One of America’s first great Italian neighborhoods was once in East Harlem, populated with more southern Italians than Sicily itself, a neighborhood almost entirely gone today except for a couple restaurants, a church and a long-standing religious festival.
This is, of course, not New Yorks’ famous “Little Italy,” the festive tourist area in lower Manhattan built from another 19th-century Italian neighborhood on Mulberry Street. The bustling street life of old Italian Harlem exists mostly in memory now.
If you wander around any modern American neighborhood with a strong Italian presence, you’ll find yourself around people who can trace their lineage back through the streets of Italian Harlem. Perhaps that includes yourself.
But it’s not all warm nostalgia and fond recollections. Life could be quite hard in Italian Harlem, thanks to the nearby industrial environment, the deteriorating living conditions and the street crime, the early years of New York organized crime.
So who were these first Italian settlers who left their homes for what would become a hard urban life in upper Manhattan? What drew them to the city? What traditions did they bring? And in the end, what did they leave behind, when so many moved out to the four corners of the United States?
Find the episode wherever you listen to podcasts or listen right here:
LISTEN NOW Italian Harlem: New York’s Forgotten Little Italy
We’re not done with Harlem! In fact we’re building up to an epic new 450th episode for our next show.
FURTHER LISTENING:
Past Bowery Boys episodes with close links to this current show: