Little Italy is no longer Italian

Speaking of New York City traditions and what’s becoming of them, we went last night to the San Gennaro festival in Little Italy, where, in crushingly hot humid weather, block after block of Mulberry Street was more jammed with humanity than anything experienced since Times Square on New Year’s Eve 2000. We sampled from the endless choices of Italian food being prepared by feisty street vendors, and went into the Church of The Most Precious Blood where a film showed a procession at the Naples Cathedral in which the blood of San Gennaro (martyred by the Romans in the fourth century) was being carried about in a glass vial in a monstrance in its miraculously liquified state.

However, for all its (mostly very secular) vitality, the festival, according to a sociology professor quoted in The Los Angeles Times, only offers “a stereotypical view of what Italians are like. It’s like play-acting on a grand scale, a reenactment of something that has vanished.” Little Italy once boasted the largest Italian population of any urban center outside of Italy, once hitting an estimated 250,000. Today, there are only 5,000 people of Italian ancestry living in the area, which has largely been taken over by Asians and Hispanics.

“Its like the whole place changed before your eyes,” said Johnny Cappello, a San Gennaro food vendor who was born on Mott Street but moved to a larger home in Brooklyn. “I feel so connected to this area. I can show you where my grandparents lived. But it’s such a different world now.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 22, 2002 01:31 PM | Send