Modern Italy

ISSN: 1353-2944 (Print) 1469-9877 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cmit20

Seeing Ethnic Succession in Little Italy: Change

despite Resistance

Jerome Krase

To cite this article: Jerome Krase (2006) Seeing Ethnic Succession in Little Italy: Change despite
Resistance, Modern Italy, 11:1, 79-95, DOI: 10.1080/13532940500492340

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13532940500492340

Published online: 18 Aug 2006.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 274

View related articles

Citing articles: 7 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cmit20
Modern Italy
Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2006, pp. 79–95

Seeing Ethnic Succession in Little Italy:

Change despite Resistance
Jerome Krase

This illustrated paper is the latest in a long series based on visual sociological research which
I have conducted about how the meanings of neighbourhood spaces are changed by the agency
of even the least of their inhabitants. Specifically, it attempts to demonstrate how the Italian-
American character, or version of Italianness (Italianità), of four of New York City’s most
well-known Little Italies (Mulberry Street and East Harlem in Manhattan, Bensonhurst,
Brooklyn, Belmont, Bronx) has been affected by the invasions of new and different ethnic groups.
The spatial and semiotic logic of diasporic/transnational processes that have taken place over
the course of a century is presented here in the form of scholarly and journalistic reportage, as
well as photographic images. All these sources document and illustrate contrasting and changing
demography, but here special attention is paid to commercial vernacular landscapes which play
a major role in defining the ethnic (in this case Italian) quality of city neighbourhoods. It is also
suggested that this Visual Sociological approach might have value if applied in parallel studies
of how immigrants are changing the meanings of urban spaces in contemporary Italy.

Introduction

Little Italy continues to serve as a powerful symbol for Italian Americans. The strong
connection in the public mind between places and people is not restricted to Italian
Americans as indicated by the spatial semiotics of The Ghetto (Wirth 1928) and The
Dark Ghetto (Clark 1950) for Jewish and African Americans respectively. It is
difficult to imagine a conversation about the long history of these ethnic groups in
New York without mentioning Mulberry Street, the Lower East Side and Harlem.
Ethnic neighbourhoods are also a genre. ‘Little Italies’ are only one ubiquitous
stereotype among an extremely large collection of ethnic places that today include
diminutives of India and Africa, several ‘Chinatowns’ and even more numerous
‘Los Barrios’. It was not so long ago that terms like ‘Germantown’ and ‘Jewtown’
were also part of the lexicon for New York’s complex ethnic landscapes. In the
Italian-American case, this process of what the classic urban ecologists called ‘ethnic
succession’ is analogous to the aphorism of fish swallowing other fish. For more than

Correspondence to: Jerome Krase, Emeritus and Murray Koppelman Professor, Sociology Department,
Brooklyn College of The City University of New York, 2900 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, New York
11210, USA. Tel.: 718 951 5314. Email: JKrase@brooklyn.cuny.edu

1353-2944 Print/1469-9877 Online/06/010079–17 ß 2006 Association for the Study of Modern Italy
DOI: 10.1080/13532940500492340
80 J. Krase

a century, Italian immigrants to the USA have been changing the meanings of central
city spaces. Most stereotypically, they created Italian colonies and Little Italies in
one form or another. They accomplished this not merely by the power of superior
numbers of local inhabitants, but by the momentum of spatial semiotics—i.e.
changing the appearances of spaces and places and thereby changing their meanings
as well. Today in response to the influx of new groups, as well as gentrification, some
of the best known of these Little Italies, such as Mulberry Street (Figure 1), remain
as little more than what I have called ‘Italian-American ethnic theme parks’, places
which are virtually Italian in name only (Krase 2003).
In order to demonstrate this phenomenon of ethnic demographic and semiotic
transition, as well as the persistence of Italian enclaves, both old and new approaches
are needed. The old is represented by Robert Ezra Park and Ernest Burgess’s
classical ecological theory of invasion and succession of urban neighbourhoods.

Figure 1 San Gennaro festa in Manhattan’s Little Italy.

 Modern Italy 81

The new is represented theoretically by Spatial Semiotics, and methodologically by

Visual Sociology. After briefly discussing relevant theories, and the long history of
New York’s Little Italies, we will turn to a consideration of the changing meanings,
illustrated by selected images, of their most recent ethnically contested spaces.
Literally, the focus will be on the commercial landscape, store windows and shop
signs that are interpreted by ordinary people as ethnic markers. For Italian
neighbourhoods, such generally accepted and almost stereotypical ethnic markers,
other than sidewalk shrines, have been barbershops, pizza parlours and various other
purveyors of Italian foods.

Italianità
Mine is not the only work that emphasizes the importance of understanding
the essential semiotic/symbolic character of Italianità. Italian-Americanist Fred
L. Gardaphe (1996, p. 20) has written extensively on references to signs indicating
qualities such as omertà and bella figura. In other places, my own work identified the
spatial and visible components of the complex, as yet un-deconstructed, notion of
Italianità, such as how both omertà and bella figura are visually available as social
performance and in vernacular architecture (Krase 1993). However, as radical urban
theorist Mike Davis (2001, p. 15) in Magical Urbanism argued for Latinidad, I would
submit that Italianità is ‘practice rather than representation’. It is what Anthony
Giddens (1984) terms ‘human agency’, which transforms mere representation into
practice in the form of vernacular landscapes. Members of ethnic groups present
themselves by going about their daily existence. The observer re presents their
performances in description, which, in turn, becomes a representation of them.
Davis’s argument that, despite impoverishment, Latinos have ‘reinvented’ the City of
Los Angeles clearly indicates the necessity of exploring the role played by space and
place in ethnicity and ethnic identity of all self, or otherwise identified, social groups.
It might also be useful for us to think for a moment of immigrant neighbourhoods as
‘third spaces’ or interstitial places where things such as ethnic identity are being
created and then negotiated, demonstrating in this way the agency of ordinary people
(Gutiérrez 1999). Whereas much of ‘third space’ discourse concerns the negotiation
of identities of persons within real and imagined spaces, my own special interest is on
how those identities change the meaning of the space in which ethnicity is acted out
or practised. Consequently, one can also consider how the newly defined space
affects the identities of the people within it. I would argue that, by doing Italianità,
Italian immigrants to America socially created Little Italies. In the same way, then,
we can argue that new immigrants, by displaying their own cultural and social
practices, are undoing Italianità in Little Italies. As neighbourhoods are contested in
the process of change, these visual expressions often stand side by side. In some
cases, they replace the previous, and in the visually most interesting examples they
overlay one another, as in Figure 2.

Ethnic Succession
University of Chicago sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess (1925) developed
an elaborate notion—more of a general descriptive formula than a theory—of city
82 J. Krase

Figure 2 This Dominican-owned bodega in East Harlem is an example of ethnic overlays as it

plays host to both Italian American and Puerto Rican cultural expressions.

growth and development. It supposed that cities were like natural environments and,
as such, were influenced by forces that similarly affected natural ecosystems. The
most important of these forces was competition that was expressed in the struggle for
scarce resources such as living space and jobs. The results of competition between
groups were ‘natural areas’ that were dominated by people with shared social and
economic characteristics. City wide competition for the most desirable residential or
commercial spaces would be expressed in the form of concentric zones. Their model
was not static, and movement from one zone to the other, as well as within zones,
was termed ‘succession’. For our purposes here, this logic was demonstrated by less-
able migrants strangely ‘dominating’ the least desirable residential sections in urban
centres. The classic pattern in American central cities during periods of high
immigration had been the development of immigrant enclaves in ‘zones of
transition’, such as Little Sicily and Chinatown in Chicago, located near the central
business districts, as in Figure 3. Ethnic succession results from the competition
between new and established groups and is often facilitated by the out-migration
of the more advantaged group. Cities like New York have long been the destination
 Modern Italy 83

Figure 3 Park and Burgess’s (1925) concentric zones of Chicago.

of immigrants and ecologically understandable spatial patterns of invasion and

succession have already been well established.

Spatial Semiotics and Visual Sociology

The question for pre and post-modern urbanologists has not been ‘Who or what is
where in the city?’, but ‘How and why’ they got there. Researchers look at the same
objects but the meanings of those objects seem to vary by the ideology of the viewer.
The purely descriptive models of Classical Urban Ecology come from a biological
analogy. In the city, equilibrium is expressed through the interaction of human
nature with geographical and spatial factors producing ‘natural’ areas. Political
economists, on the contrary, see these natural areas and ecological zones as the result
of ‘uneven development’, and perhaps even planned cycles of decay and renewal.
Globalization and the movement of labour have changed the meaning of spaces in
Italian America.
84 J. Krase

The urban landscapes of America are affected by ‘natural’ and migration

driven demographic forces, as well as the powerful processes of globalization,
de-industrialization, and privatization. As I have argued elsewhere,

Contemporary urban sociologists appear to be suffering from parallax vision.

One eye sees the ‘natural’ spatial form and function of the city as a biological
analogy as did Parks and Burgess. The other eye sees these same urban places
and spaces as the reproductions of power, and circuits of capital à la Castells,
Harvey, and Lefebvre. (Krase 2003, p. 17)

For most, a visual approach in the humanities and social sciences is merely taking
or showing pictures as an adjunct to the ‘regular’ process of research. Visual
Sociology is much more than that. In my own work it is both a theoretical and
methodological practice, as put by John Grady (1996, p. 14) for ‘producing and
decoding images which can be used to empirically investigate social organization,
cultural meaning and psychological processes’. Here we focus upon what
John Brinkerhoff Jackson (1984, p. 6) calls vernacular landscapes that are part
of the life of communities, governed by custom and held together by personal
relationship.
In a related vein, Harvey (1989, p. 265) argued that:

Different classes construct their sense of territory and community in radically

different ways. This elemental fact is often overlooked by those theorists who
presume a priori that there is one ideal typical and universal tendency for all
human beings to construct a human community of roughly similar sort, no
matter what the political or economic circumstances.

Visual Sociology and Vernacular Landscapes are connected via Spatial Semiotics.
Mark Gottdiener (1994, pp. 15–16) writes that ‘the study of culture which links
symbols to objects is called semiotics’, and ‘spatial semiotics studies the metropolis as
a meaningful environment’. ‘Seeing’ the uses and/or meanings of space requires
sensitivity and understanding of the particular culture, which creates, maintains and
uses the re-signified space. In other words, even the most powerless of urban dwellers
is a social ‘agent’ and therefore participates in the local reproduction of regional,
national and global societal relations.
According to Gottdiener, the most basic concept for urban studies is the
‘settlement space’, which is both constructed and organized:

It is built by people who have followed some meaningful plan for the purposes
of containing economic, political, and cultural activities. Within it people
organize their daily actions according to meaningful aspects of the constructed
space.

As part of national and global systems, neighbourhoods are affected by a wide range
of supply side forces, but ethnic vernacular landscapes show that ordinary people can
affect their environment, even though they are ultimately at the mercy of these larger
societal forces. Visual Sociology and attention to vernacular landscapes in the inner
 Modern Italy 85

city allow us to see conflict, competition and dominance at a level usually noticed
only by local residents.

The History of New York City’s Little Italies in Brief

Here we will take a brief look at where Gotham’s most, and least, known Little
Italies were at the beginning and the end of the twentieth century. Little Italies are
both real and imagined places, and the lines between local historical facts and
fictions are, to say the least, blurred. Given space limitations here, providing visual
representations covering the whole period is impossible. However, excellent
searchable visual archives are available such as those found at the US Library of
Congress Memory of America Project (http://www.loc.gov/rr/print) and those of the
Museum of the City of New York Photographic Archive (http://www.mcny.org/
Collections/photo/prints.htm). Whether in objective photographic research, photo
journalism or in the search for cinematic reality, unsurprisingly, it seems that the
visual focus has fallen on representations of family, religious celebrations and food.
Over-generalizing about New York’s Little Italies has a long and venerable history.
Antonio Mangano, a Protestant missionary, wrote at the turn of the century:

It is generally supposed by those unfamiliar with actual conditions, that the

Italian colony of the Borough of Manhattan is a well organized and compact
body of people, having a common life and being subject to the absolute control
and leadership of some one person or group of persons. To the reader of
popular articles describing Italian life and customs, in these days so frequently
appearing in newspapers and magazines; to the enthusiastic and romantic slum
visitor, who walks through Mulberry street, and possibly peeps into the dark
and dismal hallway of some dilapidated tenement and feels that he knows
just how Italians live and act; to the theoretical sociologist, to whom Italians
look alike and in whose estimation all Italians are alike, think alike, and act
alike—to such persons the mere mention of the Italian colony inevitably
suggests unity of thought and action as well as of mode of life on the part of all
who belong to that colony. And yet nothing is further from the truth.
(Mangano 1974, pp. 107–108)

The first Italian settlements were most often referred to as ‘colonies’, reflecting the
common perception by the native born that they were foreign outposts on American
soil. Most immigrants had come to find work, send money home and return as soon
as possible. For economic sojourners, community building was not a priority. Only
slowly did Italian ‘birds of passage’ decide to stay, raise families and create
distinctive neighbourhoods that in some ways reflected their places of origin.
The 100-year history of development and change in Italian neighborhoods is an
interesting variant of Parks and Burgess’s (1925) theory of Ethnic Succession. They
had noted that as the inner city becomes less desirable for living space, economically
successful social groups move towards the periphery, leaving the marginal ‘zones
of transition’ adjacent to the developing business and industrial core to the less
fortunate. New York’s Italians, however, tended to remain in the neighbourhood,
86 J. Krase

while other ethnic groups with whom they initially shared the same territory moved
away. It is via this process that Italian neighbourhoods became both concentrated
and larger.
Similar to many new migrants, Italians settled near work opportunities to
minimize transportation costs. Their residential concentration also formed local
labour pools. ‘Chain migration’ tied together the locations of kin or paesani with
work and cheap housing. Italians clustered on a block by block, building by building
basis. More social glue for the community was provided by village and regional
mutual-aid societies. Local social networks gradually expanded to include markets,
businesses, youth gangs, church activities and religious festivals. Although these local
and regional distinctions gradually diminished, as Little Calabrias and Little Sicilies
merged into Little Italies, they never disappeared completely. Class and occupational
differences, on the other hand, always remained strong, and ever present was the
drive towards home and property ownership among Italian Americans. Later, in
addition to economic and political differences among members of the community
were those based on the generation of immigration—i.e. ‘Italians’ as opposed to
Americani.
Italian neighbourhoods expanded by natural increase and the ebb and flow of
immigration from the home country. As empty city spaces were filled with apartment
buildings, offices and factories, the excess population of some of the most
overcrowded Little Italies leapfrogged to smaller satellite neighbourhoods on the
fringe of the city. Despite all the changes of over a 100 years of settlement, the
geographical and symbolic cores of these first settlements have remained amazingly
constant. This attachment to locality was even more remarkable, as Gabaccia (1984)
noted, that given Italians may have liked the social aspects of their teeming
immigrant ghettos, they were not happy with the depressing physical environment.
Between 1900 and 1930 the number of Italians in New York City had exploded
from 219,000 to 1,511,800 even as the mass migration of Italians ended. The Workers
of the Federal Writers’ Project located ten large Little Italies in New York City. Four
were located in Manhattan. The first was on Mulberry Street, which was occupied
then by poor immigrants from the South. Another was East Harlem, around 110th
Streets and 1st and 2nd Avenues. By 1940, ‘Italian’ Harlem was the largest Italian
colony in New York and peopled mostly by Southerners and some Northerners who
‘furnished it with doctors, lawyers, realtors and proprietors of most of the shops’
(Writers’ Project 1969, p. 21). On Bleecker, MacDougal and Sullivan Streets, just
south of Washington Square Park, another colony was established by northern
Italians. A fourth developed on Manhattan’s West Side around 9th Avenue, south
of 59th Street. In the Bronx there was only one neighbourhood, around Haight
and Arthur Avenues, called ‘Belmont’ and populated by Sicilians and Calabrians.
In Brooklyn there were three large Italian neighbourhoods. ‘South’ Brooklyn was
populated by southern Italian immigrants. In the 1930s, southern Italian enclaves
could also be found in urbanized Williamsburgh, as well as country-like East
New York sections of the rapidly growing borough. In the Borough of Queens there
were two Little Italies: Ozone Park and Long Island City.
Finding Italians during the first part of the century was a relatively simple matter;
almost all were Roman Catholics who were still speaking their native tongue, and
occasionally celebrating their local feste. Consequently, Italians could be found
 Modern Italy 87

wherever masses were being said in Italian. In Manhattan the second oldest Catholic
church attended by Italians was St Anthony of Padua (1866) at 153 Sullivan Street.
Nearby was St Joachim (1888) at 26 Roosevelt Street. Further west, one found Our
Lady of Pompei on Bleecker and Carmine Streets. Our Lady of Mount Carmel, on
115 Street and 1st Avenue in East Harlem, was formed in 1881 by immigrants from
the province of Salerno.
In Brooklyn the first Italian church was the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary
which was established by immigrants from the province of Naples in 1882. Our Lady
of Loretto stood at Pacific and Sackman Streets; and Our Lady of Peace is at 522
Carroll Street (1899). All these were in South Brooklyn, not far from the Brooklyn
Bridge, which connected Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan. St Blaise, on Kingston
Avenue and Midwood Street, was first attended by Italians in 1897 and served a
semi-rural Italian neighbourhood referred to at that time as ‘Pig Town’.
In the Bronx, the first church used by Italians was St Roch on Wales Avenue
between 147th and 149th Streets (1889). Our Lady of Mount Carmel (1907), at
Belmont Avenue and 187th Street, was ‘perhaps the finest of the Bronx Italian
Catholic houses of worship’ (Writers’ Project 1969, p. 81). There were also two St
Anthonys, one at Commonwealth Avenue and Mansion Street and the other at 4531
Richardson Avenue. Although Queens had a considerable Italian population, there
was only one church of ‘wholly Italian character’: the Church of the Nativity of
Our Blessed Lady, located in Ozone Park. Finally, on Staten Island, there was
St Joseph’s church in Rosebank, which dated to 1902 and stood next to the
Garibaldi-Meucci House.
Although most festas at the time were connected to well-known neighbourhoods,
that of Santa Rosalia, which was celebrated by ‘western Sicilians’ was not and it took
place on 14th Avenue, between 62nd and 65th Streets, in Brooklyn (later known as
Bensonhurst) (Krase 1994). The most noted feasts in New York were those of
St Gennaro (Neapolitans) on Mulberry Street and St Agatha (Sicilians) on Baxter
Street. Those of St Rocco were on Bleecker, Roosevelt Streets in Manhattan and on
Hicks Street, Brooklyn. The locally well-known and well-studied Our Lady of
Mount Carmel, on 115th Street in Manhattan, was started by immigrants from the
province of Salerno (Orsi 1985).
Except for the natural increase in the size of the population, it can be argued
that between the start of the Great Depression and the end of the Second World
War, New York’s Little Italies hardly changed as compared to the first third of the
century. When Edward J. Miranda and Ino J. Rossi (1976, p. 22) located New York
City’s Italian neighbourhoods, the Italian population had declined from its highest
point of 1,951,300 in 1960 to 1,739,700 in 1970. Brooklyn had the most (691,900),
followed by Queens (494,700), the Bronx (292,400), Manhattan (119,000) and Staten
Island (102,000). Italians still lived in well-defined ‘pocket areas’ and were ‘highly
segregated from other ethnic groups’ in older housing in older neighbourhoods.
In 1970, Italians comprised more than 40% of the population in Baychester,
Castle Hill, Eastchester, Parkchester, Throgs Neck and Williamsbridge in the Bronx;
Bensonhurst, Bath Beach, Gravesend, Park Slope, Sheepshead Bay and Canarsie in
Brooklyn; Astoria, Bayside-Flushing, Ozone Park and Rosedale in Queens; and
Oakwood-Great Kills and Dogan Hills in Staten Island. Ironically, Manhattan had
only one such area: the Mulberry Street ‘Little Italy’, which by that time had come to
88 J. Krase

symbolize all of New York’s Italian-Americans. Despite pockets of concentration,

‘Italian’ Harlem had become ‘Spanish’ Harlem.
Italians began to sense that their neighbourhoods were under attack both in those
places popularly known as Little Italies and also in lesser-known areas of Italian
settlement. The source of this anxiety, according to Philip F. Napoli (2004), was both
the emergence on Mulberry Street of an ‘Asian Invasion’, due to the rapid expansion
of Chinatown, as well as development of the fabled ‘Cross-Manhattan Expressway’.
The Italian part of Greenwich Village saw increasing signs of what was later to be
called ‘gentrification’. There was the loss of jobs in SoHo, the art scene and rising
pressure on residential and commercial rents (Tricarico 1984). Uptown in East
Harlem, Italians were still reeling from the shocks of 1950s ‘blockbusting’. And
always there was the construction of the hated ‘housing projects’, and other kinds
of public development that brought strangers (especially non-whites) into the
neighbourhood. In places like Greenpoint, Brooklyn, conflicts over ethnic
dominance and housing were acute as absentee landlords were forcing old timers
out for profit. Urban sociologist Judith DeSena (1990) documented defensive
practices in the area, such as the attempts of local residents to restrict the influx of
outsiders, especially blacks and Latinos, by an informal housing referral system.
Elsewhere in Brooklyn, Jonathan Rieder (1985, p. 15) framed the response of Italians
to the threat of racial integration in this way:

Today the frame bungalows with baroque statuary saints on the lawn evoke an
earlier time. Old Canarsie hands like to recall the intimate feeling of community:
little Italian ladies cutting dandelions for homemade wine, the vegetable gardens
with their gnarled growth, hunts for rabbits in the marsh grass.

Giulio E. Miranda (1974, p. 447) saw insularity more positively as:

The tenacity in clinging to the old neighborhoods, partly sentimental, but also
derivative from the extended family pattern, can act as a glue to hold the cities
from becoming racial ghettos. The Italians have shown a readiness to live in
neighborhoods adjacent to those of blacks and Puerto Ricans and fight it out
for the turf. This is more promising than the discreet avoidance practiced
by the groups who deplore the rumbling and name calling of black–Italian
confrontation. The resistance to change is an index of inner strength.

Writing in the late 1980s, Robert C. Freeman (1987, p. 234) asked:

Will this be the fate (landlord ‘milking’, mortgage delinquency, and

abandonment) of the Greenpoints and Canarsies in the year 2000? The
declining numbers of incoming Italian immigrants, combined with the out-
migration of young Italian-Americans, would seem to suggest so. ‘Little Italys’
[sic], however, are nothing if not hardy entities, and have probably persisted on
the urban scene for far longer than the early Chicago School theorists had
thought possible. Their demise will be the cause of mourning for some,
and delight for others; their struggle to resist the seemingly inevitable tides
 Modern Italy 89

of change will be watched closely by all observers of the contemporary

American city.

For Freeman, the most vibrant Little Italies at that time were in the Bronx and
Brooklyn. But even they were threatened by neighbourhood racial transition, school
integration, perceptions of high crime rates, deterioration, lower property value and
blockbusting. Although New York’s Italian Americans felt they were being singled
out for attack by various coalitions of non-whites, and ‘liberals’, it might be more
accurately stated that Italians had simply stayed a decade or two beyond their
welcome in the centre of a city in radical flux. Migrants from Italy had also stopped
coming to New York City. For example, Suzanne DeCampo (1991, p. 51) noted that,
while in 1980, Italy was the birthplace of the greatest number of the city’s foreign
born, by the mid-1980s, Italian immigrants had sunk to 26th place. Most of them
settled in or near Bensonhurst and also concentrated in Ridgewood, Queens.
A decade later, Alba et al. (1997) completed a detailed study of white ethnic
neighbourhoods in the New York metropolitan area based on the 1980 and 1990
Censuses. They found that the residential patterns of other ‘white ethnics’ were
consistent with assimilation theory, but the picture was ‘different’ for Italian
neighbourhoods, which continued as a visible feature of the urban landscape. From
the 1980s most other ‘white ethnics’ left the central city due to the invasion and
succession of minorities in inner-city neighbourhoods. The great majority of these
newcomers were non-European immigrants for whom the doors were opened wider
by the 1965 and subsequent changes in US immigration laws. In addition to these
regularized groups was a large influx of undocumented, especially Latino, aliens.
Racial incidents such as the murder of a young black in Italian-American
Bensonhurst reminded the authors that Italian Americans vigorously defend their
turf (Krase 1994).
Even though Italians were moving out of the least desirable of previously Italian-
dominated settlements, they continued to be concentrated (Alba et al. 1997).
‘Italian’ neighbourhoods in Brooklyn were still defined in Bensonhurst, Canarsie,
Carroll Gardens, Borough Park, Greenpoint, Flatlands and Bay Ridge; in Queens
the neighbourhoods of Woodhaven, Middle Village, Whitestone, Flushing, Astoria
and Long Island City are similarly described; and in the Bronx, the well-known
Belmont (Arthur Avenue) area no longer satisfied their criteria. Increasingly, many
new areas in the borough of Staten Island were becoming at that time Italian-
American enclaves. Because of their central city locations, and lower rents,
traditional Italian areas became magnets for newer immigrants. In Belmont,
Latinos and Albanians transformed the neighbourhood, whereas Italians in
Bensonhurst experienced the arrival of Russians and Chinese. What was left of
Manhattan’s Mulberry Street Little Italy had become an extension of Chinatown.
Even though Asians lived there in large numbers, the commercial streets retained
their Italian theme-park appearance.
Little Italies have also waned because the Italian-American population decreased.
Using data from the 1990 Census, William Egelman and Joseph Salvo (1994;
Egelman 2003) found that 857,700 New Yorkers identified themselves as being of
Italian ancestry and were only 11.5% of the city’s total population. By 2000,
the number of Italian-American New Yorkers dropped by 17% to 692,733 persons.
90 J. Krase

It was a 30% decline since 1980, and even more dramatic given that between 1930
and 1960 there were more than 1 million Italian Americans in New York City
(Rosenwaike 1972). Italian Americans remain today, however, the largest European
ethnic group in the city. It must also be noted that the borough of Staten Island, with
both the largest Italian-American and Italian-immigrant population, has no Little
Italy. The 2000 Census shows that Italian immigrants increasingly choose not to
settle in New York historical Little Italies, preferring where other Italian Americans
had moved to escape urban blight in past decades.

A Final Glance at Little Italies

Despite the demographic realities of their ‘actual’ disappearance, three of
New York’s oldest Little Italies ‘virtually’ retain the title: Mulberry Street, in
Manhattan; Bensonhurst, Brooklyn; and Belmont in the Bronx. Both Mulberry
Street and Belmont also remain as major and minor tourist attractions (e.g. ethnic
theme-parks) respectively. Although a small minority of Italians lives there, no one
claims that Mulberry Street is a real Italian neighbourhood, but some in Belmont
struggle to maintain a semblance of ethnic authenticity. Slowly but surely, the
meanings of these places are changing not only because of demography, but also
because of the altered appearance of the vernacular landscapes.
One might think of the photographic and written descriptions that follow as
additional text about the contested meanings of Italianità: a visual symbolic
competition that reflects the battle for local dominance. Metropolitan desk writers at
New York Times frequently employ the visual imagery of Little Italies as props to
comment on the changing social landscape of New York City. In this regard, they
treat as equal evidence both demographic data and the visual appearance of
commercial vernaculars as indicators of permanence and change. In his article
‘A romantic ideal of Italy, over a samba beat’, David Gonzalez (2004) reported that
Francesco Castiglione hoped to ‘save’ the Italian character of Belmont by adapting
to the changing ethnic composition of the neighbourhood and by singing musical
blends on the local sidewalk café music scene. Castiglione explained that:

Just as Astoria isn’t just Greek anymore, Arthur Avenue probably has more
Albanians, Mexicans, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans than Italians. But
romantic notions—of food, the old days and older ways—still sell.

Another local, Nick Santilli, said: ‘The Italian soul is here, but it is disappearing’;
and café owner, David Greco, wants his place to stay as an Italian bar: ‘What I do
not want is to sell this so it becomes another Albanian club.’ (See Figure 4) Gonzalez
closes this newspaper article with:

At Francesco’s season premiere two weekends ago, the patrons at an Albanian

restaurant across the street barely looked up as he set up his keyboard,
accordion and amplifier. Mexican laborers walked home, tired and grimy,
clutching bags from McDonald’s.
 Modern Italy 91

Figure 4 Gurra (Albanian) Café on Arthur Avenue.

Jacqueline S. Gold’s (2004) New York Times story was titled ‘Love, discord and
cannoli’ in Belmont:

Egidio Pastry Shop, its window glistening with seductive sweets, has sat on the
same block of East 187th Street near Arthur Avenue for more than 90 years.
Topped by a gold-lettered awning, it is a fixture of Belmont, the Bronx’s
own Little Italy, and like its sister cafés, it is loved for its inky espresso, its
crisp-shelled cannoli and its comfortable conviviality.

She concludes with: ‘Arthur Avenue has long ceased to be solely the province of
Italians, as it was for about three-quarters of a century, but places like Egidio’s have
endured as treasured repositories of the neighborhood’s authenticity’.
‘Well, the ices are still Italian’ is the way that Joseph Berger (2002) chose to frame
his article about how Bensonhurst, Brooklyn—New York City’s largest Italian
neighbourhood—was losing its Italians: ‘The 2000 Census shows the number of
residents of Italian descent is down to 59,112, little more than half that of two
decades ago, and departed Italians have been replaced by Chinese and Russian
families’. Despite the shrinking population, Bensonhurst’s major commercial street,
18th Avenue, still carries the title Cristoforo Colombo Boulevard, which provides a
sharp contrast to the ethnic change shown in Figure 5.
A few years earlier, Berger (2002b) had registered the end of Italian dominance in
Harlem in his press article, ‘Sit in this chair, go back in time; barber is unchanged as
old neighborhood vanishes’ (see Figure 6):

For 52 years, Claudio Caponigro has watched through the window of his
barbershop as Italian Harlem has changed around him. But, with a few
exceptions, he and his shop have hardly changed at all . . . But largely as a result
92 J. Krase

Figure 5 Chinese gift shop on Cristoforo Colombo Boulevard.

of a vigorous ethnic mobility, typical of many New York City neighborhoods,

it is down to a relative handful of Italians and a handful of Italian stores—the
110-year-old Morrone Bakery; Patsy’s and Rao’s restaurants; two funeral
homes; and Our Lady of Mount Carmel Roman Catholic Church, where a few
elderly neighborhood residents go to say their novenas. Ask one of them, Gena
Bolino, how many Italians are left and she will respond: ‘You can count them’.
In these circumstances, Claudio’s Barber Shop, in its own tumbledown shack
like building on 116th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues, is a touchstone,
its fusty customs and etiquette appealing to people who are not always
mesmerized by the siren songs of modern life.
 Modern Italy 93

Figure 6 Claudio’s barbershop on 116th Street in East Harlem.

Conclusion
New York City’s Italian America is changing, and quickly. Quantum leaps in
transportation and communications technology make it almost impossible to keep
up with changes in the location, structure and function of modern communities. As
old neighbourhoods wax, a few others wane. Inexpensive regular air transportation,
telephone, fax, modem and electronic access to funds make it possible for Italian
extended families and clans, and virtually whole villages, to socially, physically and/
or imaginatively dwell on many continents. Because of this mobility, small but
thriving enclaves can exist but remain unnoticed, for it is the traditional yet
disappearing Little Italy which is still the template.
Little Italy is a product and source of both social and cultural capital. Although
ordinary people in the neighbourhood are ultimately at the mercy of distant
structural forces, in their naı̈veté they continue to create and modify the local spaces
allocated to them, and inevitably become part of the urban landscape. Thus, people
and spaces become symbols, and as a result, they come to merely represent
themselves and thereby lose their autonomy. In the case of ethnic theme-parks,
the enclave comes to symbolize its imagined inhabitants and stands for them
independent of their residence in it (Krase 2002, 2003).
Here we have looked at how some of New York City’s urban spaces became
Italianized, and subsequently became less so, in response to immigrant settlements
and local commercial practices. Over the decades, that which stands for Italian
America has remained relatively constant, while that for which it stands has
considerably evolved. In this regard, we might say that while real Italianità
is culturally dynamic, its virtual expressions have been, and continue to be,
94 J. Krase

virtually static. Central working-class Italian neighbourhoods, for example, have

‘represented’ the Italian-American community long after the great majority of
Americans of Italian descent has ceased to live in them, or to wear blue collars. Little
Italies continue to be important places to study not also because they are venues for
assimilation and acculturation, but because they help us to understand America’s
ethnic past, present, and, indeed, its future. Visual Sociology and Spatial Semiotics
are important tools in gaining that understanding.
Finally, it must be noted that there are strong semiotic parallels between the
history of invasions of Little Italies and their counterparts in Italian cities today.
Russell King and Jacqueline Andall (1999, p. 155), commenting on increasing
xenophobia towards, and political posturing about, non-EU foreigners in Italy,
noted that:

In very recent years the media frenzy has created powerful yet badly distorted
images associating immigrants with widespread violence and crime. National
stereotypes are repeated almost daily on television screens and in newspapers:
crude associations between North Africans and drugs, Albanians and
racketeering; black African women and prostitution. While some immigrants
are undoubtedly engaged in criminal activities, the degree of association is
vastly exaggerated, and much less prominence is given to Italians’ engagement
in crime, including that against immigrants. With barely 2.5 per cent of the
population in Italy of immigrant origin, much less than in most other
European countries, the ‘crisis in immigration’ is truly a crisis of (mis)
representation.

There is also a great irony in these parallels, in that during the period of mass
migration native born Americans of European ancestry saw Italian immigrants as an
integral part of an invading ‘unwashed horde’, in much the same way that
contemporary Italians visualize and stigmatize a much smaller influx of documented
and undocumented aliens into their own country. I would suggest that adminis-
trators and planners of Italy’s increasingly multiethnic cities could also benefit
greatly from an understanding of immigrant and ethnic vernacular urban landscapes,
which, according to Dolores Hayden (1990, p. 7), take ‘account of both inclusion and
exclusion’.

References

Alba, R. D., Crowder, K., Logan, J. R. (1997) ‘White ethnic neighborhoods and assimilation: the Greater
New York region, 1980–1990’, Social Forces, vol. 75, no. 3, pp. 883–909.
Berger, J. (2002a) ‘Well, the ices are still Italian’, New York Times, 17 September.
Berger, J. (2002b) ‘Sit in this chair, go back in time; barber is unchanged as old neighborhood vanishes’,
New York Times, 11 November.
Clark, K. B. (1950) The Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power, Harper & Row, New York.
Davis, M. (2001) Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City, Verso, London.
DeCampo, S. (1991) The Linguistic Minorities of New York City, Community Service Society, New York.
DeSena, J. N. (1990) Protecting One’s Turf: Social Strategies for Maintaining Urban Neighborhoods,
University Press of America, Lanham, MD.
 Modern Italy 95

Egelman, E. (2003) ‘Italian Americans in New York City: 1980 to 2000: a demographic summary’, paper
presented at the 36th Annual Meeting of the Italian American Historical Association, Boca Raton,
FL, July.
Egelman, W. & Salvo, J. (1994) ‘Italian Americans in New York City’, in Italian Americans in a
Multicultural Society, eds J. Krase & J. N. DeSena, Forum Italicum, Stony Brook, New York,
pp. 114–126.
Freeman, R. C. (1987) ‘The development and maintenance of New York City’s Italian American
Neighborhoods’, in The Melting Pot and Beyond: Italian Americans in the Year 2000, eds J. Krase
& W. Egelman, American Italian Historical Association, Staten Island, New York, pp. 223–237.
Gabaccia, D. (1984) From Sicily to Elizabeth Street, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY.
Gardaphe, F. L. (1996) Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative,
Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Polity Press,
Cambridge.
Gold, J. S. (2004) ‘Love, discord and cannoli’, New York Times, 17 October.
Gonzalez, D. (2004) ‘A romantic ideal of Italy, over a samba beat’, New York Times, 18 May.
Gottdiener, M. (1985) The Social Production of Urban Space, 2nd edn, University of Texas Press,
Austin, TX.
Grady, J. (1996) ‘The scope of visual sociology’, Visual Sociology, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 10–24.
Gutiérrez, D. G. (1999) ‘Migration, emergent ethnicity, and the ‘‘third space’’: the shifting politics of
nationalism in Greater Mexico’, Journal of American History, vol. 86, no. 2, pp. 481–517.
Harvey, D. (1989) The Urban Experience, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.
Hayden, D. (1990) ‘The potential of ethnic places for urban landscapes’, Places, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 11–17.
Jackson, J. B. (1984) Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
King, R. & Andall, J. (1999) ‘The geography and economic sociology of recent immigration to Italy’,
Modern Italy, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 135–158.
Krase, J. (1993) ‘Traces of home’, Places: A Quarterly Journal of Environmental Design, vol. 8, no. 4,
pp. 46–55.
Krase, J. (1994) ‘Bensonhurst, Brooklyn: Italian American victimizers and victims’, Voices in Italian
Americana, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 43–53.
Krase, J. (2002) ‘Navigating ethnic vernacular landscapes then and now’, Journal of Architecture and
Planning Research, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 274–281.
Krase, J. (2003) ‘Italian American urban landscapes: images of social and cultural capital’, Italian
Americana, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 17–44.
Mangano, A. (1974) ‘The associated life of the Italians in New York City’, in The Ordeal of Assimilation,
eds S. Feldstein & L. Costello, Anchor Books, Garden City, NY.
Miranda, G. E. (1974) ‘Ozone Park revisited’, in The Ordeal of Assimilation, eds S. Feldstein &
L. Costello, Anchor Books, Garden City, NY, pp. 443–449.
Miranda, E. J. & Rossi, I. J. (1976) New York City’s Italians, Italian American Center for Urban Affairs
Inc., New York.
Napoli, P. F. (2004) ‘Little Italy: resisting the Asian invasion, 1965–1995’, in Race and Ethnicity in
New York City, eds J. Krase & R. Hutchinson, Elsevier/JAI Press, New York, pp. 245–63.
Orsi, R. A. (1985) The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950,
Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Park, R. E., Burgess, E. W. & McKenzie, R. D. (eds) (1925) The City, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.
Rieder, J. (1985) Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA.
Rosenwaike, I. (1972) Population History of New York City, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY.
Tricarico, D. (1984) The Italians of Greenwich Village, Center for Migration Studies, New York.
Wirth, L. (1928) The Ghetto, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Workers of the Federal Writers’ Project (1969) Works Progress Administration of the City of New York,
The Italians of New York, Arno Press/New York Times, New York.