By John B. Manbeck
A Brooklyn historian
Special to the Brooklyn Eagle
Now we all know that Chris Columbus, working for the Spanish royalty, wasn’t the Italian navigator to chance upon New York. Rather it was Giovanni da Verrazzano, working for the French king, in 1524. But we just celebrated Columbus Day so that makes him more significant. It’s a national holiday. There is a Verrazano-Narrows Bridge — note the spelling variation — but no holiday.
Bit by bit, over the centuries, Italians drifted over here, with Lorenzo da Ponte disembarking here in 1805 to become the first professor of Italian language and literature at Columbia College. Even Giuseppe Garibaldi, the revolutionary, lived here for a while. By 1880, about 20,000 Italians lived in New York City, according to The Encyclopedia of New York City. Then, because of rural poverty, over a million immigrants landed here within the subsequent 30 years.
Largely, they settled in Greenwich Village and the outskirts of the Lower East Side. In Brooklyn, they moved into Williamsburg, Greenpoint and South Brooklyn — today’s Gowanus and Red Hook. So I decided to thumb through pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to see how this phenomenon was reported.
In the issue of Feb. 20, 1916, a staff columnist had profiled Italian enclaves in Vinegar Hill, then called Lower Adams Street, and in “Pigtown” in Crown Heights. Photographs of a street scene were labeled, “A replica of a Calabrian Village on the site of the old [Kings County] penitentiary.” He indicated over 100,000 Italians lived in New York then.
The tone of the writing bordered on denigrating, with stereotypical illustrations. On one hand the writer noted that “Italians make excellent citizens” — they are “not a problem but a poem” — then suggested the mafia with references to the Black Hand. Trends from the old country are disappearing, he wrote.
That date, 1916, might be significant, too. America was a year from entering The Great War, as World War I was known. The fighting in Europe started in 1914 and Italy sided with the Allies. So the Eagle portrait may have been political propaganda.
The émigrés came from Milan and Tuscany in the north as well as Calabria, Sicily and Naples in the south. In Brooklyn, they settled along Hamilton Avenue in New Utrecht (Bensonhurst today) as well as East New York and Brownsville to the east. Many worked in mom-and-pop stores but others found lucrative pay on the waterfront and in constructing the privately owned railroads that preceded the subway system.
Although condescending, the writer observed that many Italians had entered politics and the law. No reference was made to conflicts the Italians had with the Irish whom they had replaced on the lowest rung of the social ladder.
Unrelated articles in other Eagle issues cited raiding of establishments and homes by Prohibition agents who confiscated wine. Many had Italian names. But the topic of Prohibition will be addressed here in future columns. Regardless, the impact of Italian-Americans on the lives of Brooklynites has been significant. Now all we need is a holiday to celebrate Verrazzano’s discovery of New York’s harbor.
© 2011 John B. Manbeck
