be commemorated, before it fades away.
