The Taste of Place: Italian Immigrants in New York Shape a Foodscape, 1900-1950
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Simone Cinotto The Taste of Place: Italian Immigrants in New York 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 Harlem in Northern Manhattan 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 Italian Americans who still live in East Harlem 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 First Avenue which in the late 1880s sheltered the laborers working at the elevated railroad, Italian food stores immediately appeared (“Blocks”). In the 1920s 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 city, 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 116th Street 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.