Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America

2. City: New York Delirious

chapter 2 City New York Delirious The truth: These country women from the mountain farms of Italy . . . loved the clashing steel and stone of the great city, the thunder of trains in the railroad yards across the street, the lights above the Palisades far across the river. —Mario Puzo, 1964 “Milan is just like New York, only there aren’t so many Italians.” The assumption underlying this common quip is that New York is one of the most Italian places on earth, yet it was built and settled not by the urban peoples of Italy’s advanced north but by contadini—the rural peasants from the impoverished, essentially medieval hill towns south and east of Naples. What happened? How did Italian peasants, conservative by their own tradition, come to so love the American city—Greater Metropolitan New York and its industrial satellites most of all—that they remain to this day hugely identified with it? The story begins with the initial encounter of Mediterranean hill towners with the techno-industrial cityscape, a sensory shock of profound import that no one understood better than the painter Joseph Stella, who emigrated at eighteen from Basilicata to New York’s Lower East Side and emerged fifteen years later as America’s “first and greatest futurist.” Stella’s colossal renditions of America’s urban infrastructure— of Coney Island, the Brooklyn Bridge, the port and skyline of New York —captured the primal scene of industrial sublimity, the newcomer’s 28 fierce engagement with what Stella called, with an energetic, compacted Italinglish eloquence, “the polychromatic riot of a new polyphony .” What Stella meant—what, indeed, he pictured—was the sudden, instantaneous exposure to tunnels and bridges that knew no bounds, buildings that leaped massively to the sky, and electric lights that cut through and carnivalized the night sky—which in combination felt to him like nothing short of “a new divinity.” Throughout the period of the Great Migration and well into the 1920s, after the gates of admission had been effectively shut to the southern and eastern Europeans, there were many efforts—most of them led by oldfamily social workers with evangelical Protestant leanings—to move the Italian immigrants from the cities, especially from the tough ghettoes of the Lower East Side, Hell’s Kitchen, and East Harlem, onto farms in places like south Jersey, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The idea was that the city (crowded, filthy, and filled with crime) was inherently corrupting, and that the Italians, unusually susceptible to corruption , needed to get out if they were to be saved and safely absorbed into American society. The back-to-the-farm movements failed miserably, however, as only a very, very few immigrants ventured forth and even fewer did not immediately return to the Little Italies. The established explanations for this resistance are good ones: industrial wage labor, no matter how exploitative, still brought cash that could be saved, no matter in how miniscule the units, which is what brought most of the immigrants in the United States in the first place (many of whom figured they would send money and then go back to Italy); the romance of the land had no appeal to the peasants from south and east of Naples, most of whose families had suffered under its caprice since time immemorial, nature no friend; and that peculiarly American arrangement wherein individual families lived on farms isolated from one another made no sense at all to ferociously social people who huddled together in hill towns, finding in the conviviality of street stoops, piazzas, and neighboring relatives the only respite from the terrible and terribly alienating work on the land they farmed, often miles away. These are persuasive accounts of why the immigrants rejected farming from the get-go. But I think there developed, with surprising speed, a less practical, less ideological , less domestic reason for keeping close to the city, which has to do with the Italian feeling for what sociologists call the built environment: city 29 how the immigrants responded to and made sense of the remarkable physicality of New York. I can’t prove, of course, what the illiterate and undocumented felt, but in interpreting what is in the sociological record beyond dispute— the stubborn urban-ness that the Italian immigrants demonstrated from the start and that has characterized each and every ensuing generation —we have the privilege of a very special kind of hindsight...