Italians
THE STREETS NEW YORKERS now associate with Little Italy—Baxter, Mulberry, and Elizabeth—did not become thoroughly Italian until the 1880s. Before then, Italian immigrants were just a modest presence in Five Points. Both Cow Bay and the block of Baxter Street just north of the Five Points intersection had become home in the 1850s to many natives of Italy. In the prewar decade, the majority of the city’s Italian immigrants were either professionals or skilled artisans. But those who lived in Five Points worked primarily as unskilled day laborers and fruit peddlers, while the women toiled as ragpickers and the boys as bootblacks. Like their countrymen in other parts of the city, most of the first Italians in Five Points were natives of northern Italy, particularly the province of Liguria and its bustling port capital of Genoa. By 1855, the Italian presence in Five Points was significant enough to prompt the Children’s Aid Society to establish a special night school there especially for Italian immigrants.9
During the 1860s, the neighborhood’s Italian population continued to increase steadily. In 1865, it was sufficient to support three Italian groceries. These establishments, two of which featured billiard tables and crowded barrooms, served as social hubs for the Italian residents. Growth in the early 1870s was even more rapid, and soon the Italian “colony” began spreading south from the Five Points intersection down Baxter Street. This concentration was the largest in Manhattan, prompting the editor of the city’s Italian-language newspaper to dub Five Points the city’s “Boulevard des Italiens.”10
Many of the newly arriving immigrants still hailed from Liguria and other northern provinces, but by the early 1870s, large numbers also began arriving in New York from the southern half of the Italian peninsula, especially Campania (the region surrounding Naples) and Basilicata (the region south of Campania). By this point, significant Italian enclaves developed a few miles to the north of Five Points on Thompson, Sullivan, Jersey, Crosby, and Washington Streets. Yet most of the impoverished southern Italians arriving in these years chose to make Five Points their home.11
Overpopulation, crop failures, high taxes, desperate poverty, and in the case of Basilicata in particular, fear of malaria, all drove southern Italians from their homeland in the 1870s. Until about 1875, most of these sojourners settled in South America, especially Argentina. But as the American economy revived later in the decade, New York became their preferred destination. Soon, hare l’America, to go to America, became a goal of all young Italians, “almost a sign of manhood,” notes one historian. Men did, in fact, outnumber women in this early Italian emigration, by a margin of nearly ten to one in the mid-1880s. They came without women in part because they did not intend to relocate permanently. Most hoped merely to save money and return to Italy to pay off family debts, buy a farm, or in some other way improve upon their previously miserable standard of living.12
“GROANING OUT THEIR HORRID MUSIC UNDER OUR WINDOWS”
Unlike Irish Five Pointers, who had quickly embraced American foods upon their arrival in America, Italians chose to bring their culinary staples with them. They could find virtually all of their favorite foods in the neighborhood’s many Italian groceries. Luigi Peirano’s emporium at 98 Park Street carried “a complete assortment of every type of food, specializing in the foods of Genoa and Naples, imported directly. . . . We have olive oil from Lucca and the Ligurian Riviera, parmesan, romano, pecorino, and Swiss and Dutch cheese, dried mushrooms, preserves, salami, rice, flour etc.” The store also stocked wines from Italy and California. Italian groceries also sold pasta, of course, though most Italian housewives settling in Five Points continued to make their own by hand. As in Italy, many Italian food shops in Five Points were highly specialized. Pasquale Cuneo’s Mulberry Street “salumeria,” for example, sold only pork products, including salami, Bolognese mortadella, lard, and numerous varieties of sausage and prosciutto. The Italian press waxed eloquent on the wonderful aromas emanating from Five Points’ kitchens, a sentiment never expressed when the Irish dominated the neighborhood. Yet other New Yorkers did not salivate over the thought of Italian cuisine. Still wedded to a meat and potatoes diet, they looked disdainfully upon the Italians’ “dirty macaroni.”13
Some specialties, such as Italian ice cream, were sold on the street. For just one cent, a vendor dished out, “on a bit of brown paper, a small dab of ice-cream, or its mysterious and sticky relative called ‘hokey-pokey’; and he finds plenty of cash customers. While ice-cream is sold at such popular prices, even the poorest family need not be without cramps and dyspepsia.”14
The first Italians in New York became synonymous not merely with certain types of food but with specific occupations as well. Initially, organ-grinding was the vocation most associated with Italian immigrants. Journalist Solon Robinson had complained in the 1850s that New Yorkers were “tormented” by Italians “groaning out their horrid music under our windows, while the grinder and his monkey look anxiously for falling pennies or pea-nuts.” As Robinson noted, monkeys were an integral part of the organ-grinder’s trade, climbing up building facades to solicit donations from those in upper-story windows. Their antics delighted children, who in turn beseeched their parents for coins. Grinders usually dressed their simian assistants in ornate costumes to attract attention, though they did so with a sense of humor. After the Austro-Italian War of 1866, for example, it became especially popular to dress the monkeys in Austrian officers’ uniforms.15
New Yorkers associated organ-grinding with Five Points. Nearly one in twenty Italian men living there was an organ-grinder in 1880. Even if he did not live in Five Points, the organ-grinder probably bought or rented his instrument there. An aspiring grinder could rent a hand organ for four dollars per month on Baxter Street, or buy one direct from the manufacturer a block away in Chatham Square. The Chatham Square dealer claimed to have supplied five thousand Italians with the instruments from 1870 to 1890.16
Five Pointers also supplied organ-grinders with their monkeys. A Harper’s Weekly story on “Italian Life in New York” featured a full-page print of a Baxter Street “monkey training school.” The “half-grown” monkeys enrolled at the simian academy were taught to doff their hats and shake hands in response to commands in either Italian or English. A properly trained monkey could significantly increase a grinder’s income by thoroughly working the crowd for tips and amusing onlookers so that they dug deeper into their pockets for donations. Trained animals were worth twenty to thirty dollars, the equivalent of several months’ salary to impoverished Five Pointers.17
Consequently, a Five Pointer would go to virtually any length to keep a monkey healthy. An Italian author visiting the neighborhood related with astonishment that “one day, seated on a step of one of the darkest tenements, one could see an Italian lady who, with uncovered breasts, nursed a monkey as if it were a baby. The monkey was sick; and this woman, the wife of an organ-grinder, hoped to restore it with her own milk.”18
As had been the case with child street musicians, legislation hastened the decline of organ-grinding. “The law forbidding organ-grinders to have monkeys, and the demand for Italian laborers, have made organ-grinding almost a thing of the past,” reported Harper’s Weekly in 1890. This was something of an exaggeration, as the trade persisted well into the twentieth century. But the number of organ-grinders in New York probably declined by two-thirds from the 1870s to 1890. Once Italian boys began to displace Irish youngsters as bootblacks and newsboys, and Italian men gained acceptance as day laborers, few lamented the demise of these musical street trades.19
“WE WANT SOMEBODY TO DO THE DIRTY WORK;
THE IRISH ARE NOT DOING IT ANY LONGER”
Because they could speak no English, most Italian men turned to padroni to find them jobs. The padroni supplied manual laborers to construction sites and public works projects inside the city, and to railroad track crews and mining companies outside of it. Employers paid the padroni, who deducted a generous fee before turning over the balance to their laborers.
The padroni who found employment for adults soon became as notorious as their predecessors who had exploited children. The initial fee they levied for finding work seemed exorbitant, often amounting to one or even two weeks’ pay. A newcomer might not receive a dime in wages for quite some time, and if he was laid off before his padrone had been paid in full, the laborer would leave the work site without a cent and still be in debt to the contractor. If the job did last, the padrone continued to deduct a portion of the worker’s salary as long as he was employed. Padroni were notorious for laying off workers without cause in order to generate a new round of up-front fees. Some padroni, especially those new to the business, actually supervised their charges at the work site. A few even brandished pistols to maintain discipline. The more established padroni hired foremen to oversee the laborers and translate the construction boss’s orders into Italian. Whether they wanted to stay in New York or journey thousands of miles for work, Italian immigrants quickly learned that Mulberry Street in Five Points was the place to find the padroni who could secure them their first jobs in America.20
Many successful Five Points p adroni eventually branched out into “banking,” and the district soon became as renowned for its shady Italian banks as it was for its rapacious padroni. “Almost every other house in the Italian quarter is a ‘bank,’” observed the Herald in 1892. Another writer christened Mulberry Street “‘the Italian Wall Street,’ because of the many banking houses and money exchanges that line that thoroughfare.” In the late nineteenth century, there were six and sometimes even ten banks per block on Mulberry Street.21
These banks had little in common with typical American depositories of the period. Other financial institutions built imposing offices in order to convey a sense of solid financial stability. The Mulberry Street banks, in contrast, were generally “shabby little affairs, run in connection with lodging houses, restaurants, grocery stores, macaroni factories, beer saloons, cigar shops, etc., but under imposing names, such as Banca Roma, Banca Italiana, Banca Abbruzzese, and the like.” They were neither licensed nor regulated and paid no interest whatsoever on their deposits. Anyone, it seemed, could open a Mulberry Street bank. A successful watchmaker began offering banking services in 1891. A wine shop doubled as a bank as well. Most Mulberry Street “bankers” also served as railroad and steamship company agents, and typically transacted more business wiring money to Italy than they did taking in immigrants’ hard-earned savings for deposit.22
Despite these shortcomings, New York’s Italian newcomers were drawn to the Mulberry Street banks. With Italian unification a recent event, immigrants still thought of themselves more as Basilicatans or Neapolitans than Italians, and the bankers skillfully manipulated the newcomers’ regional loyalty to win their confidence. In addition, many believed they had no choice but to make the banks their first stop in New York. Often the bankers’ agents in Italy stamped the name and address of a particular Mulberry Street bank on their passports and instructed them to report there for work.23
The Italian bankers insisted that their unsavory reputation was unfounded. They paid no interest, they asserted, because they did not put their depositors’ funds at risk by investing them. Their fees and commissions were not exorbitant either, they contended, because so many immigrants defaulted on their loans. That the bankers loaned money at all, however, indicates that they were investing their depositors’ funds. It is also hard to believe that the many bankers who accumulated substantial real estate holdings did not use deposits to purchase tenements or secure mortgages.24
One of the most successful bankers in Five Points was Antonio Cuneo. Born in the Piemonte region of northwestern Italy, Cuneo immigrated to New York in 1855. Like many early Italian immigrants, Cuneo first chose self-employment, selling fruit and roasted nuts from a pushcart. Four years later, he managed to acquire a grocery, and as Italian immigrants began arriving in Five Points in greater numbers in the postwar years, he opened a bank. In 1881, he abandoned the grocery business altogether to concentrate on finance and real estate, and soon his office at the corner of Mulberry and Park Streets became one of the best known banks in the neighborhood. By the end of the 1880s, Cuneo boasted that he owned more than $400,000 in property, mostly tenements in or near Mulberry Bend. Despite his wealth and prestige, Cuneo continued to live in Five Points at 101 Park Street well into the 1890s.25
Cuneo had chosen the location of his bank wisely, for as Harper’s Weekly commented in 1890, “the moment an Italian arrives in New York—that is, one of humble means and without friends in the city—he wends his way to Mulberry Street.” For most Italians arriving there, Five Points was merely a staging ground. On Mulberry Street the newcomer could exchange some money, locate employment through a padrone, write (or hire someone to write) a letter back to Italy reporting his safe arrival in the United States, and regain his bearings while he awaited transportation to his first American job. For most Italian immigrants, this meant an additional journey to Texas, Florida, the Rocky Mountain West, or some other far-flung corner of North America.26
Of the Italians who took jobs outside of New York, the vast majority toiled on railroad construction crews. “The typical railroad-builder of a few years ago,” noted Frank Leslie’s in 1882, “was a newly-arrived Irish immigrant, ready to do hard work for moderate pay. [But] the representatives of the Green Isle have been largely supplanted in this work by the sons of Italy.” A prominent railroad construction contractor told the Tribune in 1887 that “on all the big railroad jobs throughout the West you will find Italians in droves. . . . On some roads they are employed almost exclusively.” Although this contractor lamented that the Italians “are not nearly as good workmen as the Irish,” they became the preferred source of labor for most railroad construction projects by the mid-1880s.27
Many railroad crews were recruited by padrone Francesco Sabbia, a Sicilian from Catania who arrived in New York in the late 1870s. Sabbia settled in Five Points and soon opened a grocery and stale-beer dive at 92 Mulberry Street. By the 1890s, he was placing newly arrived immigrants in railroad construction gangs up and down the East Coast. He later opened a bank as well. Unlike Cuneo, who remained throughout his life a pillar of the Italian-American community, Sabbia became the personification of padrone greed and exploitation when Progressive Era muckrakers discovered in 1907 that the workers he had supplied to the Florida East Coast Railroad lived as virtual slaves. Despite such horror stories, and various governmental attempts to stamp out the padroni by establishing employment offices at Ellis Island, padroni remained the primary source of railroad employment for Italians well into the twentieth century.28
Mining jobs were also popular among newly arriving Italians. An 1888 edition of Frank Leslie’s featured a print entitled “Arrival of Contract Laborers for the Coal Mines,” which depicted hundreds of Italians marching up Mulberry Street for transportation to a distant site. Many Italians worked the coal mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, but thousands of others entered mining in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Italians rarely dominated mining in the same manner as they did railroad construction. Employers often hired a variety of ethnic groups in order to divide the workers and prevent unionization. Mine owners also believed that Italian miners would work harder if they knew that the Slavs or Welshmen working another shaft might out-produce them.29
Unlike mining, work on the railroads was not available all year round. In fact, outside the Deep South, most kinds of construction labor ceased each winter. As a result, many of the Italians who had passed through Mulberry Bend on their way to job sites across North America returned to Five Points for the winter. “They come in from the country, the railroad and other work having stopped,” reported a labor journal in 1884. “Some of them find odd jobs, but the majority live on their scanty earnings—a piece of bread and an onion for breakfast, about the same for dinner, and maccaroni for supper.” An Italian visiting New York found that during the winter thousands of unemployed Italian railroad laborers “fill up the streets of New York, where the young polish shoes and the adults are engaged in work refused by workers of other nationalities—emptying garbage from barges into the sea, cleaning sewage—or they go around with a sack on their shoulders rummaging for bones, etc.” Never sparsely populated, Mulberry Bend seemed to burst at the seams each winter as permanent Italian residents took in out-of-work friends and relatives, while commercial boardinghouses filled to overflowing as well.30
Many in these trying times turned to mutual aid societies for assistance. Immigrants from virtually every village and town in Italy organized self-help societies in New York whose membership was limited to natives of a particular Italian locale. The groups loaned money to indigent members, helped them find jobs, and organized social gatherings.31
Given the cramped quarters and lack of employment opportunities in wintertime, many of the immigrants—both those who lived in New York year-round and those who did not—chose to return to Italy for the season. Italians were the first New York immigrants to partake in this “return migration.” Some laborers “go to Italy in the fall and return in the spring, so that during the months of September, October, November and December there is an exodus of over thirty thousand of them,” reported a group of Italian bankers and steamship agents. Often these returnees decided to remain in Italy permanently, lured by the prospect of marriage or the ability to purchase land with their newfound American wealth. Most, however, returned to America the following spring, anxious to earn even more money before resettling permanently in Italy. These repeat immigrants frequently brought with them friends or relatives who were drawn to New York by stories of high pay and plentiful job opportunities. Others decided to journey to the United States after seeing the remittances earlier immigrants had sent home to loved ones. To southern Italians whose families had been mired in poverty for centuries, even Five Points streets seemed to be paved with gold.32
Although most Italian immigrants merely passed through Five Points on their way to a distant job site, some decided to make the neighborhood their home in America. Even more so than the Irish a generation earlier, these Italians were renowned for clustering in tenements with other immigrants from the same region or village. Unfortunately, the neighborhood’s Catholic church did not keep the detailed nativity records for its Italian parishioners that it had for the Irish a generation earlier, so we cannot document the Italians’ regional clustering with certainty. Nonetheless, contemporaries were sure that the Italians of Mulberry Bend lived “grouped by ‘villages.’” An Italian-American journalist agreed that “in one street there will be found peasants from one Italian village; in the next the place of origin is different and distinct, and different and distinct are manners, customs, and sympathies. Entire villages have been transplanted from Italy to one New York street.”33
Five Points Italians also found themselves, like the Irish before them, situated initially at the bottom of the city’s economic ladder. The vast majority of unskilled Italians living in Five Points toiled as menial laborers on construction sites and public works projects. By the mid-1890s, Italians comprised three-quarters of all New York construction workers and 90 percent of laborers employed by the city. Italian laborers did the same backbreaking and dangerous hauling and excavating that the Irish had once dominated. “We can’t get along without the Italians,” commented one police officer in 1895. “We want somebody to do the dirty work; the Irish are not doing it any longer.”34
In Five Points before the Civil War, four of five Irishmen who were not laborers worked in skilled trades. But in 1880, the majority of non-laborer Italians were peddlers or otherwise self-employed on the streets. Many were organ-grinders, but the vast majority peddled fruit. Speaking of the once ubiquitous Irish apple seller, Police Superintendent Thomas Byrnes noted that “twenty years ago you couldn’t pass a street corner without finding one; now all the fruit stands are kept by Italians.”35
Some Italians sold a variety of fruits; others concentrated on one specialty, such as watermelon or lemons. In the winter, when fruit was not readily available, they sold hot chestnuts and peanuts. These fruit vendors actually altered New Yorkers’ eating habits. “Italians have put up fruit stands at every available corner where there is a chance of selling their wares, and have learned to arrange their fruits so tastefully as to tempt the passer-by,” commented the Times in 1895. “It is mainly due to the efforts of the Italians,” the journalist concluded, “that fruit eating has become quite universal here.” By that point there were said to be ten thousand Italian fruit vendors in New York. Their union, the Society of Italian Fruit Peddlers (Societá di Frutivendoli Ambulanti), usually held its meetings in Five Points.36
Italian women also worked for pay. Whereas three-quarters of the neighborhood’s Irishwomen had worked either in the needle trades or as domestic servants in 1855, by 1880 only 24 percent of Italian women were employed in those fields. A variety of manufacturing jobs had become available since the Civil War, and many Italian women took jobs in these industries instead. They worked primarily in candy and tobacco factories in 1880, though they made artificial flowers as well. Italian women would eventually dominate artificial flower and paper box making, but Irish-American women (mostly the American-born daughters of immigrants) still held the bulk of these jobs in 1880. By the mid-1890s, many Italian women would move into garment work as well.37
New Yorkers in these years especially associated Mulberry Bend women with the “rag picking” trade. “Most of the rag pickers in New York live in the Five Points, and near the Central Park,” wrote Virginia Penny in her encyclopedic study of women’s work. The term “ragpicker” was something of a misnomer, as those who followed this vocation collected not only rags, but paper, bones, and scrap metal and glass as well. “Some even carry a basket in which they gather waste vegetables or putrid meat, or the trimmings of uncooked meat,” explained Penny, “which they feed on themselves, or give to a pet pig, or trade with some neighbor.” A ragpicker’s life was a hard one. Trudging about the city rummaging through trash barrels and garbage heaps was only the beginning of her work. When she returned home, she had to sort the rags into clean and dirty, washing the latter. She also separated linens from woolens, clean paper from dirty, and white from colored. In the Civil War years, ragpickers generally got two cents per pound for rags and paper, and on a very good day might collect forty pounds. Bones sold for thirty cents a bushel. They sold fat to soapmakers or rendering plants and the metal and glass to junk dealers. Huge sacks of rags and paper are visible in most of Jacob Riis’s photos of Mulberry Bend, indicating the omnipresence of ragpickers in the neighborhood. In the 1850s and ’60s, both Irish and Italian Five Pointers followed this line of work. By the 1880s, however, four of five neighborhood ragpickers were Italian.38
The employment rate for Italian women was held down by demographics and cultural attitudes. Thirty-five percent of married Irish-American women living in Five Points in 1880 did paid work, versus only 7 percent of married Italian-American women. Most Italian husbands would have been ashamed to let their wives work outside the home. Among unmarried women, 74 percent of Irish Americans worked for pay, versus just half of the Italians. The sample of unmarried Italian women was tiny, however, because there were very few unmarried Italian woman in Five Points. Eighty-five percent of Italian women aged eighteen or older were married, whereas only 36 percent of Irish-American women had a spouse. This huge disparity resulted primarily from the differing sex ratios in the two communities. Among adult Five Pointers, Italian men outnumbered women by two to one in 1880, while Irish-American women comprised 53 percent of the neighborhood’s adult Hibernian population. Italian men sometimes went to great lengths to find wives. Padroni occasionally brought potential brides from Italy to New York, noted one reporter, “and they are disposed of at prices that pay the passage money and a good profit on the venture.”39
With so few Italian women working outside the home, Italian boys were especially likely to choose employment over school. “Bootblacking,” once monopolized by the Irish, eventually became associated with Italian youths. Although they initially had trouble breaking into the Irish bootblacks’ close-knit ranks, by 1890 Italians controlled bootblacking completely. An 1894 survey of 484 New York bootblacks found that 473 were Italian Americans. Nonetheless, many more Italian adolescents worked as laborers than as bootblacks.40
Irish workers often resented the Italians who displaced them. When Irish sewer diggers went on strike for higher wages during the severe depression of 1874, the contractor dismissed them and hired Italians. The Irish threw rocks at the Italians, seriously injuring two before police drove them off. “They left vowing vengeance,” reported the Times, “and threatening to murder every Italian who would dare to accept employment in the place of Irishmen.” Labor groups condemned all manner of Italian workers—from laborers to barbers—for accepting less than the prevailing American wage during the late nineteenth century.41
Labor leaders often cursed Italians’ supposed hostility to unions, but many obstacles prevented them from becoming part of the Gilded Age labor movement. The padrone system, for example, made it virtually impossible for laborers to seek union membership. But in a few cases Italians in Five Points did aid the cause of organized labor. When New York freight handlers called a strike in 1882, employers brought in Italians to man the piers. A mass meeting was held in Five Points at which Jeremiah Murphy, president of the Freighthandlers Union, asked the Italians not to work as scabs. Consequently, two hundred Italians already hired as replacement workers for the Erie Railroad walked out as well. Many joined the union, which agreed to provide food for the Italian strikers. Yet such cases of interethnic labor cooperation were relatively rare in the late nineteenth century. Much more common were comments like those of a clothing manufacturer who stated that he preferred to hire Italians because while Jews were always striking, the Italians “work along steadily and do not complain.”42
“THE ITALIANS AS A BODY ARE NOT HUMILIATED BY HUMILIATION”
During the last fifteen or so years of the nineteenth century, religious antagonism between Italian- and Irish-Americans in Five Points became even more intense than workplace hostilities. This animosity developed as a result of Five Points’ evolving demographics and the reactions of Irish Catholic leaders to those transformations.
Looking back in 1897 at the changes Five Points had undergone during the previous twenty years, a Catholic priest remembered that the district had once had about thirteen thousand Irish Catholic parishioners. But then
came the Chinese, who gradually usurped all of Pell and Doyers streets, and Mott street from the Bowery to Pell. Then came the Jews, who not satisfied with Baxter street, settled in Mott, Hester, Bayard, and Chrystie streets. Then came the Italians and they drove the Irish from Mulberry and Park streets and took full possession of the “Bend.” Last of all came the manufacturers with their big factories and dispersed our people from Elm, Leonard, and Franklin streets so that at the end of twenty years we have in our parish limits scarcely eight hundred English-speaking people.43
In theory, these changes should not have alarmed the neighborhood’s Roman Catholic clergy. There were virtually as many Catholics in the parish in 1890 as there had been two decades earlier, and a truly “catholic” church ought to have welcomed the Italians who replaced the Irish in the Transfiguration pews. But American prelates viewed the Italian newcomers as inferior Christians. “It is a very delicate matter to tell the Sovereign Pontiff how utterly faithless the specimens of his country coming here really are,” confided one American bishop to another in 1884. “Ignorance of their religion and a depth of vice little known to us yet, are their prominent characteristics.” Even in correspondence with Rome, the Americans found it impossible to conceal their prejudices. “Nowhere among other Catholic groups in our midst,” they complained, “is there such crass and listless ignorance of the faith as among the Italian immigrants.”44
One might imagine that those clergymen who worked directly with the Italians would develop familiarity, respect, and even sympathy for the newcomers, but this was not the case in Five Points. Rev. Thomas F. Lynch, who from 1881 to 1894 served as rector of the parish that encompassed Five Points, often complained about his Italian parishioners. And Lynch’s brother Bernard wrote an article for the Catholic World that seethed with intolerance and prejudice.
In the article, entitled “The Italians in New York,” Bernard Lynch asserted that “the Italians in the jurisdiction of Transfiguration parish . . . come to America the worst off in religious equipment of, perhaps, any foreign Catholics whatever.” They do not know the “Apostles’ Creed” nor the other basic “elementary truths of religion, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Redemption.” Italians instead focused their energies upon “‘devotions,’ pilgrimages, shrines, miraculous pictures and images, [and] indulgences,” while remaining in “almost total ignorance of the great truths which can alone make such aids of religion profitable.” Lynch admitted that some northern Italians arrived in America well educated in the teachings of the church. But most southern Italians, he charged, were not even “well enough instructed to receive the sacraments.”
As if these statements were not incendiary enough, Lynch impugned the Italians’ character as well. Italians, he wrote, lack “especially what we call spirit.” In addition, “they for the most part seem totally devoid of . . . personal independence and manliness. An American or an Irishman will almost starve before asking for charity, and often really does starve. Not so the lower-class Italian. He is always ready to beg.” The Transfiguration Italians, Lynch boldly declared, did not have “the qualities fitting them to be good Americans!”45
How had relations between Five Points Italians and Irish Catholics sunk to this level? While some of the neighborhood’s first Italian immigrants had attended mass at Transfiguration, others had preferred to venture out of the neighborhood to churches run by Italian priests. The first, St. Anthony of Padua, had opened in 1866 a mile and a half north of Five Points at the corner of Bleecker and Sullivan Streets. By 1878, as the Five Points Italian population continued to grow, Transfiguration rector James McGean began allowing his Italian parishioners to hold a separate mass in the church’s basement. Italian priests from St. Anthony’s officiated at these services. But McGean still sent Italians to St. Anthony’s for confessions, baptisms, marriages, and last rites. As the Five Points Italian population continued to increase during the 1880s, Lynch requested that the archdiocese assign him an Italian assistant who could officiate at the Italian masses and administer the sacraments. The first clergyman assigned to this duty arrived in Five Points in the autumn of 1886. A second arrived in 1887. Each Sunday, more than two thousand Italians celebrated mass in the Transfiguration basement.46
Not surprisingly, the newcomers resented their banishment to the basement. Transfiguration’s Irish Catholic leaders asserted publicly that the Italians preferred worshipping separately. But as New York Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan noted privately in 1885, the Irish clergy had exiled the Italians to the Transfiguration basement because “these poor Italians are not extraordinarily clean, so the [other parishioners] don’t want them in the upper church, otherwise they will go elsewhere, and then farewell to the income.” Responding to charges that segregating the Italians was insulting the newcomers, Bernard Lynch asserted that “the Italians as a body are not humiliated by humiliation.” But the Italians clearly were insulted. Complaining of one of the many bigoted comments in Lynch’s article, an Italian priest in New Jersey asserted that “there is no other pastor in New York City who would allow his brother to say this, so disparaging a remark,” against fourteen thousand of his own parishioners. This was proof, he concluded, that the Irish priests were irrevocably prejudiced against the Italians.47
Even Reverend Lynch’s request for the permanent assignment of Italian priests to Transfiguration was motivated by selfishness. Lynch appears to have thought that he could better control and monitor the activities of the Italians if they were ministered to by his own assistants rather than by clergymen from St. Anthony’s, over whom he exercised no authority. An Italian cleric assigned to Transfiguration complained to the head of his order in Italy that “Your Excellency knows that Fr. Lynch said that here the Italian priests, ours included, must be servants, servants, servants.” Another Italian priest informed a superior in Italy that Lynch constantly denigrated him. Poor Italians who dared to enter the upper church and stand to avoid paying pew rent, he added, were scorned and verbally abused by the ushers.48
Transfiguration was only the first New York parish in which such animosity developed. Soon, the treatment of Italian Americans by the predominantly Irish-American Catholic hierarchy became a matter of international debate, referred to as “the Italian Problem,” and discussed in the highest Catholic councils both in the United States and Rome. Pope Leo XIII believed that the American church leaders were neglecting the Italian immigrants, and perhaps willfully mistreating them as well. Beginning in 1887, he expressed his displeasure both in writing and in audiences with American prelates. He also ordered Bishop Giovanni Scalabrini of Piacenza to begin specially training Italian priests to minister to the Italian immigrants in America.49
The American bishops seethed with indignation at this reprimand from Rome. They retorted that the pope and his northern Italian advisers understood neither the depth of the southern Italians’ ignorance nor how the United States’ multiethnic Catholic population would be splintered if each immigrant group received its own parishes and priests. In a letter to Archbishop Corrigan, Lynch propounded an additional reason for opposing the pope’s policy. It was important to keep the Italians in parishes presided over by English speakers, he contended, so that their children “grow up with our (proper) notions of supporting the church.” Lynch was not referring merely to financial considerations. Turning over American parishes to Italian priests would make it difficult for Irish-American church leaders to impose their “proper notions” of church practice on the newest generation of American immigrants.50
Transfiguration’s Italian parishioners sent two petitions to Rome in the spring of 1888 complaining of their treatment by Lynch and their banishment to the church’s basement, and asking that the diocese set up a separate Italian parish in their neighborhood. A few months later Corrigan consented to the opening of a Scalabrinian-run church on Baxter Street just north of Canal. Services were held in a storefront on Centre Street for three years until, in September 1891, the Church of the Most Precious Blood opened in the yet unfinished Baxter Street building. Many Five Points Italians happily left Transfiguration to attend services at the new church.51
“THE SAINT BELONGED TO THE PEOPLE, NOT TO THE CHURCH”
The support they had received from Rome apparently emboldened the Italians in other ways. For centuries, Italians had organized lavish street processions on important feast days. Archbishop Corrigan had forbidden them from transferring this custom to New York, however, both because he considered it undignified and because these festivals (or feste) diverted Catholics’ attention from what Irish-American church leaders considered the “true” essence of Catholicity. Yet in 1888, Five Points Italians began ignoring the ban on processions, organizing them first at the Scalabrinian church across Chatham Square on Roosevelt Street, and by 1891 in Transfiguration itself.52
The best known religious street celebration in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century New York was the homage to Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The Madonna del Carmine, as she was known within the Italian community, was, according to one immigrant, “the Madonna they worship most.” The Festa della Madonna del Carmine took place not in Five Points but within Manhattan’s other “Little Italy” (as these enclaves came to be known in the 1890s), located in East Harlem around 116th Street. Yet devout Five Pointers, especially those from the Campania region surrounding Naples where the Madonna del Carmine was most venerated, participated in the mid-July festivities anyway. “Some march barefoot the six miles and over from Mulberry street” to the festa, Riis reported, displaying their humility by “choosing the roughest pavements and kneeling on the sharpest stones on the way to tell their beads. Lest there should be none sharp enough, the most devout carry flints in their pockets to put under their knees.” Because there were so many Neapolitans in Five Points, July 16 was always keenly anticipated there.53
Another famous Italian street festa was the one held for St. Rocco, and this celebration was associated with lower Manhattan, Transfiguration, and Five Points. Describing the festivities held in Rocco’s honor each August 16, Riis observed that his “patronage is claimed by many towns.... There were half a dozen independent celebrations going on all day in as many yards, always the darkest and shabbiest, which this saint seems to pick out by a kind of instinct.” He wrote in 1899 that “one of my last recollections of the Bend, and one of the very few pleasing ones, is seeing the vilest of the slum alleys, Bandits’ Roost, lighted up in honor of ‘St. Rocco’ a few nights before the wreckers made an end of it. An altar had been erected against the stable shed at the rear end of it, and made gaudy with soiled ribbons, colored paper, and tallow dips stuck in broken bottle-necks. Across the passageway had been strung a row of beer-glasses, with two disabled schooners for a centerpiece, as the best the Roost could afford.”54
Jacob Riis, “The Feast of San Rocco in Bandits’ Roost,” c. 1894. Collection of the Museum of the City of New York.
Riis’s photo captures the Five Pointers’ humanity as few images ever have. Innocent children excited about the celebration and the accompanying fireworks replace the glowering thugs and withered old “hags” who dominated Riis’s better-known image of Bandits’ Roost. The care with which the altar has been assembled and decorated also reflects a level of devotion and pride one rarely sees in representations of Five Points. Even the stringing of glass tumblers across the alleyway demonstrates that, in whatever manner they could, the impoverished residents of these notorious tenements used every resource at their disposal to create a festive atmosphere.
The Five Pointers who erected this altar in honor of “San Rocco” were probably natives of Basilicata. People all over Italy venerated Rocco, but the Tribune in 1901 aptly characterized him as “the healing saint of Basilicata.” Although Basilicatans may not have organized the first of New York’s San Rocco celebrations, held in 1888 and 1889 at the Scalabrinianrun church on Roosevelt Street, they were definitely in charge by 1890 when, for the first time, the festival became a grand production. In that year, the Brotherhood of San Rocco of Savoia di Lucania (a small mountaintop village in western Basilicata whose patron saint was Rocco) organized the celebrations with assistance from a Basilicata-wide San Rocco society. A decade later, this festa was still associated with this isolated region of southern Italy and this single tiny hilltop village. The Tribune noted that the story of Rocco curing people of the bubonic plague “has been handed down from father to son in Basilicata for centuries,” and quoted a little girl at the parade who said that that “if he [San Rocco] had not come to Savoia none of us would be alive to-day.”55
In order to create a celebration befitting their patron saint, the immigrants from Savoia di Lucania called upon the immigrant fraternal societies of neighboring Italian villages. At the 1891 festa, for example, music was provided by the Society of San Michele Arcangelo (composed of immigrants from Sant’ Angelo le Fratte, just two miles south of Savoia di Lucania on the other side of the Melandro River Valley), the Society of Monte Carmelo (immigrants from Polla, a town five miles southwest of Savoia), and the Society of the Madonna della Pietá (immigrants from Calvello, about fifteen miles east of Savoia). The San Rocco Society band would return the favor by performing when these groups staged feste for their patron saints.56
The festivities for San Rocco generally began on August 15, the evening before the actual feast day, with a street party, music, “lavish and expensive” fireworks, a parade, and visits to the tenement alley shrines set up for the veneration of San Rocco. The streets near the shrines and churches were “decorated with tricolor banners and, at night, flaming with lights and various pyrotechnic spectacles, crowded with people, [and] gay with happy melodies.” Among the preliminary events were competitions to determine which neighborhood residents would have the honor of carrying the statue and banners of San Rocco through the streets the following day.57
On the sixteenth, the celebrations reached their climax. Already by 1893 the San Rocco festa was important enough to merit inclusion in an Italian-language novel entitled The Mysteries of Mulberry Street. The author’s description of the festivities, the most vivid we have from these early years, suggests that he was intimately familiar with the proceedings:
Mulberry Street was on holiday: from the windows of the Italian houses hang tapestries, flags, and three-coloured lanterns, and everywhere were garlands of light-bulbs. . . . In the street, the crowd was happy and noisy: women—and among them several were very young and handsome—wore their holiday dresses and brought the gay note of gaudy colours amid the dark suits of the men and the uniforms of the military societies. San Rocco was being celebrated, and the Italians of Mulberry Street wanted to do things properly. Towards 11 a.m., the call of the trumpets was heard and in the distance flags and banners appeared. The crowd thronged the sidewalks to enjoy the parade in honor of San Rocco. A squad of policemen headed the procession, followed by the Conterno Band, and right after by a banner on which San Rocco was painted in oil, with all his wounds and his dog. Two flags, one Italian, the other American, flapped at the banner’s sides, thus placing the saint under a double protection. Then came the members of the Società of San Rocco, stern and proud in their blue dresses with golden buttons and stripes, as if the whole world belonged to them. In the buttonhole of their parade dresses, they had flowers, ribbons, and cockades. After another musical band, a military society paraded, in the uniform of the military engineer corps, with the three colours flapping in the wind; and then came a colossal banner of San Rocco, wounded more than ever, and after it the [societies] of the Carmine, of the Madonna Addolorata, and of other saints like San Cono, Sant’Antonio, etc.58
As the parade progressed, spectators pinned dollar bills onto the banners depicting San Rocco. The procession wound slowly and solemnly through virtually every block of both Five Points and the Italian neighborhood north of Canal Street as well.
Although these were the features of virtually every Italian religious festa, there was one aspect of the San Rocco celebration that made it unique: wax body parts. Because Rocco was said to have miraculously healed thousands in fourteenth-century Europe during the bubonic plague, the devout looked to him to cure their own ailments. They marched in the parade holding lifelike wax body parts representing their diseased limbs and organs or those of a loved one. Merchants and street vendors did a brisk business in these body parts in the weeks leading up August 16. The procession concluded at a neighborhood church (in the 1890s either Transfiguration or Most Precious Blood), where the images of San Rocco and the tremendous pile of wax body parts would be displayed around the altar while the faithful celebrated mass. That evening the festivities reached their climax. Valuable prizes were raffled off, more fireworks were ignited, and there was music, dancing, and “rivers of beer.” Only in the wee hours of the morning did the merriment finally come to an end.59
These feste were held despite Corrigan’s ban. Such prohibitions were difficult to enforce as more and more Italian priests began arriving in New York. In response to inquiries from Corrigan in August 1892, Lynch insisted that “no such procession has ever gone forth from this church.” But he reported that just a few days earlier “the procession of St. Donatus (which you forbade) was held . . . with all the noise of a brass band and fireworks in the streets.” Lynch walked to Most Precious Blood to investigate and found it gaudily decorated for the celebration. The “Piacenzan priests,” Lynch gravely informed the archbishop, “had disobeyed your orders.”60
Although the Italian immigrants were undoubtedly grateful to the Scalabrinians for participating in their festivals, the newcomers did not entirely trust the immigrant clergymen either. Back in southern Italy, they had viewed their priests as allies of the landed elite that had impoverished them. This traditional anti-clericalism persisted among the Italians who settled in the United States. In a particularly revealing account of the San Donato festa (the same “Donatus” referred to by Lynch), Riis reported that this feast had been organized by immigrants from the town of Auletta, located just six miles west of Savoia di Lucania. He noted that except for the days when the image of St. Donato was being used for the festival, the natives of Auletta left Donato “in the loft of the saloon, lest the priests get hold of him and get a corner on him, as it were. Once [the priest] got him into his possession, he would not let the people have him except upon payment of a fee that would grow with the years. But the saint belonged to the people, not to the church. . . . In the saloon they had him safe.”61
Banned from the main sanctuary at Transfiguration and denigrated by its Irish-American rector, Five Points Italians thus revived their beloved feste as a means of asserting some degree of religious autonomy in their new surroundings. The feste may have appeared quaint to American journalists, and sacrilegious to Irish-American church leaders, but they played a major role in helping the newcomers create a distinctly Italian-American community and identity.62
Five Points Italians were soon reminded of their precarious status within the New York Catholic community, though, when Most Precious Blood suddenly closed in 1893. The Scalabrinian who had spearheaded the building campaign for the church was a financial incompetent who had borrowed far more to construct it than the parishioners could afford. Both the church and some of the Scalabrinians’ other property in New York were soon sold at auction to satisfy creditors.
Italians blamed the Irish-American church leadership. They were convinced that the archdiocese would have loaned money to prevent foreclosure had theirs been an Irish parish. The former parishioners began soliciting money door to door in an attempt to reopen the church, insisting that “unless the church reopens ‘Italians will be the slaves of the Irish as they have been before the church in Baxter St. existed,’ and that they will always remain slaves.” A former clergyman from Most Precious Blood told a group gathered to discuss the church’s future that “the Irish priests wanted everything and gave no privileges in return.”63
Given the demands of the pope, Corrigan could not take back Most Precious Blood from the Italian community. Instead, he eventually allowed it to reopen under the auspices of a different Italian Catholic religious order, the Franciscan brotherhood. Meanwhile, a new priest, Thomas McLoughlin, was assigned to Transfiguration in 1894. According to a parish history written during his tenure there, “Father McLoughlin did his best to make the two races coalesce, by compelling the Italians to attend services in the upper church, but found that far better results could be obtained by having the two people worship . . . separately.” Although Five Points’ southern Italians became disillusioned with the northern Italians who came to dominate Most Precious Blood, they continued to leave Transfiguration for the new parish. Average attendance at Sunday mass at Transfiguration fell from 1,200 in 1894, to 700 in 1897, and to only 350 by 1901. Finally accepting that the parish could not survive as long as its leaders treated 90 percent of the parishioners as second-class citizens, Corrigan in 1901 arranged to transfer control of the parish to the Salesians of Don Bosco, placing “the whole building at the disposal of the Italian Catholics of that neighborhood.”64
The Salesians immediately appointed an Italian pastor to head Transfiguration and ended the basement masses. They allowed the Italians to place their statues of Saints Rocco, Vittorio, Anthony, and others in the church. Catholic societies dedicated to these saints and others were permitted as well. It had been a long struggle, but the Italians of Five Points finally had a church of their own. By 1901, Italians had dominated most aspects of neighborhood life for more than a decade. The transfer of Transfiguration to Italian control, after years of Irish resistance, symbolized the Irish community’s grudging acceptance that the transformation of Five Points into an Italian neighborhood was now complete.65