Little Italy: From Immigrant Enclave To Italian Theme Park (Rewind)

Summer retrospective on neighborhoods

0:00Hey, it's the Bowery Boys. Hey.

0:15Hi there. Welcome to the Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young. And this is Tom Myers with a final part, final installment of our little summer retrospective, which is looking at three New York City neighborhoods and how they have changed over time, including how they've changed since we first recorded the episodes about them. And each of these stories is slightly different because each of these neighborhoods has changed in a different way. So in part one, we reviewed our story on Soho, a place where traditional

0:48landmark protections and preservation efforts largely saved the neighborhood's unique architectural character, which allowed room for both artists in the 1960s and 70s and 80s and a return of retail, including department stores. But this also caused sky-high rents and the then displacement of many of those same artists. For part two, we took the F train to downtown Brooklyn, which has experienced a very different

1:22transformation over the past few decades. It is a business and government district, which was also famous for being the borough's major shopping district. However, changes in retail took a toll. But then a 2004 rezoning ushered in a modern era of gigantic residential towers. Resulting in a dramatic transformation to the neighborhood. Today, to see those changes, just look up.

Little Italy today

1:53And up, and up, and up. So then, for our final part here, we thought we'd look at a different type of neighborhood transformation. And that neighborhood is Little Italy, which is actually adjacent to Soho, in fact, in Lower Manhattan. Now, this is a place that has become a sort of Italian cuisine-themed restaurant Disneyland, right? It's a popular tourist destination

2:24that really once was the heart of Italian life in New York City. The show that you're about to hear was recorded in 2015. And for the most part, with some exceptions, the neighborhood has not changed that much overall, right? It is still world-famous for the vast number of Italian restaurants lining its streets, many of which, you know, date back several decades. And some, I mean, like Lombardi's, you know, that are well over a century old.

2:56But that is not to say that the neighborhood isn't endangered on some level. Now, officially, few of the neighborhood's buildings are actually protected by New York City landmark status. However, there is a National Register of Historic Places designation, okay? So that's national, but there is not a local historic district protection. However, just again, outwardly, it doesn't seem like too much has changed. You know, the architecture is still mostly tenement buildings, but individual businesses, right? Privately owned businesses, many decades old and older,

3:32have been forced to close due to high rents. So while the touristy vibe of Little Italy hasn't really shifted too much in the decades, it is losing some of its past. Places like Forlini's and Oliva Derry, Greg, which is heartbreaking. Oliva Derry originally opened on Grand Street in 1892, when what we call Little Italy today was called the Italian Quarter. And it

4:04stretched much farther than today's neighborhood's boundaries. Tens of thousands of newly arrived Italian immigrants made their home here in this region. Of course, some of the best history is often hanging on the walls of some of the neighborhood's very oldest restaurants. And it is truly worth pushing past the tourists to visit some of these truly fun and tasty restaurants here. Now, one thing that hasn't changed, though, of course, that is the Feast of San Gennaro,

4:38which this year is celebrating its centennial. The festival will be held from September 17th through the 27th, 2026. And it honors the life of San Gennaro of Naples. And it's a tradition that's also worth braving the crowds for. I'm sure many of you have been many times. And many are probably going to celebrate the centennial. There will be crowds for good reason, right? And by the way, a great companion episode to this show is our episode from last year, 2025,

5:13on Italian Harlem. That is episode 449, which, you know, that neighborhood has a parallel history to Little Italy here. And we also have an episode on the history of pizza. That's episode 409. Do you remember, Greg, we started that show with Scott Wiener of Scott's Pizza Tour, literally walking along the streets of Little Italy, like along these blocks? Well, we went to Lombardi's. In fact, I had to take issue of something you said a little bit earlier,

5:43because you mentioned Lombardi's, which we literally on the podcast go and have pizza there. But to be technical, Tom, Lombardi's is now considered to be in Nolita, aka north of Little Italy. I know this is absurd. Give me a break. This is absurd. How can Lombardi's not be in Little Italy? I refuse. Write your congressman, Tom. I don't know. I don't make these rules. But in this show, we get to the core of the story of why the Italians settled here in the late 19th century and why it

6:18remains important to American history and also to immigration history.

Locating Little Italy on the map

6:24Sid, join us as we push past the souvenir shops to find the real heart of Little Italy. To start the show, we usually start it with the situate the listener, you know, like finding on the map where the place is for those who don't know. In this case, this is quite important to the story because it has changed over time. What we call, quote unquote, Little Italy is much different than it was even 25 years ago. That's right. And we're not just talking about the areas in New York City

6:55where Italians moved because otherwise that's a much bigger episode that would be called Italians in New York or Italians in the United States. There's several neighborhoods. We're talking about Manhattan's Little Italy neighborhood. Downtown. Right. Because there are multiple. Even in Manhattan. So the Little Italy we're talking about is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan that was the most famous of the Italian-American neighborhoods in the city. It's still there. It's quite a bit smaller today than it was. Today's neighborhood is technically bordered to the north by Nolita,

7:29which we'll get to in a second, and the south by Chinatown, the west by Soho, and by the east by Bowery. But that paints, if you can imagine that in your head, a much larger neighborhood than truly exists today. Because really, if we're talking about taking a walk through Little Italy today, we're really just talking about starting a canal and Mulberry Street and walking north until basically Broom, which is really three blocks. Yes, five to ten minute stroll, basically. Yeah, you get to Hester,

8:00then you get to Grand, then you get to Broom, and then you're kind of done. The definition of a pocket neighborhood. Once you get to Grand, if you turn to the right, you can walk a couple steps, and you've got Ferrara on the right, you've got the food shops, the cheese shops on the left, so there's a little detour on Grand Street. Obviously, Little Italy was much bigger than this back in its heyday. And this heyday would be in the 1880s, 90s, 1900, 1910. So that's really the period we're going to be talking about today, during which Little Italy spread out into this much bigger area. The original old Little

8:35Italy, in fact, was not here north of Canal Street, but was south of Canal Street down in an area called Mulberry Bend. To the north, though, let's back up here because you mentioned Nolita. Right. Nolita is a fairly new neighborhood, and of course, that stands for- The term is new. Yeah, the term is new, of course. That stands for north of Little Italy. That's right. This is the area that's basically between Broom and Houston Street. Now, I've been fighting this name for many years because this is

9:07a name that's come up by real estate people, essentially. It's not an organic name of the neighborhood. A few years ago- Because this was part of Little Italy. It was Little Italy. There are huge landmarks like St. Patrick's Old Cathedral. Lombardi's Pizza is in quote-unquote Nolita. I remember when we had our show on old St. Pat's, how incensed we were to even use the word Nolita. It's all upscale shops and wine bars everywhere. Wine bars. It was like a wine bar

9:38and shoe shops. It's like 80% of the shops. Small plates. Small plumbing. Small plates. You walk down Mulberry Street, they serve you on big plates. You walk through Nolita. It's nothing but annoying small plate. And fancy shoes. Fancy shoes and small plates. So, right. Nolita is not Little Italy. Absolutely not. It really isn't. So, that's the north side. But on the south side, the original Italian neighborhood, in fact, the core of the Italian neighborhood was down here at Mulberry Bend, which is Mulberry Street where it takes a little curve to the east and is notable today for

10:13the park that's there called Columbus Park. Right. Let's rewind quickly to the 18th century when this

The Collect Pond and Five Points

10:19whole area was New York's biggest water supply. It was the Collect Pond in the 18th century. The pond was used for industry. There were breweries and factories built around this pond. It took up this entire area. Although called the Freshwater Pond by some, water was not very fresh. To make a long story short, they decided to drain the pond in 1811 by way of a canal, a large portion of which would become known as Canal Street. And then they filled in the pond with a

10:51landfill. Unfortunately, when they filled it in, they didn't do such a great job with the drainage process. And the land that they left behind was a bit unstable and unsuitable for building. But they built right on top of it anyway. They didn't really know. They didn't know at the time. So, the houses, the shops and things that they built on top of this land started to settle in odd ways. It became unsuitable for living. And people took off. Leaving behind these buildings, instead of knocking them down, they just became slums. And it was into

11:23these buildings that the newly arriving Irish immigrants would move in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s, thus creating this dangerous neighborhood of vice and crime, the Five Points neighborhood. So, this area, this was ground zero for newly arriving immigrants who were very poor. It happened with the Irish and would also happen 50 years later, 40 years later, with the Italians. So, we have covered many immigration movements throughout our past shows through these many

11:54years. And each group of immigrants come to America with just slightly different, very unique situations. The Irish, for instance, came here in the 1830s and 1840s, 1850s primarily, due to famine. The Chinese would come afterwards, come mostly from the West. Many of them had already been here for work and had come from the West Coast. Russian Jews would be arriving in the 1880s because they were fleeing persecution. You could say that the origin of one of the most prominent waves of

Garibaldi and Italian unification

12:25Italian immigration that would happen here in the late 1870s, 1880s, actually began in the year 1850 with the arrival of one Italian. That Italian being Giuseppe Gattabaldi. He was a military leader, principally involved with the unification of the nation of Italy. Up to that point, the country we call Italy today was back then in 1850, a collection of nation states and was not a unified country. And very much different in terms of northern Italian provinces and southern

13:00Italians. Quite different cultures. So, Garibaldi had led a failed attempt to unite these nation states, but it was unsuccessful. So, fled and in 1850 arrived in New York, or rather arrived in Staten Island, where he lived with a friend and inventor, Antonio Meucci. So, here in Staten Island, Garibaldi laid low and even worked at a candle factory. He would eventually return to Italy in 1854, but I wanted to say that the house that he stayed in is a museum and you can visit it in Staten Island

13:33today and I recommend it. Garibaldi returned in 1854, recommenced in this war against the Bourbons to make Italy an independent country. And finally, in the year 1861, sorry, I'm speeding through international history here, but in 1861, that is when the Kingdom of Italy was finally created. Which sounds like a wonderful moment for unified Italy, but it seems like that was also done to the detriment to a certain degree of southern Italians. And you had already inferred this just now with

14:07the idea of basically two groups of Italians being married together in this new union. The relatively sophisticated northern Italians are the ones with the great renaissance traditions and all the great sculptors and artists. And then in the south, what they would call the mezzo giorno, they would be a lot more poor population and they would remain so even following the unification of Italy. And it would be a place of great poverty. When this unification happened, not only were the people in southern

14:43Italy getting sort of screwed over by the northerners who were making all of the new laws that they would abide by, they were getting new taxes imposed upon them as well, but they were also having to deal with a new competition from the north and from other parts of the world that they never had had to deal with before. So they were also feeling the globalized economy crunching down. They were quite isolated and now they were part of this larger country and it actually made life quite difficult

Southern Italian immigration waves

15:12for them immediately after unification. Now, in terms of immigration before 1871, if you were to sort of look at the statistics, most of the Italian immigrants that had come to the United States were from the north and were generally speaking artisans, trained laborers. But then after unification, with this increase of the poverty and disease and overpopulation, and of course, you know, not just high taxes, but then a lot of corrupt governments, corrupt churches, even at this period, almost all the Italian immigration that would

15:48happen after that date would come from the south. So if you're looking at a map, Italy as the boot and football, the regions that are basically like the foot part of the boot, Basilicata and Campania and Calabria, then of course, Sicily, of course, those would be the areas where most of the immigration would come from into the United States during this period. So between 1880 and 1920, 4 million Italians

16:19would arrive into the United States and a majority of them would arrive through New York City. Now, unlike these other groups like the Irish, for instance, most of them were just men that arrived here for work. Depending on the year, it changed. But between 75 and 90 percent of these people were men. Yeah, which is a huge number, which is, I think, often overlooked in the popular retelling of this of the story because they were coming to seek their fortune. This was not a story of people coming over

16:52to immediately settle down and start a new life in the new world. It was people who were desperate back in their villages coming, men leaving their wives to come to the U.S. and to make their fortunes and then to go back to bring their money back to Italy. Over the course of years, many of them just moved with their families here. Life did seem to be a lot better here than it was back in southern Italy. Many of these thousands that came through New York settled in the Italian sections of cities all over the United States, including

17:24Chicago and Boston, and would be employed by these U.S. companies to help build some of America's great technological projects of the late 19th century, including the New York subway. And we're going to get into all of these occupations and things in a minute here.

Settling Mulberry Street

17:46Geographically speaking, in terms of Little Italy, why were these immigrants settling here around the Five Points area? So by the 1880s, the heart of downtown Italian population, I'll explain that in a second, would be specifically on Mulberry Street and the Mulberry Bend and those streets, you know, that are around it. They're arriving in this neighborhood specifically because it is the cheapest area to live. Groups of people tended to cluster around those that had similar

18:19cultures and similar language. So you actually had little spots around this area, like individual blocks and even individual buildings that would have just people from one region. Those people on Mulberry, for instance, tended to be all Neapolitans, basically from around Naples and in the region of Campania. Elizabeth Street would tend to be the place where Sicilians would live, at least in the 1880s and 1890s, before people branched out a little bit more.

18:50And this all makes perfect sense. So if you're arriving and you don't speak the language, you want to be around people who can speak your dialect and who understand you. And it's probably easier to find a place to live if you can speak to them and you trust them, especially if you're coming from a village. This was not actually the first Italian settlement in Manhattan in the late 19th century. Up in East Harlem, there was also another huge Italian neighborhood. When I kept looking at old newspapers for the phrase Little Italy, this is actually what came up first. This was actually

19:23called Little Italy before then, this area of 110th Street to like 112th Street and First and Second Avenues. The difference is this would primarily be Northern Italians. So that's the difference between these two big enclaves of Italians here. So in the New York Times in 1888, I read kind of a startling quote that described these two neighborhoods very differently and how people might have seen them differently. So this was 1888, quote, about 25,000 Italians had come to the United States this

19:57year. There were about 60,000 to 70,000 Italians in New York City already. About 8,000 live in Little Italy, meaning up in Manhattan, and are of the better class. Nearly 2,500 live in Mulberry Street, unquote. So that is a newspaper depiction of how people saw these two different groups of people. Real overt discrimination. And by the way, those figures are not accurate at all. I mean, nothing about that passage is actually accurate, but it's just to go to show you that how people saw this new wave was much different than

20:33what they were used to when they were interacting with new Italian immigrants that had come 20 years earlier. I just want to add that many of these Italians before 1892 were coming in through Castle Garden, which was the immigrant processing station that was at the foot of Manhattan, today's Battery Park. But in 1892 was when Ellis Island would open, and the Italians would actually find themselves the most sizable group of the large number of immigrants that were coming through America

21:04through this post. And in terms of just numbers, I mean, if we look at how many Italians were living in New York City in 1850, there were 833 Italian-born citizens. Wow. 1850. And if we jump forward to the 1880s, New York was averaging 30,000 Italians arriving every year. So by 1900, there were 250,000 people living in New York City who identified as Italian-American. What's so shocking about that 833 number you threw out earlier, that would be like the population of

21:40half a block by the 1880s down here in Little Italy. And this immigration really picked up in the 1880s and 1890s, again, with mostly men at the beginning who were coming over, mostly people who were at least anticipating that they'd be going back to Italy. 43% of those who arrived would return to Italy, but 57% would stay put. So, and at some point, you know, reach out for their families to come over and join them. And you see how, as the decades progressed, they built their own real world here.

22:15Sometimes they'd be living with, or often they'd be living with families that would let out one of their bedrooms to a bunch of lodgers, sometimes fitting six, eight people in a room that we would think would be made for one or two people. Many of these people were, quote, day laborers. So they would head off to do day jobs. It was really unskilled work, just physical work for which they were not compensated very well. Incredibly dangerous at times.

22:46And these jobs were often arranged for them through sort of brokers called padroni. These were power brokers who would often be the first point of contact that somebody would have when they arrived. A newly arrived immigrant would go to a padroni, maybe had already been in touch with the padroni and was coming over because somebody had set up everything for them in advance and had reached out to them while they were still living in Italy. But they would come over, come through this broker who would set them up with a cheap place to live and a job. And this broker, padroni,

23:23would be getting a cut of all of the revenues. Many companies in the United States actively were recruiting Southern Italians in this fashion and, of course, was not popular with those who already lived in America and saw this as a threat to their the labor market. And let's remember that the U.S. is going through an incredible expansion at the same time. And so you had alluded earlier to the railroads needing to be built, dams being built, huge infrastructure projects that were happening all over the country.

23:55Skyscrapers. The city's being built and this all needed labor. And so these newly arrived immigrants would become the majority of New York's day labor force. Another statistic here, in 1883, 15% of New York's, day labor force was Italian. And just one decade later, in 1893, 75% of the day labor force would be made up of Italians. So during the Gilded Age, I think it's very fair to say, many of the great landmarks and monuments

24:25of the Gilded Age were constructed by Italian laborers. And to bring it back to our location here at Little Italy, most of these men lived around this neighborhood. Although by the turn of the century, there were different Italian enclaves around Brooklyn and Queens and other areas. And they were also doing other kinds of jobs. They weren't just doing unskilled day labor things. They were a majority by 1894, for example, a majority of fruit sellers were Italian in the city.

24:5697% of boot blacks were Italian, for example. But in discussing this neighborhood, I think we have to talk about the actual neighborhood, not just what people were, what they were working on or the often miserable conditions in which they were living. But the street was a vibrant place as well. We have to imagine the push carts in the streets, the businesses open, the food shops that were open. What I find really interesting is now if we're in the 1890s, beginning of the 20th century,

25:28and you compare that with what's in Little Italy today, some of the biggest tourist attractions, the big restaurants and pastry shops and shops and everything, many of them trace their origin from this particular decade that they have been open for well over 100 years.

Historic bakeries and cheese shops

25:47In terms of pastry shops, I think that that would take us directly to Ferrara's, which indeed opened in 1892. It's still there today in its fifth generation. It was opened by Enrico Scopa and Antonio Ferrara when they opened Cafe A Ferrara's, which specialized in cakes and cookies and espresso and still open right there at the corner of Grand and Mulberry. I mean, today it's like a wonderland of sugar and delicious sweet things. Everything from cannolis

26:19to delicious cakes and tiramisu. And if you look straight across the street, you'll see Oliva Dairy, which is the nation's oldest Italian cheese store. It started by Pina Oliva after she moved to New York from Benevento, Italy. It's at the corner of Grand and Mulberry, just across the street at 188 Grand. It still uses the same recipe for mozzarella and ricotta today, and that dates back again to 1892, the same year as Ferrara. Now, just a few years later in 1897, a certain Gennaro Lombardi opened a grocery store

26:55at 53 Spring Street, so just a couple blocks up. He was soon selling tomato pies, which he'd wrap up with the string, and in 1905 received a license to operate a pizzeria. And this is the genesis, of course, of Lombardi's Pizzeria, which is the first in the country, but not the oldest continuously operating pizzeria, because it did close in 1984 and opened a decade later. These are places that people all over New York come to, because they're very famous.

27:28But when they opened at the beginning of the century, it was primarily for the Italians that lived in those neighborhoods. Right. You came from Italy, you missed the mozzarella cheese back home, and so you went to Oliva Dairy on Grand Street, or you went to Di Paolo's next door, which opened in 1910. This was opened by Savino Di Paolo, who was a cheesemaker living in a southern Italian mountain town. He leaves for New York in 1910, and he opens up this dairy in Little Italy. His family would join him four years later. Today, Di Paolo's, which is located at 200 Grand Street,

28:03is still there in its fifth generation, still making their own fine cheeses. Today, it's run by Lou and his son, Sam. But that's located on that same block as Oliva and as Pimonti Ravioli. It's quite a block there, just at the corner. All these classic places that are right here at this, almost at this corner. And we're providing people with the tastes of back home. On top of, of course, all of the dozens of food carts that were outside, streets were

28:34always crowded. And adding a score to this whole bustling chaotic scene were the organ grinders. Let us not forget the fact that some of the Italian immigrants arriving to make money created music to make a living, including organ grinders who would turn out a melody on a hand-cranked organ, usually accompanied by a small monkey dressed to the nines. And the monkeys were a key part of it because they could hop around. They could even scale walls and scale up to take money from the

29:04hands of people who might be listening to the music from their windows. Oh, yeah. So always an attention grabber here. And according to Tyler Anbinder in his book, Five Points, by 1880, nearly one in 20 Italians living in Five Points were organ grinders, which I really just... That's a lot of monkeys. And it was before a lot more Italians had arrived, obviously. But in the early days in 1880s, organ grinding was a key way to make money for people who arrived.

29:35They could even rent the organs, and you could rent monkeys or buy them. It was a whole thing. They'd eventually be outlawed by an Italian-American himself, Mayor LaGuardia, who would outlaw them in 1936, saying that radio and concerts had made organ grinders redundant. I don't know what concerts I've recently seen with monkeys darting about the stage, but it's probably unsanitary.

30:06Yes. I think he was also perhaps... I think he was also trying to discourage street begging, he said. And I think to overcome a certain cultural stereotype as well. But the 20th century would bring new aspects to Italian life, some of them that would make things quite difficult for the newly arriving Italian immigrants. And some of them speaking of these stereotypes that would linger in the Italian community for well into the end of the century. We'll get to that and many more colorful details after the commercial break.

30:41Okay, Greg. So we're back in this bustling, colorful, vibrant neighborhood, mostly along Mulberry Mott, Elizabeth Streets. I see the streets filled with people. I smell the food that they're eating and buying in the grocery stores. There are a wide variety of smells happening on Mulberry. Got it.

Columbus Park and labor activism

31:05A major change came to the neighborhood in the 1890s. Now, the Five Points neighborhood, those tenements had been there for decades. Well, thanks to the crusades of Jacob Rees and the city leaders at the time, the worst of those tenements were torn down. In 1897, a new park was built there. So they originally called it Mulberry Bend Park and would later become Columbus Park in 1911,

31:37partially due to the growing influence of the Italians that were here. So now this neighborhood, which had been so dense, now had an outdoor park. A little room to breathe. A little room, but there's still a lot of tenements around here and still so many people. But this park would be the site of cultural events in the neighborhood, some political events, and some union organizing. So, you know, by the first part of the 20th century, Italian workers would actually be on the forefront

32:08of a lot of labor activism and a lot of the unrest at the conditions of their workplaces. And they fought back for greater rights and bonding with other immigrant classes at this time as well. But this new prominence in the labor scene reinforced, you know, there was a certain fear of foreigners, of course, but a specific fear of these Italians and the types of philosophies they brought over.

32:40They're frightened of these foreign ways of thinking, political ways of thinking. I'm, of course, referring to, like, anarchism, socialism. As early as 1895, I read in the New York Times, quote, The general tone of the Italians in New York has grown higher as they have increased in numbers. Most of their fights and deeds of violence have been confined among themselves and have been due generally to old feuds or to quarrels over the gambling table.

33:10They admit, however, that among the immigrants, a number of restless political spirits came. Among these are anarchists and probably members of secret societies who, under the guise of patriotism, try and live upon their hardworking countrymen by political propaganda or intimidation, unquote.

The Black Hand and Petrosino

33:32Now, in the new century, some of this fear and some of these new forces would play out in a few terrifying ways. And the scary part is, is that initially it would be directed not out at other people in the city, but at other Italians in the neighborhood. Oh, so there were forces within the community who were targeting other Italian immigrants? In the form of the very scary shadowy group called the Black Hand,

34:02which would perpetrate extortion and blackmail plots that would be aimed directly at newcomers, from people from other Italian communities who were taking advantage of people's language barriers and their distrust of law enforcement, and taking advantage of these closed communities, knowing that people would not report this type of extortion. How were they intimidating business owners? Were they forcing them to give kickbacks?

34:33What were they doing? Families and proprietors of shops would receive letters demanding money, and people who did not pay up, their loved ones would be kidnapped, their shops would be dynamited. And so this is a really terrifying thing to think about. This really closed neighborhood with hundreds of people in the street would see a series of dynamite attacks and explosions between the years 1900 and 1920s.

35:03Just going through the newspapers at this time was kind of horrifying to see the number of explosions that would happen in the neighborhood. Just as a sampling here, 1905 on the corner of Grand and Mott Street, a butcher shop was blown up. 1907 at Elizabeth and Kenmar, two police officers were almost killed in a dynamite explosion. 1909 at Spring and Mott, an arson that had been perpetrated by the Black Hand killed nine people.

35:34So think of just all of these explosions in a tiny neighborhood, how dangerous that was, and how frightening it would have been for individuals living here. And were the police investigating these? Were they helpless here? Oh, no, no. Well, the press was, of course, outraged and angered and brought this up to the attention of the entire city. In 1908, I read, quote, Where and how are bombs manufactured? Who are the unnatural Americans engaged in the nefarious work of murder?

36:07And what is the motive that impels bomb throwing in this city of greatest personal liberty? The following year, in 1909, the New York Police Department's first Italian detective by the name of Joseph Petrosino... I believe we've talked about him before. Yes, in our cases of the NYPD show, he was at the forefront of cracking down on this Black Hand crime and was looked up to by the entire community as representing them and fighting back against this.

36:37Unfortunately, when Petrosino went on a secret mission to Sicily to investigate and unravel some of these connections, possible connections between the domestic crimes and those foreign organized crimes, he was assassinated while he was over there in March of 1909. That brought just terrible grief and outpouring of grief to this community. And a huge public funeral. Yes, at Old St. Pat's, right up the street. And, in fact, thousands lined the streets when they had the procession,

37:10and his body was actually displayed at a social club at Lafayette and Spring, so right in this neighborhood. Today, the square that is found at the end of Kenmar Street, right there at Lafayette and Kenmar, is named after him. It's Petrosino Square. In 1913, the New York Department of Combustibles, which I can't believe... Wait, that's a department? There were so many bombs that they had a whole department of called... Of combustibles. Department of Combustibles claimed that there were 125 bomb explosions in the city just that year.

37:43Interestingly enough, by 1920, however, the black hand extortions had kind of died out. You had better police techniques, and the community was a little less closed, and so a little bit more open to reporting these crimes. And I also read something interesting that a change in the law involving the postal service actually affected things, because there was a law criminalizing threatening material in the mail, meaning that these black handers needed to deliver notes instead of mailing them,

38:16and so that's a little less successful. So that dies out as an effective extortion plot. Because they had been extorting uniquely through the mail? Mostly of it was, like, just letters through the mail, yeah.

Prohibition and mob history

38:31Mm-hmm.

Prohibition and mob history

38:32Well, there's a new problem, though, by 1920, though. I think you know where I'm going with this. Organized crime and the rise of the mafia in the United States. Very serious problem, the mob, and much of their operations would be here in the area of Little Italy. Of course, prohibition actually empowers organized crime and empowers a whole network, a whole underworld here. And there would be, you know, foreign influences that would take advantage of that.

39:02And so it would be an incredibly sophisticated organization by the 1920s. Virtually every address, this is extraordinary, virtually every address up and down a long Mulberry Street and the side streets have been the site of some sort of, like, the home of a famous mobster, or, like, a place where he hung out, or a place where he died. Mm-hmm. Up and down these streets. I mean, it's extraordinary how dense this area is with these types of stories.

39:34Wow, so it's like mob roulette. Let's just throw out an address here. How about Mulberry and Kenmar? Well, that's funny you say that, actually. Did you read my notes? Because, actually, to me, that's a very fascinating corner in the history. Because in the early days of prohibition, this corner, Mulberry and Kenmar, was called the Bootlegger's Curb Exchange. So this is, like, in the early days where we were trying to figure out what they can do and what they can't do on the streets.

40:05They would have, like, speakeasy owners and illicit alcohol distributors that would gather on these corners to buy cases of rum and beer off of trucks. I mean, what makes this so almost... Right in the street. Right in front of... Right in the street. Pretty close to police headquarters. Like, a block from police headquarters. Like, two blocks from police headquarters. It's extraordinary, the audacity here. Let's go down a little. On 121 Mulberry Street was one of the many places where mobsters would gather to discuss illicit liquor sales.

40:42In 1922, cops raided this address at 121 and found thousands upon thousands of liquor bottles and barrels of rum. Today, that is the charming northern Italian restaurant, Il Cortile. In fact, many of these Italian restaurants have a few stories. And I would recommend, if you go to one of these restaurants, ask an owner, ask one of the waiters. I'm sure they all have wonderful tales. So, these stories could go on and on, I'm sure, throughout Prohibition.

41:13Did it pretty much die off? I don't think it dies off after Prohibition. Oh, no, no, no. Absolutely not. I mean, rumors of connections to the mob still exist in this neighborhood today. But it was really thriving in the 70s and 80s. And I wanted to bring up one more example from here. We're breaking the timeline a little bit. But I think it's very important. At 132 Mulberry is a restaurant called Umberto's Clam House. Right. They do have the clams. They're good there. That is their current location.

41:45But when they first opened in 1972, they were at 129 Mulberry. Today, that is the restaurant at Dagenero's. This was originally owned, this restaurant, by the father of a mobster nicknamed Matty the Horse. We've mentioned Matty the Horse on a podcast. Do you remember that name? In the 1960s, he was part of a big extortion racket over in the West Village in the Gay Bars. Oh, in the Stonewall show.

42:15Yes. In fact, one of the bars that he sort of had a racket over was Stonewall. Well, in 1972, at Umberto's Clam House here on the corner, on April 7th, 1972, the gangster Joe Gallo was assassinated here in the restaurant in a hail of bullets. I mean, it is about as Francis Ford Coppola as you can possibly imagine, actually. And if you look at some of these old photographs, it looks quite striking, needless to say.

42:47All right. Well, on that grim note, why don't we talk about something a little more festive? In fact, one of the things that draws thousands and thousands of tourists and locals to Little Italy every year is the Feast of San Gennaro, an 11-day, currently, 11-day festival that packs Mulberry Street all the way from Houston down to Canal. So it does go right through that area called Nolita. To their consternation, I think, right, recently.

43:19In fact, some of the fancy pants merchants of Nolita have tried to force them to start it outside of their neighborhood because they didn't want the, quote, greasy hands of its patrons getting all over their fancy clothing. Well, I mean, there's a lot of great food. There's a lot of people from outside of the city who come in. And, you know, those are like some upscale retailers. So, I mean, it's an interesting modern class. They didn't have to deal with it. They moved into that neighborhood.

San Gennaro and neighborhood decline

43:46Oh, no. Hello. So, the San Gennaro Festival started in September of 1926 as a one-day festival to celebrate the patron saint of Naples, San Gennaro. His feast day is September 19th. And so they celebrated on that date in 1926 to celebrate the safe arrival of a boatload of immigrants into New York City from Naples. The highlight of this event is the Grand Procession, which occurs on the last Saturday of the feast

44:17and follows a mass at the Church of the Most Precious Blood, which is located at 109 Mulberry Street. So, San Gennaro Festival would originate from here and would be an outdoor festival, which is a very southern Italian thing to do things and sort of leave these outside boisterous places. We really haven't – we didn't even touch on religion because, well, we've talked about a lot of other things and we have a short show. But the importance of religion needs to be stated here as well in the lives of the immigrants who were arriving.

44:49I mean, many of those first immigrants being young men who were arriving here weren't necessarily attending church so often to the consternation of the city's other Catholics at the time, who were basically the Irish population, who couldn't believe that these Italian immigrants were not attending church as they should be. And when they were, they weren't made to feel very welcome. They had to take seats downstairs in the basement. Yeah, they often had to meet in the basement of these places. There was a language barrier happening here as well because most of them didn't speak English.

45:23So, they weren't really communicating well. The mass was difficult, etc. So, they were often in the basement and – which was just a total slap in the face. So, they took many of their celebrations to the streets, which was a very southern Italian way to celebrate. And there are actually other Italian religious festivals in New York City that usually take place outside. But this one is the most prominent, at least in this neighborhood. Today's celebration is also kind of a – it's a riot of smells and sights.

45:57There are games. There are all kinds of food stands. A lot of sausage vendors. A lot of fried cheese. A lot of fried everything, really. So, how do we get to today's little Italy from this authentic old neighborhood that was rich in southern Italian culture to what I would describe maybe as a little ship-in-a-bottle type Disney-esque tourist-focused shadow of its former self?

46:28So, there's a lot of changes that happen in the mid-20th century that get us here. One of them is that these second- and third-generation Italian-Americans are having great successes in assimilating, finally, into American life. Of course, large-scale, everything from, like, Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia to entertainers like Tony Bennett to small-scale here where family members are leaving to have their own life and living in other places and are prone to scattering throughout the city.

46:59Because now you can communicate better, obviously. But this was also the point of the immigrants who were heading over, like, for the other immigrant populations as well, was to pass through this neighborhood to sort of land on their feet and be able to make some money so that they'd be able to succeed and move out to the suburbs and buy a house. Yeah, I mean, in a sense, Little Italy was never really meant to be a destination. A permanent. Right, for a lot of people. There's also the rise of populations of the outer boroughs after the war, after World War II, and that, of course, swelled these new Italian neighborhoods, many of them which are intact today, places like Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, Bensonhurst, and Ozone Park.

47:45In fact, Staten Island has the highest percentage of Italian-Americans in the United States. You know, people wanted, after living in this neighborhood that was so cramped, people wanted front yards. They wanted to be able to have actual houses. They didn't want to live on top of each other, you know? So the dwindling Italian population in Little Italy could be basically a victim of its own success. In 1968, with the change in U.S. immigration quota policies, this would be a huge boon to the neighboring Chinatown, as thousands of new Chinese immigrants would then come over in the 1970s, and Chinatown began taking over other blocks that had once been all Italian.

48:30And many of these Chinese were buying or renting spaces from the Italians, who were happy to get rid of the spaces. A quote from Ernest Lepore, who owns Ferrara, told the New York Times in 2011, quote, When the Italians made money they moved to Queens and New Jersey, they sold to the Chinese, who are now selling to the Vietnamese and Malaysians. Well, according to the last census, there are no Italian-born residents that live in the area of Little Italy.

49:01Now, in 2010, the Chinatown and Little Italy Historic District was created, and it's almost the entire lengths of the streets of Mulberry, Mott, and Elizabeth Street, and many other streets. And you know what? That historic district is needed because there is one other threatening force to this neighborhood, and that is, of course, the rise of gentrification. And let us go back to this neighborhood of Nolita one more time, this rebranded area of North Little Italy, one of the most historical and important areas to immigrant life in New York City.

49:38Today, it is overrun by these, you know, these shops. Great bookstore over there. I mean, I'm not... We just ran into each other. Yeah, I know. I'm not dissing Nolita, necessarily. It's just that, you know, and this kind of forces, this gentrification that's happening, is happening all over the city. And it seems to have gelled in a certain fashion here in the former Italian district of Lower Manhattan. Although I have to say, when I think about restaurants that I tend to go to, that you and I have dined in, places where we've had wine and met with friends, we do frequent places in Nolita much more frequently than we frequent places on Mulberry Street.

50:24But it is, it does make you pause and you want to take a step back and realize, is this just going to happen? And is this little district of Little Italy going to become tinier and tinier? This area has survived a lot of very broad elimination plans in the past. Everything from Robert Moses' Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have plowed through Broom Street and would have eradicated pretty much most of this neighborhood. Survived that. In 1970s, it survived mob control and the coercion that ran amok during this period.

50:59It was in this time when the city for the very first time created this new zoning laws, these special zones where construction of new buildings had to conform to a certain size and shape of the present structure. So essentially, if you look, there are a lot of like skyscrapers and it's very specially zoned. Now at this historic district, we will not see some like lunatic glass skyscraper. And area businesses today focus on the specific nostalgia of what people collectively believe old Italian New York used to be, right?

51:36So you have to look at the neighborhood today and think, well, how is it going to survive going forward into the future? What's it going to look like in 10 years? Well, hopefully many of these stores and restaurants will still be around. When I think about the food shops that are still there on Grand Street and that we can still support, like DiPaolo's, like Piemonte Ravioli. These are places, you know, I still like picking up some ravioli for a dinner party at Piemonte because it's made maybe not in the back. Maybe it's often in Queens at their warehouse.

52:08But it's still it's still a family run business. It's great to still be able to support these stores, these families and this neighborhood's history. And then perhaps afterwards, stop over at Ferrara for a little late night cappuccino and and biscotti. That's what we did on Friday. It was delicious. And a lot of sugar late night. But there's a lot of sugar to be had there. It's delicious. Visit our website, BoweryBoysHistory.com for some images of the neighborhoods that we've featured on the past three episodes.

52:43You can find those there. And, of course, information about all of the episodes of the Bowery Boys podcast. That is BoweryBoysHistory.com. And you can find us on all sorts of social media, including Instagram, Facebook and Threads. And YouTube. YouTube, you can actually listen and watch this with new footage that Greg was out recording in the streets. Oh, yes. It was a good excuse, actually, to go walk and stroll very slowly and look up in these neighborhoods.

53:13So I really had a good time doing it. You don't want it to be distracting. Well, you don't want to zip past some of this beautiful architecture, right? I mean, also, you could get hit by a car or a bus. That's true. I have to walk very slowly. Or a throng of tourists. Mm-hmm. But head over to YouTube and search for Bowery Boys podcast. We would love for you to follow us there and to enjoy the show there. We would also love for you to follow us in the streets of New York. Do you like that one? Mm-hmm. Over at BoweryBoysWalks.com. We just have so much fun.

53:44We have professional tour guides who lead small walking tours in historic neighborhoods all over the city, including all around Lower Manhattan. In fact, Greg, we have a Chinatown food history tour that is a lot of fun and just adjacent to, if not butting up against, as we have just heard, Little Italy. That is a very popular and very tasty tour. Also, we have tours all over the city, including in Grand Central and, of course, the Gilded Age mansions of Fifth Avenue.

54:15You can join a public tour or you can book a private tour for your business, family, or group of friends. Just join the fun and walk through time with us over at BoweryBoysWalks.com. This episode was re-edited and remastered by Kieran Gannon, as were the other two episodes in this miniseries. Thank you, Kieran. So thank you very much for listening. Have a great New York week, whether you live here or not. See you real soon.