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Simone Cinotto The Taste of Place: Italian Immigrants in Shape a Foodscape, 1900-1950

All human identities are shaped by the space in which people live and socialize. Migrant identities are bounded to the geographies of multiple places. Immigrants recreate in their memory the place where they came from and turn to it to while understanding their new surroundings and redefining their identities. The tension between the perceptions of the native land and the new habitat significantly influences immigrant culture. This paper, which deals with Italian immigrants in New York in the interwar years, focuses on the role of food - as a cultural feature, non-verbal form of communication, and metaphor of self - in immigrants’ “construction” of two places: one actual - the neighborhood - and the other one remembered and imagined – the old country. In Italian neighborhoods of New York, food production, trade, and consumption had such an impact on social space that we can talk of distinct urban ethnic “foodscapes” and “smellscapes”, which affected subjective and collective identities. As the case of the Italian community of East in Northern shows, social interactions and rituals centered on food not only helped turning streets, buildings and other landmarks into shared and recognizable objects of affective relationships, but also contributed to draw boundaries (mental, cultural, political) between “Italians” and other neighboring groups. Among Italian immigrants in New York, narratives on food embedded a sense of attachment to a distant place. As a product of the specific ecology of the land immigrants left behind them, the food of the “Italian” past was the recipient of peculiar feelings of fondness. Food and eating events were central features of the narratives of the past that immigrants developed among themselves or told to their American-born children. In immigrants’ discourse, Italian food and foodways - even though, as we’ll see, technically “unauthentic” - became symbols of continuity, by way of their ideal location into a natural and ordered “other place.” The few older who still live in today regard the 1930s and 1940s as the golden age of their community. In those decades, first and second generation Italian Americans accounted for up to 80% of the population of the area. Of course, they remember the hardships of life in Depression and wartime. Some of them blame the eventual demise of “their” neighborhood on the influx of African American and Puerto Rican migrants, which began to take place at that time. But what they most vividly remember is the rich social life of a “self-sufficient” community. “The neighborhood”, according to a woman who lived there all her life, “was one big family. Doors were kept open, everybody socialized with each other, everybody borrowed from each other, everybody paid back what they borrowed” (Pascale). In Italian Harlem, ethnic homogeneity and intense social interaction nurtured a widely shared set of expectations and behaviors; an ethnic working-class subculture “geographically” bred by life in the “urban village.”1 As a consequence, many residents were attached to a place that for many other New Yorkers was just an unattractive, crime and poverty-ridden slum. Geographer David Ley argued that in “urban villages” the identity of the community is made coherent through a widespread sharing of common symbols (158). This is certainly the case for food and foodways in Italian Harlem. In oral histories, food customs are among the most recurring and worshiped aspects of communal daily life. Furthermore, it is impossible to separate the meaning of food from the meaning of the places where it was purchased, prepared, and consumed. The emotional relationships that individuals uphold with tastes and smells of the past are intertwined with the sentiments for places. Food is also a powerful symbol in articulating the “history” of the place. To the interviewer who asked her if she used to return in the old neighborhood every now and then an immigrant woman explained: “I’ve got an house over there, but I don’t wanna live over there.” She went on suggesting who was to blame for the disappearance of her community. “There are Spanish people there now. They’re nice people but… Before there were all Italian people, all Paisano in the house. I miss them, because I used to go over there, and smell the Italian cookin’ in the hall. Now no more. I don’t have nothing to do there” (Fischetti). Indeed, a peculiar “foodscape” shaped the identity of Italian Harlem, fashioning the choreography and rhythm of its streets, in terms of smells, sounds, colors, names, signs. From the very beginnings of their settlement in Harlem, immigrants tried to shape around them a recognizable and familiar sensual microuniverse. In the first nucleus of Italian Harlem, a handful of shanties on 113th Street and which in the late 1880s sheltered the laborers working at the elevated railroad, Italian food stores immediately appeared (“Blocks”). In the and 1930s, there was a huge number of restaurants, markets, and stores selling what people in the neighborhood labeled as “Italian food”. In 1935, a typical block between First and Second Avenues, 109th and 110th Streets, hosted two bakeries, two delicatessen shops, four butchers, five grocery stores, two candy stores, one pastry shop, one pasta shop, and one restaurant owned by Italian Americans plus a restaurant and a live poultry market run by Jewish Americans. Involvement in neighborhood’s daily life, even more than ethnic or regional affiliation, was a key resource for local food dealers. Businesses’ survival largely depended on face-to-face relations between storekeepers and their customers, many of whom living in the same block. The high degree of intimacy that existed between storekeepers and their closest residents is suggested by the fact that some Jewish and Greek grocers spoke Neapolitan, Sicilian, or Italian fairly well. Food markets and stores were especially important in a gendered perspective. In a community which put several restrictions on women’s use of public space, shopping for food (along with other activities related to food preparation) represented an acknowledged area of women's visibility and sociability. For immigrant women, newcomers in particular, shopping was not only a way to develop social relations, but it had an important function in the understanding of the urban space, its uses and meanings. A woman who immigrated to East Harlem from Sicily in 1924, for example, suffered intensely for the displacement, finding the new environment extremely hostile. “In the streets she was constantly afraid because there were too many automobiles that whizzed by very fast.” But when she became acquainted with Italian neighbors who had lived in New York for some years, she thought less and less of the old country. She and the new friend would go out together during school hours, and do their shopping together, and this duty had become

a very pleasant one. Little by little she learned the names of the food articles, and patronized the shops were other Italian women went. She was getting to like more and more her small apartment, and began to realize that hot and cold running water were indeed very useful, just like the peculiar black gas stove, which at first had put fear into her. (Vicesvinci) If many “food places” functioned as landmarks to Italian Harlem residents, helping them to “bring into focus” a subjective image of the , the open-air market situated on First Avenue between 110th and 116th Streets was the “node” of the area, what geographer of perception Kevin Lynch called a “thematic concentration”, the “heart, focus, and symbol of a region.” Apart from being a vital institution in Italian Harlem’s socioeconomic life, the market was a central element of visual attraction, that imbued the place with spirit and identity. Pushcart peddlers cried the virtues of their merchandise in “a half dozen Italian dialects: Sicilian, Calabrese, Neapolitan, Apulian, and so forth.” They sold fruits and vegetables uncommon in the American city, like broccoli, cauliflowers, zucchini, eggplants, artichokes, prickle pears, olives (Federal Writers’ Project 6). Those who participated into the local subculture knew a complex topography and semantics of the market. A second generation Italian American remembered: Every morning my mother would take the shoppin’ bag from and walk all the way down to 111th to see what the story is. After 111th, she comes back and starts buyin’, because she might have figured that at 116th it was more expensive than 114th or 111th. All the aristocrats would go at 115th and 116th. My mother had to go at 113th and 114th. Everything was cheaper there, but you had to know how to shop. It was a show – the Jewish merchant and Italian, it’s a riot. […] Some of the Jews, they never wanted to lose their first customer. They would lose money, but if they lost their first customer, that day was gone. So everybody would go early to be the first customer. “Wait till he opens.” “No, me first.” (qtd. in Kisseloff 355-356) City dwellers learn urban space through a multisensual experience of places. Sounds and smells influence the perception of the environment, affecting the subjective evaluation of spaces, the affective relations that people establish with places, and their feeling of belonging. In the eyes of many middle-class observers, Italian Harlem was a monotonously ugly area. Two reporters noted that “the misfortune of Little Italy is peculiarly uniform.” And when it came to odors, outsiders tended to perceive an homogeneous “stench of poverty.” Journalists described the olfactory landscape of Italian Harlem recalling the indistinct stink that resulted from the “urine-draft of air that move up the stairs,” the exhalations raising up from “unforgettable toilets,” and the ubiquitous sweet and sour smell of deep fried garlic. The open air market was scarcely mentioned for other than the smelly, putrid garbage that it left behind every night (Federal Writers’ Project 3). But those “initiated” to the life in the slum knew of a different “smellscape”. They were able to perceive and make distinctions in the wide range of sweet, sour, pungent, spiced odors that blended in their streets. This olfactory sensitivity was important to confer an identity to space, in making it familiar, in transforming it into something of their own. Food smells were the most emotionally significant. A recent immigrant remembered how pleased he was by the smells he encountered along the street where he lived. “There was the reassuring fragrance of warm bread, the heady aroma of roasting coffee, the musty smell of wooden barrels filled with wine, the pungent odors of ripe olives and anchovies in brine, of gorgonzola and provolone cheese and hanging salami” (Sermolino 25). Because of the residential segmentation of the population along lines of regional origins, each street had its peculiar smells. Foodways communicated the cultural differences attached to places. As a visible feature of sociability and rituality among different groups, food was a powerful symbol in the narrative of “self” and “the other.” A man whose family had come to New York from Campania noted: I could enter the neighborhood at one end and sample the air quality of the gravy, and the odds were that it would be about the same at the other end of the neighborhood, with the exception of the Sicilians’, who were strange in just about every other department, too. They were much more violent than the Neapolitans, and as far as their dialect went, we couldn’t understand a word they were saying. They ate weird things; at least we Neapolitans thought so. They ate macaroni with pumpkin, and who the hell would do something like that? (Della Femina 23). East Harlem residents instinctively mixed up the spatial boundaries, food boundaries, and cultural boundaries that were precisely drawn on the street grid of Northern Manhattan. The territory of “the other” was firstly experienced in terms of different foods, smells, and customs. A food geography replicated ethno-cultural divisions, created an apparent group coherence and unity, reinforced the sense of belonging of the people in the community. Sometimes, prejudices, distastes, and repulsions for the food of “the other” reproduced conflicts and imagined cultural hierarchies. Italian immigrants articulated these narrative strategies against their Puerto Rican neighbors, who around the 1930s had “taken control” of the area west of and, in their turn, completely transformed the urban landscape, introducing previously unknown voices, sounds, colors, and smells. The symbolic connection between food, territory, and identity was a major dimension of the most important ethno-cultural event of Italian Harlem, the annual feast of the Madonna of Mount Carmel. According to its historian Robert Orsi, the feast was a collective performance that featured different layers of meaning (Orsi, The Madonna). The dimension of the mystic experience overlapped with territoriality and with the sensual experience, in which the consumption of food was essential. In the 1930s, when the Feast drew into Italian Harlem streets several thousands people, vendors sold watermelon, Italian sausage and pepper, torrone and ice-cream from the stalls lined along the sidewalks; peddlers wormed their way into the crowd with pizzas, zeppole, lupini, chick-peas, cotton candy. The procession followed an established path, crossing the neighborhood streets from Second to and from 111th to 116th Street. With the stride of the Madonna in the streets, and the symbolic language of the public performance, the music of the band, the wavering flags, the illuminations, and the smells and tastes of the “ethnic” food, the community claimed the neighborhood streets as its own. To participants, the experience of the Feast meant a ritualized occasion during which emerged a close relation between food consumption, sense of place, and collective identity. We participated in the feast by buyin’ a sausage frankfurter - remembered one of them. In those days they had everything – a bottle of beer, soda, pizza. We liked the sausage. I don’t know why it always tasted better there. No matter how your mother cooked ‘em, that guy did it better. Even the frankfurter, no matter how you cook frankfurters at home, you can’t beat the guy on the corner. (qtd. in Kisseloff 376) The relationship that was built between the residents of the ethnic enclave and the “ethnic space” by means of the sensual experiences of food, its tastes and smells, could also function to understand other places. Leonard Covello, a prominent scholar and public leader who was a lifelong resident of East Harlem, experienced this feeling during a visit to an Italian section of the . He was nervously walking toward the house of the violent father of one of his student, wondering about how to approach the man. Covello recalled: “As I entered the downstairs hall and caught the odor of garlic and tomato sauce, I felt right at home.” He was thus reassured that he would be able to enter in a relationship of confidence with his counterpart, relying on the fact of sharing the same culture (Covello, The Heart 132). Food was equally important in the construction of both public and private places. The symbolic connections between food and places stemmed from the sphere of affective relations. The stronger the emotional involvement toward people, familiar tastes and smells, the spatial context, the more inseparable became these three dimensions. It was on the basis of emotional involvement that food and places became overlapping codes of communication between individuals, group, and community, conveying affection, membership, identity. In Italian Harlem existed a recurring narrative. People celebrated their own food cultures as different from the rest of the community. The women of the family were usually thought to be the keepers of a peculiar tradition. The characters of this “food narrative” - people, family, community - were set in actual places, which turned themselves into recipients of emotional attachments. My mother was the greatest cook in the world - remembered a second-generation Italian American man. Everybody thought their mother was the best. I don’t know why they think that, but my mother was the best. It was a fact. Her bread was the best-smelling bread in the whole world. When she made bread, the whole house smelled – three floors. Everybody knew that Antoinette was making bread. My sister lived on the first floor of our building. My grandmother was on the second floor, and we were on the third. When I come home from church, my sister would make meatballs, and I would steal a couple. My grandmother would make meatballs, and I would take from her, and by the time I got to my mother’s I was full. My mother made good meatballs, but my grandmother had something different in hers. I think it was more garlic. Anyway, it was good. You came into that house, and you got such a good aroma. It was a wonderful

feeling. There was a woman next door named Jenny. She was Neapolitan. Her meatballs were different. They were good, but they weren’t as good as my mother’s or my sister’s or my grandmother’s (qtd. in Kisseloff 353-354). The symbolic significance of home food rituals was enhanced by the integration of food sharing and family gathering in the physical space of the home. The ritual Sunday dinner, which took place in one of the households of la famiglia, established over time an holistic relationship between familiar faces, voices, places, tastes, and smells. We didn’t go out to eat - remembered another source. We ate either at our house, or Cousin Ronnie’s, or Uncle Dom’s, or wherever. My grandmother would start making her meat sauce at seven in the morning on Sunday and within five or six hours that smell would be all through the house, covering everything - clothing, furniture, appliances - and then it would go out the front door and into the streets, to mix with the aroma of neighboring meat sauces (Della Femina 22-23). Among immigrants, however, food derived much of its power in establishing affective relationship with concrete places from being a reminder of another, intangible place. Tastes, smells, and other “food signs” helped transforming an unfamiliar space into a system of recognizable and meaningful places and symbols also because these signs told immigrants of an alternative, idealized place: “Italy.” For immigrants, the consumption of foodstuffs coming from their village in Italy, be they olive oil, wine, cheeses, salamis, dried figs, or prickle pears, was a cherished means to ideally reconnect them with the place they left behind. In the neighborhood, petty importers benefited from the affective ties between immigrant consumers and these foodstuffs. Discussions about the old paese often revolve around food, and immigrants from a single village loved to share “food memories” among them (Park and Miller 120). In the early decades of the twentieth century, food import from Italy to New York was big business indeed, thanks to the dimensions of the immigrant community and its faithful devotion to imported products. Immigrants preferred them over domestic replicas even when the latter were significantly cheaper2. Only the combination of the spurring effects of and the protectionist U.S. tariff policy on the domestic industry of “Italian” foods, the emergence of second- and third-generation consumers, and the Depression, reversed the trend in favor of American-made Italian-style food in the 1930s (Camera di Commercio 66). In fact, the houses and streets of East Harlem were no heaven for immigrants. Harlem was the distant and strange place where they had been drawn from their paesi. They came there looking for economic gratification in exchange of their labor, or following the path of other family and kin members. Disappointment and frustration were not foreign feelings to them. In New York many experienced, at some point of their lives, exploitation, unemployment, family crises, violence, disease, and death. For some of them, the sensual encounter with “America” (that is, the often limited portion of the land that they happened to experience) was disconcerting. They had arrived with great expectations, built upon the tales of those relatives, friends, and acquaintances that had preceded them. Most of them had left a rural little town environment for a “cramped quarter” of the world’s largest modern . They perceived and depicted that place in one color, gray. You, the chemists, the doctors, the engineers, of America, you have made this country gray - wrote Emanuel Carnevali in his autobiography. Why do you handle gray things only, why does everything turn grey in your hands? Why do you want to take the joy out of oranges and peaches - kill fruits? This is the complaint of a million Italians [...]; “America, donne senza colore e cibo senza sapore” - America: women without color and food without taste. (161) The immigrants’ common complaint that in “America” food was tasteless, colorless, and “industrial” was not just meaningful per se. In their perception, it revealed the presence, of an ideal connection between environmental conditions and a supposed immorality of American life. American life conditions were perceived as especially corruptive of what immigrants felt was most ideologically dear and socially important to them: la famiglia. Nothing caused more grief among the immigrant community, during the 1920s and 1930s, than the generational conflicts that arose from the increasing individualization of the American-born generations from their parents’ control. Immigrants blame this conflict on the “Americanization” that caused the “departure from the tradition” of their children. In immigrants’ narratives, food was often part of the picture. It is difficult to bring up children in this country - told Covello a mother of seven, six of whom were born in New York. In the old country children somehow knew, without

being taught, that they should help the family… In America all children are much younger; they have neither the understanding or the physical strength that children in Italy have. Here a family has to wait a long time till the children get sense and make up their minds that there is nothing finer in the world than to take interest in the affairs of the family. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe is the bad food. (qtd. in Covello, Social Background 304)

Food memories were recurring features of the narratives of the Italian past told by the immigrants of Italian Harlem. Immigrants indulged in representations of “Italy” among them and in front of their children, who had not any clue of what “the other side” was like. Historian Robert Orsi wrote a revealing essay on the process of remembering the past among immigrants in Italian Harlem and its impact on generational relations between them and their American-born children. Memories of “Italy” were not neutral recollections of facts, people, and places “buried” or “frozen” in the past, but narratives ideologically enacted to respond to immigrants’ concerns and needs in their present social world. Especially when told to their New York-born children, the “stories” of “Italy” had moral lessons attached (Orsi, Fault of Memory). The openly symbolic and mythical contents of these “memories” is suggested by the fact that many Italian Harlem youths believed that Italy was “just one farm house after another” and that Italian villages were dwelled by spirits, dwarfs, giants, witches, and magicians (Thrasher 204).3 In immigrants’ narratives, “Italy” was the land of la miseria, which they fled to achieve better material conditions. Over there, though, hunger instilled in people a sense of discipline and morality that were hard to find in affluent America. “In Italy, we did not waste anything,” an immigrant woman claimed. “If a crumb fell on the floor, we bent down, picked it up and kissed it, thanking God that we had it” (“Thrift”). On another tone, the “old country” was the beautiful, “in color”, land where now adult or old immigrants set a distant and idealized past, a “state of nature” where they nostalgically remember themselves growing up. Finally, “Italy” was the setting where they located the narrative of an ordered family life, as opposed to a disappointing reality. In their memories, immigrants constructed “Italy” as a multifaceted (but non changing, not evolving) place. “Italy” was a non-place, a narrative geographical tradition that drew much of its value from being conceptually opposed to History, that is, to the socioeconomic circumstances that made most of immigrants’ culture, customs, and values obsolete and useless. Food, as a symbol of tradition, was enacted in representations that were inherently modern, in that immigrants narrated traditional life in an elegiac natural place as a positive alternative to American life. Sensual memories of foods, tastes, smells were uncertain and ambiguous, both in terms of contents and meanings. However, they often articulated the terms of a conflict between “here, now” and “there, back then.” In an interview with Covello, a man told him:

When I’m in Italy I want to be in America. When I’m there I always dream of home. I remember these dirty, ugly streets; these squalid houses, the smell of baccala (dried cod fish). I thought of the time I slept in my native vineyard, how the larks or the crowing roosters woke me up. I saw the sea and the clouds. Oh, I tell you it is a difficult thing to forget this country (Italy). (“Nausea”) When immigrants described to their children the place of their birth, the taste of “Italy” existed in dialectical opposition to the taste of “America.” From the way my relatives usually talked about it - noted Jerre Mangione - Sicily sounded like a beautiful park, with farmland around that produced figs, oranges, pomegranates, and many other kinds of fruit that refused to grow in Rochester. The air was perfect in Sicily, neither cold nor damp as it was in Rochester most of the time. The wine tasted better, and you could pick almonds and olives off the trees. In the summer the men strummed guitars and sang in rich tenor voices, and the women went on picnics in the country. Everyone was much happier there. (18-19) The flexibility of food as a symbol of identity enhanced its importance in the creation of public and private spaces in Italian Harlem. Immigrants in New York ate much differently than in Italy. They labeled as “Italian” much of the food they consumed, even though they became familiar with much of it in America, many foodstuffs were American-made or grown, and their ways of consumption were for a large part a result of the American experience. In New York, their diet was affected by the market conditions. In Italy, food supplies were strongly dependent on local ecologies, different ways of production, and seasonal cycles. In New York fruits, vegetables, and other foodstuffs were available on the market the whole year round. While in Italy the consumption per capita of meat and sugar was among the lowest in Europe, the ’ was the world’s highest. It was only in America that the daily consumption of pasta, white bread, coffee, olive oil became widespread among Italians. These foodstuffs, that in Italy were consumed on a regular basis only by the upper classes, in the United States were frequently accessible even to the poorer families. However, as the shaping of ethnic cuisine amid immigrant communities stemmed by the effort to realize food ideals that were unfeasible in Italy, the radical changes that occurred in the diets of immigrants were somehow perceived as a “persistence of the tradition”. The way immigrants came to think about the food they consumed as “Italian food” is one of the most illuminating examples of the degree their “Italian” identity was in fact an American creation. A similar process was at work as far as the construction of the private space of “home” was concerned. In New York, most immigrants lived in physical environments that were completely new to them. Italian American domesticity was mostly the result of the efforts to cultivate the realization of old, often unfulfilled, values in new ways and in different spaces. The recurring convivial events involving the extended family emerged as a new, central “ethnic tradition.” But the novelty was covered with the appearance of continuity. The representations of Italian life often linked a place “closer to nature“ to the unity of families around tables and the sharing of food as symbols of family communion. Immigrants were most touched when they recalled themselves being served dinner by mother in the stone house in the little village. The most vivid of their sensual recollections were those of good food: fruit trees, vines, freshly pressed oil, the smell of homemade bread. [In Molfetta] - one of them remembered - “The relations between the various households of our whole family were in the main most cordial. Ours was a social existence as truly spontaneous and beautiful as it was natural (emphasis added). All the long line of relatives, uncles, aunts, and cousins of every degree lived in Molfetta. This gave an opportunity for much social intercourse. We had a custom of frequently getting together in the evenings for social good times. [...] Usually “eats” and drinks were served by the entertaining households; almonds, walnuts, raisins and stuffed dates or figs, with home-made cakes and candy. The best of the year’s wine and “rosolio” - a delicate liquor - were served. [...] In the summer we used to go the country, especially at vintage time. I had an aunt who owned a large farm, and I was always invited there at

grape-gathering time. It was the happiest season of all the year. I found my stomach limitless in its capacity of expansion. But best of all was watching the whole process of wine-making. (Panunzio 19-20) Through food, tastes, and smells, immigrants in Italian Harlem tried (and to a certain extent succeeded) to humanize, bend to their needs, and carve according to their nostalgia, a place that presented to them as hostile and disturbing. To make this, they needed to recreate in memory a non- place which was both the repository of the neediness they successfully escaped and what they considered the real humanity. Food was a central key to reconnect themselves to this imagined place - where food was good, natural, and tasty indeed – that functioned at the same time as a model, an alternative, a reversal, and a denial of the place where they lived and toiled.

Works Cited “Blocks.” Covello Papers. Box 78 Folder 8. The Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, Philadelphia. “Nausea of immigrant.” Covello Papers. Box 68 Folder 1. The Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, Philadelphia. “Thrift.” Covello Papers. Box 68 Folder 6. The Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, Philadelphia. Camera di Commercio Italiana in New York. Nel cinquantenario della Camera di Commercio Italiana in New York, 1887-1937. New York, 1937. Carnevali, Emanuel compiled and prefaced by Kay Boyle. The Autobiography of Emanuel Carnevali. New York: Horizon, 1967. Covello, Leonard. The Heart is the Teacher. New York: McGraw Hill, 1958. --. The Social Background of the Italo-American School Child: A Study of the Southern Italian Family Mores and Their Effect on the School Situation in Italy and America. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967. Della Femina, Jerry. An Italian Grows in . Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Federal Writers’ Project. “Italian Harlem.” American Guide, Major Guide File, Guide. Box A535. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Fischetti, Maria. “Interview.” Immigrant Labor Oral History Project. Series II Cassette 22 Side A. Tamiment Labor History Library, New York University.

Gans, Herbert J. The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans. New York: The Free Press, 1962. Gillett, Lucy. “Factors Influencing Nutrition Work Among Italians.” Journal of Home Economics 14 (Jan. 1922). Kisseloff, Jeff. You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II. New York: Schocken Books, 1990. Ley, David. A Social Geography of the City. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1960. Mangione, Jerre. Mount’Allegro. New York: Knopf, 1952. Orsi, Robert A. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. --. “The Fault of Memory: ‘Southern Italy’ in the Imagination of Immigrants and the Lives of Their Children in Italian Harlem, 1920-1945.” Journal of Family History 15.2 (1990). Panunzio, Constantine M. The Soul of an Immigrant. New York: Arno Press and , 1969. Park, Robert E. and Herbert A. Miller. Old World Traits Transplanted. : University of Chicago Press, 1921 (Italian Edition: William I. Thomas. Gli immigrati e l'America: tra il vecchio mondo e il nuovo. Roma: Donzelli, 1997). Pascale, Rose. Personal Interview. 7 Dec. 1998. Sermolino, Maria. Papa's Table d'Hote, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1952. Thrasher, Fredric M. “NYU Boys’ Club Study, 1927-1928.” The Bureau of Social Hygiene Project and Research Files. Rockefeller Archive Center of the Rockefeller University. Vicesvinci, J. “The Italian Pattern in a Family That I Know Well.” Covello Papers. Box 67 Folder 23. The Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, Philadelphia.

1 For the sociologist Herbert Gans, who in the late-Fifties studied a community of second generation Italian Americans in a low-rent district of Boston, a urban village is an area “in which European immigrants – and more recently Negro and Puerto Rican ones – try to adapt their nonurban institutions and cultures to the urban milieu” (4).

2 This attitude was well known by social workers and nutritionists working among Italian immigrants. “During the last few years, when Italian cheese was $1.50 a pound, [the Italians] preferred to use less rather than to substitute American cheese at 50 cents,” noted one of them. “They could not see that $1.50 spent for American cheese would buy three times as much nourishment” (Gillett 17).

3 The same boys and girls being interviewed were equally convinced that “The people who have color in their cheeks drink a lot of wine” and that “The people who season their food with red hot peppers will eventually become very strong.”