Just the other day when
my grandparents picked me up in the city, I suggested that we venture to
Little Italy to find some fine Italian dining. My grandfather’s response
was somewhat shocking. “Little Italy is for tourists, not real Italians.
You want some good Italian food, you come home and grandma will show you
real Italian, right Terry?” It was then that I began to think about
the function of those few blocks that run down Mulberry St. Does
Little Italy really have any true significance to Italian culture or is
it simply another consumer tourist trap? Can the true essence of
Italy be accurately represented in a crowded street filled with green,
white, & red decorated souvenirs, gangster movie memorabilia, and small
cafes? Questions like these led me on a personal search for cultural
identity within the context of Little Italy and the way in which it occupies
public space. It is my intent to explore the role, if any, Little
Italy has in defining Italian culture for those who have not experienced
it.
Little Italy was obviously
not born as a tourist attraction and, in fact, has a deep cultural history
that began in the 1850’s when Italian immigrants moved into the neighborhood.
Little Italy was essentially an Italian ghetto in which immigrants resided
in tenements and separated into their respective Italian subgroups (Genoans,
Sicilians, Neapolitans, etc.) It was from these humble, impoverished
beginnings that Little Italy grew. By the 1950’s, however, many of
the Italians moved out to the suburbs or other boroughs of New York. (“Little
Italy History”) During this time, Little Italy gradually began its
transformation from a neighborhood community into one of New York City’s
main tourist attractions.
During my research, I stumbled
across a picture taken in 1940 of an Italian gentleman playing bocce ball
(Italian bowling) in a wide-open street, while neighborhood residents observed
silently in the background. The picture is black & white and
depicts a man dressed in a baggy “gangster” style suit launching the bocce
ball amongst a backdrop of crowded, worn tenements. If I had not
known better, I would have never recognized this setting as Little Italy.
It looked drastically different from the Little Italy of today that is
bustling with tourists and merchants competing for space in the ever-decreasing
area that Little Italy now occupies. This change in the occupancy
of Little Italy marked a change in its historical/cultural significance.
The people that inhabit a space define that space. Without people
to define a space’s boundaries, the space lacks any real importance or
purpose (and can be filled with any, such as tourism). A space is
not born with purpose or meaning, it is given that by those who reside
in the space and therefore, becomes symbolic of its inhabitants.
Now that the majority of the people that walk the streets of Little Italy
today are tourists, the sight is no longer a cultural representation of
Italian-American life but rather a representation of America’s fascination
and perception of Italian culture. This becomes evident while taking
a stroll down Mulberry St. and passing merchant after merchant selling
Godfather and Soprano posters, “Kiss me, I’m Italian” t-shirts, and refreshing
Italian ices.
As I walked through the crowd,
I felt as if I was back in suburban Detroit making my way through the mall
food court and small kiosks. At first, this gave me a comforting
feeling of home but my opinions soon changed on my subsequent visits.
I came to Little Italy in hopes of finding a piece of my past to return
to during lonely times in the Big Apple. And what did I find?
A mall. A bunch of non-Italians trying to capture the Italian cultural
experience in something tangible like a t-shirt. It was during these
trips to Little Italy that I discovered that Italian is not about marinara
sauce, the movies, or the mob. Italian is family. It’s Respect.
Tradition. Loyalty. Italian is a way of life and that cannot
be captured in any catchy slogan, miniature flag, bumper sticker, or whatever
false sense of cultural authenticity the street merchants sell to ignorant
tourists.
In his “Shadow Cities,” Andre
Aciman discusses his experience coming to New York City from Alexandria
through the context of Straus Park on the Upper West Side. He claims,
“I had come here, an exile from Alexandria, doing what all exiles do on
impulse, which is to look for their homeland abroad, to bridge the things
here to the things there, to rewrite the present so as not to write off
the past.” Although I myself am not technically an exile, I visited
Little Italy for similar reasons. I came to hopefully grasp a part
of my past in the present. However, what I found was that I could
not relive my past through material objects. It is not the fresh-pot
of Rigatoni and homemade meatballs that I really long for; it is the love
that my mother shared through her efforts to make our family happy and
fill our bellies. The thing is, people want to have another’s culture
without actually experiencing it and leaving their own safe haven.
That’s why people buy souvenirs. A souvenir says, “I was here, I
experienced Little Italy,” when in fact, this is not the case at all.
Aciman talks about this desire to experience without actually doing, so
when he states, “It finally dawned on me that I didn’t very much like Rome,
nor did I really want to be in France…I rather enjoyed my Straus Park-Italy
and my Straus Park-Paris much more, the way sometimes I like postcards
and travel books better than the places they remind me of.” For Aciman,
the different areas of the park were reminiscent of and more important
than the places he had traveled to in his past. That explains why,
when tourists come to Little Italy, they hurry to acquire a memory, or
proof of their trip, and they find it in memorabilia.
The problem is that most
tourists view the sight as an authentic Italian neighborhood when, in fact,
it is no longer really a neighborhood at all. Little Italy has become
a place where visitors and owners alike can pretend, can play fantasy.
The merchants and restaurant owners of the area realize this and capitalize
off of it. Little Italy is just another example of our controlling
capitalist society banking off of a beautiful culture. The area’s
merchants make their profit off of media stereotypes of the Italian culture:
the Hollywood Italian “gangster” depicted in films such as The Godfather,
Goodfellas, and even Scarface in which Al Pacino actually plays notorious
Cuban drug lord Tony Montana. And so, the streets and shops are filled
with posters, portraits, and other memorabilia glorifying Italian film
gangsters and mob bosses like Marlon Brando’s character in The Godfather
as Don Vito Corleone or HBO’s The Soprano’s series infamous modern-day
mobster Tony Soprano. Non-Italian tourists can easily relate to these
figures because the movies are many times their only view of Italian-American
lifestyle. This is one example of Little Italy playing into the exploitation
of the stereotypes that exist about Italian-American males in society:
it promotes the glamorized violent gangster image of Italians that is present
in the media through mainly popular gangster films & television shows.
However, the alternate media
image of the Italian male as a loud, pasta-eating, fat “grease-ball” is
even further exploited within the so-called “community” of Little Italy.
This is not hard to see when walking down Mulberry Street. Let’s
be honest: it is just a bunch of restaurants. And the worst part
about it is that the food is mediocre to flat out bad. The point
is, despite popular belief, there is more to Italian culture than just
food. The exploitations of these two media stereotypes (the gangster
and the grease-ball) within Little Italy, strip the area of almost any
cultural/historical significance. Aside from The Most Precious Blood
Church, which houses the statue of San Gennaro, there are no truly historical
sites in Little Italy. Italian culture can simply not be represented
to the fullest by a string of restaurants and shops.
Restaurant and storeowners
who make their living off of tourism primarily own the real estate that
Little Italy encompasses. In her essay “Memoirs of the City’s Unfamous,”
Stephanie Farqhuar states that, “Space becomes power through exclusion,”
when expressing her frustrations with the class exclusion of New York City
private parks. Just like the rich, “keyed” occupants of Gramercy
Park who control and, as a result, define the use of that space, Little
Italy’s business owners control the space and decide how that space is
used: it serves the tourist industry like countless other attractions in
New York City. Because the tourist and restaurant industry have a
monopoly on the real estate of Little Italy, they also control any renovation
and thus any possible positive change within the area.
Unfortunately, Little Italy
no longer serves much purpose in retaining Italian history and culture
as it once did as a thriving Italian community. The main focus of
Little Italy today seems to be completely preoccupied with tourism.
Not surprisingly, the area grows increasingly smaller every year and has
become almost completely engulfed by an economically booming Chinatown.
Personally, I was greatly disappointed with Little Italy’s representation
and promotion of Italian culture. Mainly, Little Italy lacks any
genuine substance and the authenticity of the beautiful people it owes
its existence to. After all, there are malls all over the world,
but there is only one Italy.
Works Cited
Aciman, Andre. “Shadow Cities.”
Writing the Essay: Art in the World. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. 493-505.
Farqhuar, Stephanie. “Memoirs
of the City’s Unfamous.” Mercer Street. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. 45-47.
“Little Italy History.” Italian
Neighborhoods. 22 Nov. 2003 <http://www.italianneighborhoods.com>
Winter 2004
