[LINK] "A Reunion of Little Italy in East Harlem"

[rfmcdonald]

Thanks to Noel for linking to this New York Times article about the disappearance of a Little Italy in New York's Harlem.

Frank Uvenio, 73, stood on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem one recent Saturday and pointed toward the brown choppy waters. Over there was the dock where they would dive into the East River on hot summer days. He pointed toward the rooftops of the gray buildings. That’s where they would lie out on the tar to dry off. Down that street past the vacant lot was where they would hold the feast for Our Lady of Mount Carmel. And here, on this dead-end block, they would play stickball.

“This was like a paradise,” Mr. Uvenio said. “That’s why we always come back.”

Half a century later, the members of the stickball team had gathered again. This time, they were swinging hammers, not sticks. They had nearly finished building a seven-story-tall wooden platform that will be covered in flowers and saints made of papier-mâché, and lifted on Sunday during a traditional Italian festival, the Dance of the Giglio, which means lily in Italian.

The festival will be held near where Italian immigrants first celebrated their hometown tradition, even though the East Harlem neighborhood long ago shed its dominant Italian heritage and is now an overwhelmingly Hispanic enclave.

But the festival survives because of the Giglio Society of East Harlem, which was formed six years ago to bring the celebration back to East Harlem after a 29-year hiatus. Most of the society’s 300 Italian-American members don’t live here anymore. They moved away decades ago to leafy cul-de-sacs on Long Island and in the suburbs of New Jersey. And these days the 100 burly young men who hoist the platform onto their backs and dance it down the street have to be imported from elsewhere.

[. . .]

“It’s all gone,” said Nick Esposito, 85, as he leaned back in his folding chair on 116th Street on a recent August afternoon. He waved and smiled as a Mexican mother pushed a stroller through a group of Puerto Rican teenagers milling around the sidewalk. “There’s not too many of us left of the old school,” he said.

Mr. Esposito is one of the few who didn’t leave in the exodus of Italians from East Harlem that began after World War II, when dozens of tenements that had housed a population of thousands of Italian immigrants and their children were demolished to make way for public housing projects.

In its heyday in the first half of the 20th century, Italian Harlem was “the most Italian of the Little Italy’s,” said Gerald Meyer, a history professor at Hostos Community College who wrote about the neighborhood in his book about Vito Marcantonio, an Italian-American congressman from East Harlem.

“The demolition of blocks and blocks of the community completely shredded the fabric,” Dr. Meyer said. “At some point it became a remnant.”

Now, there are only 1,130 Italian-Americans left in East Harlem, according to the 2000 census. Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church stopped holding Italian-language Masses two years ago, and lately the feast for Our Lady of Mount Carmel has drawn more Haitians than Italians. This year two of the church’s Italian priests died, leaving only one Italian-American priest, who is 90 and bedridden.

Although the shift hasn't been nearly as complete, this reminds me very much of the ethnic succession from Italian to Portuguese that occurred over the past half-century in Little Portugal and other downtown Portuguese-Canadian districts. As one generation's immigrants assimilated and moved out, others--Portuguese and Brazilians and Chinese here, Mexicans and Haitians in Harlem--moved in.