The Italians of New York

By Maurizio Molinari

An overview of generations of Italians in the Big Apple, weaving together numerous stories from different epochs and different backgrounds.

“If you want to learn something about Italian creativity, come to New York. Here, you will find the pride of flying the Italian colors at the Fifth Avenue Columbus Day Parade, the American patriotism of those who perished at Ground Zero, the courage of firefighters and marines on the frontline of the war against terrorism, the babel of dialects at the Arthur Avenue market, portrayals of social change in the writings of Gay Talese, stories of successful business ventures on the TV shows of Maria Bartiromo and Charles Gasparino, political passion in the battles of Mario Cuomo and Rudy Giuliani, creative imagination in the works of Gaetano Pesce, Renzo Piano and Matteo Pericoli, and provocation in the attire of Lady Gaga . . . The Midtown top managers, who arrived in the past twenty years, operate in the XXI century, while on Fresh Pond Road in Ridgewood the panelle are still prepared according to the Sicilian recipes transmitted from one generation to the next.” —From the Introduction

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781955835275

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The Italians of New York

The Italians of New York

Maurizio Molinari

Translated by Louise Hipwell

Washington, DC

English edition, © 2012 New Academia Publishing

Translated from Gli Italiani di New York, © 2011, Gius. Laterza & Figli

Translator, Louise Hipwell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012944759

ISBN 978-0-9855698-0-8 paperback (alk. paper)

All photos by the author if not otherwise indicated.

To Eli, Chana, Dan, Naomi and their grandparents

Contents

Introduction

The People

The heroes of Ground Zero – Police Plaza – Admirals and generals – The judge of Madison Square – The defenders of Arthur Avenue – The panelle of Ridgewood – Spaghetti Park – Fortunato Bros in Greenpoint – Sunset Park, pizza wars – Toyland in Dyker Heights – Little Italy besieged by assimilation – West Village, target-shooting Bin Laden – John’s, Lucky Luciano’s East Village – 43rd Street, the American Italians of the Calandra Institute – Francesca, the life of undocumented immigrants – Verdi Square, Upper West Side – East Harlem, in Rao’s world – Staten Island, from Jesus to Mazzini

The Faith

The Vatican flag on St. Patrick’s – Brooklyn, the faithful and the anticlerical – Bensonhurst, the frontier priest – In the basement of Bleecker Street – Padre Pio Way, Williamsburg – The dollars of San Gennaro – The missionary of Flushing – Yeshiva University

Italy

Italian flags on Fifth Avenue – In the trenches against prejudice – Neglected for a century – Mulberry Street doesn’t vote – Food is more important than language – The Baroness of NYU – On the desks of Rutgers University – The UN Veteran – At the gate with Benigni and Manfredi

Politics

Passion and independence – The reformers of Tammany Hall – From Koch to Bloomberg – Cuomo and Giuliani – Referendum on identity

Business

Maria Money Honey – The Street-fighter generation – Italy vanished from Wall Street – The mistakes of Made in Italy – Global managers – High finance and old books – Columbia Business School – The entrepreneur who fled Italy – The lawyer who knew Sindona – Where Anna Wintour reigns – The oil man from Third Avenue – Berlusconi, Sophia Loren, and 434 ships – The research cashier – Curing is a team job – Theoretical physics between Lenin and Goldman Sachs – Lidia’s four stars – The food merchant

The Arts

The writer from Ocean City – The bull of Manhattan – The recipe for an Oscar – On the stage – A star in the Oak Room – The Broadway dancers – The smallest theater in the world – The African-Italian director – Carnegie Hall, in search of new voices – The architect of the New York Times – The designer of unique pieces – Reinventing Picasso – A pencil for the skyline – The street dog of Solita – The models’ guru – The paparazzo from Harlem – Yogi the Great

Maps of Places

Manhattan – Bronx and Queens – Brooklyn and Staten Island

Lists of Places and Names

Places of Origin of the Italians of New York – List of Names

Introduction

If you want to learn something about Italian creativity, come to New York. Here you’ll find Italian pride at the Fifth Avenue Columbus Day Parade, the American patriotism of those who lost their lives at Ground Zero, the courage of firefighters and marines on the frontlines of the war against terrorism, a babel of dialects at the Arthur Avenue market, portrayals of social change in the writings of Gay Talese, stories of successful business ventures on the TV shows of Maria Bartiromo and Charles Gasparino, political passion in the battles of Mario Cuomo and Rudy Giuliani, creative imagination in the works of Gaetano Pesce, Renzo Piano and Matteo Pericoli, and provocation in the attire of Lady Gaga. You’ll find the enthusiasm of the younger generations on the stages of Broadway, on the trading floors of Wall Street, in the classrooms of the Columbia University Business School, and also among the illegal immigrants who live precariously, surviving with the help of charitable priests and missionaries who run frontier churches, in those places where the mafia has not yet been defeated.

New York melds and amasses Italian identities from both the past and the present; not all of the more than 3.3 million Italians who live in New York share the same background and cultural perspectives. The top managers of the Midtown banks who arrived in the last twenty years are oriented towards XXI century life whilst, on Fresh Pond Road in Ridgewood, Sicilian style panelle are made following recipes that have been passed down for generations. In Larry Gagosian’s gallery, a temple of contemporary art on the very exclusive Madison Avenue, a forty year old Turinese woman works tirelessly to reinvent Pablo Picasso. In the laboratories of New York University, it is a female Italian doctor who is at the fore in the fight against cancer. In the classrooms of Rutgers University, twenty year old grandchildren and great grandchildren of immigrants who came through Ellis Island dedicate themselves to their textbooks to learn the language of Dante that wasn’t taught to them at home.

What sets the Italians of New York apart is the energy with which they debate their Italian identity. An eighty year old reporter for America Oggi talks about the Italian Americans who meet up at countless religious holiday celebrations, clubs and associations. Each one of them defines him/herself in reference to a specific geographical place of origin, not a region but a city, town, village or even small suburban area. Researchers at the Calandra Institute prefer the term American-Italians because the characteristics they have acquired in their new homeland prevail over the heritage of the Old Country. On Mulberry Street, the last street of Little Italy on the Lower East Side, the use of the term Italians has declined and has been replaced with terms such as Calabrian, Sicilian, Neapolitan, and Apulian. US Navy Admiral Edmund Giambastiani considers himself an American of Italian descent as do police officers, firefighters and soldiers who safeguard national security. Top pharmaceutical manager Lamberto Andreotti and UN veteran Giandomenico Picco speak of having a global identity with an Italian component. An ex-paparazzo who moved to Harlem from Rome points to the photographs on the wall of his restaurant, the sculptor Arturo Di Modica cites the freedom to create what comes naturally to me without having to submit to the diktat of the galleries, for Lady Gaga it suffices to recall her grandfather.

It all culminates in a universe of voices and values where contradictions abound. In some families, parents forbid their children to see The Godfather because they consider it an expression of a very dangerous anti-Italian prejudice. This sentiment is in tune with the complaints expressed by the resolute activists of the NIAF (National Italian American Foundation) and the Italian Citizens Foundation against the TV series The Sopranos and the reality TV show Jersey Shore which are accused of presenting an image of mobsters and tacky youths. For Anthony J. Tamburri, the director of the Calandra Institute, Jersey Shore, instead, helps to better understand what is occurring within the American working class and the Americanist Franco Zerlenga goes even further, explaining that one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Italians of New York is that they don’t lament their lot like others do. In the Bronx there are vendors who sell car tags displaying the words Cosa Nostra. In the classrooms at Rutgers University there are people who willing to fight anyone who flings the insult Mafioso at a third generation Italian, with their bare hands. As for politics, the elections for governor in New York put the spotlight on the duel between the Democrat Andrew Cuomo and the Republican Carl Paladino. As a result of their very different experiences of integration, Cuomo emphasized his complete integration into the American way and Paladino, instead, exalted his ethnic background. Beyond this, in some churches in Brooklyn mass is said in Italian for the older generations and in English for the younger church-goers. But it could be said perhaps that food is the common ground that best summarizes the Italian cultural mosaic. Thousands of restaurants, supermarkets, delis, butchers, bakeries, pizzerias, bars, coffeehouses and stands offer dishes and foods that describe the parabola of flavors that echo those of the immigrants themselves. It all began with the flavors of the original Italian dishes which were then modified by the impact of the ingredients that were actually accessible. Little by little restaurants went back to serving authentic Italian cuisine, or as in the case of Del Posto, the only Italian restaurant that can boast four stars from the New York Times, they moved a step further to include the best of American products and flavors.

From the church-goers on Saint Padre Pio Way in Williamsburg, to the customers at the Festa di San Gennaro in Little Italy, to the patrons of the rooftop bars of Manhattan, there is always an element that distinguishes the Italians of the Big Apple: the belief that if you give it your all, anything is possible. These days, the twenty year olds coming to study at the best universities or choosing to face the risks of life as illegal immigrants share an expression with the immigrants of the past: we are hardworking people.

* * *

These pages are a real life snapshot of the Italians of New York that welcomes any traveler who arrives in 2011. The journey through faith, politics, people, the relationship with Italy, businesses and artistic endeavors, unravels describing the characters and the places that belong to them. We are delving into a world that, even though it is 6916 km from the Old Country, it belongs to us. It is part of every Italian, no matter where he/she is born or lives. It therefore challenges us because the stories that are told raise questions that Italy must confront. In a club in Brooklyn that takes its name from Partanna in Sicily, a group of patrons, all over age 60, say they are saddened every time they hear about quarrels between national political leaders on Italian TV news because they would like to see a united Italy where there are shared interests and respect for state institutions. In Bensonhurst, Father Ronald Marino speaks about the young Italians who have chosen to live as illegal immigrants, risking deportation just to stay in America. In Flushing, the missionary Al Barozzi believes that the ministry of women is the way to revitalize the church, whilst the Bishop of Brooklyn and Queens Nicholas DiMarzio speaks of anticlerical believers. The top manager of an important financial company on Madison Avenue reproaches the big Italian banks for having abandoned Wall Street, leaving the playing field open to competing German and French banks. A young entrepreneur in the Luxury Goods sector attributes the lack of Italian investments in America to a business culture that favors family members over managers and undervalues attention to the customer. A professor of Cinema at New York University blames the difficulties we have with winning Oscars on the structural weaknesses of our cinema. As for why Italy doesn’t attract American investments? The response of many voices on the topic of the economy is unambiguous: there is no certainty in the laws, labor laws penalize businesses and the divide between North and South is such that it makes development projects on a national scale very challenging. We must also mention the Italian passport holders who don’t take advantage of the right to vote that is guaranteed to residents abroad and who instead express a lack of confidence in a nation whose political system is too chaotic. Set on this backdrop of questions that beg answers, the two most frequent topics that come up in the reflections of those interviewed are: memory and language. Memory concerns the fact that during a period that lasted roughly a century, from 1870 to the end of the Seventies, Italy turned its back on millions of emigrant families and this was a factor that contributed to creating a rift filled with resentment, misunderstandings and the need to really know one another that must still mended. Language can be the key to putting things right but to do this, second, third and fourth generation immigrants must learn the language that wasn’t taught to them at home because in their families dialect was often spoken. An enormous commitment must be made to teaching Italian in American schools.

* * *

As this is a snapshot of a vibrant and vivacious present-day community, difficult choices were inevitable and the selection of examples was guided by the desire to highlight novel elements. I know that if I were to write this book again, considering the pace at which New York changes, the story would probably be quite different. What comes out of this endeavor is a portrait of the largest Italian city in the United States: 3,372,512 residents who represent 16% of the 21.2 million inhabitants of the Greater New York area, or, in other words, the first ethno-linguistic group in the urban area that includes New York, Northern New Jersey and Long Island, which illustrates the sacrifices, challenges and successes of the more than 15.6 million Americans (the fifth largest national ethnic group) who in the year 2000 census wrote that they are originally from our country.

This book is the product of the encouragement of my editor who after the publication of the Jews of New York suggested I explore the Italian soul of the Big Apple, of the choice of La Stampa to have me as a correspondent in the USA and of three years of interviews, meetings with the people cited and visits to the places indicated. It was all made possible by the constant support of a small team of people whose diverse sense of Italianness reflects the reality of the city. I thank them for their time, passion and resources. Vincenzo Pascale, an Italianist at Rutgers University supported me in multiple ways, setting his wealth of valuable historical and human knowledge at my disposal. This complemented the very intimate familiarity with the territory of the indefatigable Rita Bonura and Antonio Barbera. The help of the young diplomats Maurizio Antonini and Giuseppe Favilli as well as the veterans of the Columbia University Business School Marco Magnani and Carlo Mantica was indispensable as I examined one of the capitals of the business community. A particular acknowledgement goes to Enzo Viscusi, the New Yorker on whom Enrico Mattei chanced a bet, for helping me overcome the most difficult obstacles. But without my wife Micol, a constant source of discerning curiosity about the city in which we reside, this book would never have been written.

Maurizio Molinari

The Italians of New York

The Italians of New York

Note

Most of the accounts cited in this volume were documented by the author during personal interviews and conversations. In all other cases sources have been precisely indicated.

The People

The heroes of Ground Zero

The attack against America on September 11th 2011 left 2976 victims. 2752 of the victims perished at Ground Zero and 302 of them had Italian last names. Among these names were Esposito (4), Mauro (4), Giordano (3), Marino (3), Virgilio (2) and also others such as Abate, Acquaviva, Amato, Angelini, Benedetti, Calcagno, Cannizzaro, Colasanti, Difazio, Firoi, Galla, Ingrassia, Peroncino, Pugliese, Ragusa, Vitale and many many more. We must also add the Italian Americans with American last names to this list. After white Americans and Hispanics, Italians were the ethnic group that suffered the most losses during the assault on America by Bin Laden’s 19 kamikaze terrorists aboard four commercial planes turned rudimental missiles. Among the 302 Italian victims left beneath the Twin Towers was Peter Ganci, the highest ranking firefighter and 33 years veteran of the New York Fire Department. That morning, at the age of 54, he was on the seventh floor of Fire Department headquarters in Brooklyn. At 8:46, from the window of his office, he saw American Airlines Flight 11 crash into the North Tower and he instinctively turned to Dan Nigro, chief of operations and said: Look, an airplane just hit the World Trade Center. A few minutes later they were both on board a speeding car whisking them over the Brooklyn Bridge and bringing them close to the Towers. They decided to drive around the Towers looking up to establish what the real damage was. The most heavily damaged part of the North Tower was on its northern side where the impact occurred. Ganci set up a command post at the base of the South Tower and from there he gave orders by radio to the firefighters entering the North Tower. At 9:03 AM, the second blast occurred. United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower. Ganci and Nigro were covered in dust, the radio transmitters were barely working, they got separated. Chief Ganci, as everybody called him, knew that the South Tower was in worse condition than the North Tower. He started to direct traffic in front of World Trade Center 1 in an effort to divert as many people away as possible. At 9:59 AM the South Tower collapsed and he was almost buried, but when the dust settled he managed to get out with his team and get back to work. He told his men to go north while he did the opposite and went back south to the site of the collapse to create a command post from where he could find the survivors. The reports of the last minutes of his life describe him as heading right back into the chaos. At 10:28 AM the North Tower collapsed and Chief Ganci died after having contributed to, along with his firefighters, the rescue of almost twenty thousand people. 343 firefighters lost their lives at Ground Zero, at least 64 of them came from Italian families. Among the survivors was Daniel Tardio, Capitan of Engine 7 out of Duane Street, who got to the base of the North Tower with his men where he saw people jumping to their deaths. He wasn’t able to sleep for the next three days.

There were thousands of people inside the Towers at the time of the impact and among them was Lucio Caputo, president of the Italian Wine and Food Institute. As on every other day he arrived at his office on the 78th floor of Tower 1 (North) at 8:00, he went up to the 107th floor to have breakfast at Club Windows on the World, and then came back down at 8:30. He was on a call to Italy when a blast caused him to drop the telephone receiver. The antique mirror that covered the whole wall in front of him moved a meter, the power went out, doors slammed, sirens screeched, so much dust fell from the ceiling that his green couch turned white. He thought it must have been a bomb just like in 1993. He tried to make a phone call but the lines were down. He went out into the corridor enveloped in a thick fog. There were pieces of marble on the ground, people crying and screaming. He learned of the impact of the plane. He waited for instructions from the Tower loudspeakers as always happened during a drill but no announcements came. He grabbed a torch, a bottle of water and a wet towel and began to run down the stairs. He had 78 floors in front of him. On the 40th floor he met firefighters coming towards him weighted down by masks, tubes and protective gear. He asked what happened? and the reply was I don’t know. He ran into a naked woman, her skin burned away, and into a blind man accompanied by his dog. All this occurred in a surreal stillness. On the way down the stairs there was fair play, no pushing, everybody let the injured get by. After an hour he got to the 23rd floor where two people in plain clothes pushed everyone into an air-conditioned room. Caputo, however, fearing the worst, in search of the emergency stairs he ran to the hall which was now unrecognizable strewn with broken glass, debris, marble and broken light fixtures, countless sheets of paper were drifting in the air. He got out and ran towards Broadway in time before the wave of smoke containing objects and human remains erupted after the collapse. It’s a memory that I will take with me for the rest of my life, he said, considering himself lucky. Also among the survivors was Andrea Fiano, a correspondent for Milano Finanza with an office inside the Dow Jones headquarters: the ashes of human remains reminded him of what his father, a survivor of Auschwitz, had endured more than 50 years earlier.

In the days after the collapse the dead were counted. Among the dead there were 58 officers of the Police Department and the Port Authority and 9 of them had Italian last names: Amoroso, Cirri, D’Allara, Infante, Langone, Mazza, Morrone, Pezzulo and Vigiano. At each funeral the whole police department gathered. Sergeant Giovanni Porcelli from Raito in Campania, president of the Columbia Association, was there to lend a hand to the families of the victims. He brought the New York police officers of Italian descent together in the name of Joseph Petrosino whose brother lost a brother-in-law, a firefighter at Ground Zero. On September 11 there were many Italian victims and the impact on their families was indeed great, the deaths brought suffering, financial disputes and the loss of homes. The impact of the tragedy continues still today Porcelli explains, lingering on the fact that groups of Italian Carabinieri and Police officers offered to help, but no one from the Italian government did. The gesture of solidarity most profoundly felt by the officers of the Colombia Association was the initiative of their Californian colleagues and compatriots on Columbus Day that was celebrated about one month after the collapse of the Towers. That year the New York Police Officers were not able to march along Fifth Avenue in the customary parade that celebrates Italian heritage, and instead their banner was raised during the parade that took place in San Francisco.

In the case of the Fire Department, the tally of victims was so great that the new mayor Michael Bloomberg decided on January ¹st 2002 to completely reshuffle it. The task fell to Nicholas Scoppetta, born in 1932, father from Amalfi and mother from Naples, who grew up in an orphanage in New York and became the Assistant District Attorney. He remembers his first days as Fire Commissioner as follows: 343 victims and only a few bodies found, there were funerals without remains, there was nothing inside the coffins, we supported each other like a big family, it was terrible, we had to rebuild everything. As a result, many of the survivors chose retirement, leaving their posts to the new recruits for whom Scoppetta revised duties and updated technology to confront every eventuality, even the most terrible. Scoppetta too was at Ground Zero on Settember 11: the firefighters were itching to get their assignments, in every base there were overlapping shifts, everyone we called answered, they all came, nobody hung back and many died because of it, like Chief Ganci.

September 11 continues to kill. 33 year old Joseph Graffagnino from Brooklyn, died on August 23rd 2007 along with 55 year old Robert Beddia from Staten Island. Almost six years after the attacks, they died in a fire that engulfed the Deutsche Bank. The bank was still standing but was about to be demolished after the necessary care to uncover any human remains had been taken. John Botte, instead, risked death. He was the officer to whom Commander Bernard Kerik delegated the task of taking thousands of photographs of what remained of the Towers. He worked tirelessly around the smoking rubble from September 12 until December 31 2001, inhaling toxic fumes that destroyed his lungs. I felt like I was walking in hell, I was inhaling vapors that consumed me and the air was heavy, dense with ash, but I went to the very depths to document what had happened, he remembers showing a pride that has not been attenuated by his serious disease. In remembrance of the victims and heroes of Ground Zero both Italian and of Italian descent there is a stone plaque at the entrance to the Consulate on Park Avenue, positioned so that it can be seen by all who enter.

Police Plaza

The upturned red brick pyramid, 12 floors high, at number 1 Police Plaza, the headquarters of the New York Police Department, where George Grasso lived until 2009 when he served as the First Deputy Commissioner of the Department or Officer No. 2 of the city. New Yorkers know his name because after September 11 the head of police, Ray Kelly, assigned him the coordination of activities with the FBI. This meant having access to the keys of city-wide security beginning with the futuristic mega computers of the Real Time Crime Center on the eighth floor of Headquarters. In May of 2010 these computers led to the identification, within 53 hours, of the Pakistani-American terrorist Faisal Shahzad who had left a car bomb in front of the Miskoff Theatre in Times Square with the intent of massacring a group of children. George Grasso comes from a family originally from Basilicata and his Italian identity is linked especially to his grandfather Angelo born in 1897 on the outskirts of Melfi, who after having seen the horrors of World War 1 combat in the Alps, decided to leave everything behind to go to America. After two weeks at sea, he arrived at Ellis Island on March 16 1921 with 20 dollars in his pocket. He told the officials that interrogated him that he was neither a criminal nor a polygamist and when they allowed him to disembark he went to find a stepsister who lived at 2355 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn where he settled down. The first thing he did was search for a wife from Basilicata who shared his values. Maria Fabrizio was the one who impressed him. She was 9 years younger than him and he saw her on the street carrying a large bag of garbage and from that point he decided that a woman with such physical strength was the one for him. They married in 1922, had six children – four boys and two girls – and Angelo worked first as a brick-maker and then became a chef. He had a passion for wine and, just like they did in Melfi, he started to make wine, red wine, in the basement of his home on Rockaway Avenue. The aroma permeated the building, day and night. He was proud of it. He taught his children the value of loyalty, hard work and an appreciation for good food. He never went to a restaurant because he was convinced that better food was prepared at home. When his children grew up, got married and grandchildren were born, it was his red wine as well as his ravioli and linguine that became the backbone of family cohesion. His son George, father of the First Deputy Commissioner also named George, was a printer who came home every day at 5:00 PM on the dot to share a meal with his wife and children, all gathered around the table. For the young George the most anticipated moment of the week was