The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York

by Joseph Berger

  RICHMOND HILL

  WHERE TO GO

  Liberty Avenue (A GUYANESE BAZAAR, WITH ROTI, JEWELRY AND CLOTHING SHOPS)

  Maha Lakshmi Mandir (COLORFUL GUYANESE HINDU TEMPLE) 121-15 101ST AVENUE; (718) 805-4988

  WHERE TO EAT

  Brown Betty (BAKERY) 129-06 LIBERTY AVENUE; (718) 323-6438

  Kaieteur Restaurant & Sports Bar (FORMAL DINING) 87-12 LEFFERTS BOULEVARD; (718) 850-0787

  Richie's Roti Shop 118-06 LIBERTY AVENUE; (718) 835-7255

  St. John's Restaurant (ROTI SHOP) 118-14 LIBERTY AVENUE; (718) 322-5200

  Chapter 15

  Arrivederci, Bensonhurst

  WHAT SAL CALABRESE HAS ALWAYS LOVED ABOUT BENSONHURST, the city's largest Italian neighborhood, is that it provides the intimacies of a village. “If I walk out,” he said, “I will say hello to fifteen or twenty people and they to me. ‘Hi, Sal. How are you? How's your father?’ Like the old days. We're from different places in Italy, but we live in the same town.”

  But these days Calabrese worries that Brooklyn's Bensonhurst is losing the congenial feeling that comes from a place of common habits and pleasures. Bensonhurst is losing its Italians. There are fewer men sipping espresso in cafés, fewer teenagers hanging out Italian-style on corners, fewer bakeries, pork stores, and restaurants on the main street, Eighteenth Avenue. The faces in the neighborhood are increasingly Chinese, Russian, or Middle Eastern. The 2000 census indicated that the number of residents of Italian descent in Bensonhurst had fallen to 59,112, little more than half that of two decades before, when Italians made up 80 percent of the neighborhood. More recent estimates by the census indicate that the decline is persisting unabated. Calabrese volunteers that he is part of that movement. His parents still live in the neighborhood, and he runs a thriving real estate agency there, but in 2000 he moved to Bedminster, New Jersey, to a thirty-four-acre farm where he breeds Arabian horses.

  What makes the decline in Bensonhurst more remarkable—and rueful—than that in Claudio Caponigro's East Harlem is that East Harlem is an old story; it began its decline in the 1950s. But in those years Bensonhurst was just coming into full flower. Bensonhurst was “the country,” a giant step up for the descendants of dirt-poor Sicilian and Neapolitan immigrants, the place they settled after enduring the tenements of Little Italy and East Harlem. By shoveling rocks to build the subways and stitching garments in sweatshops, they had accumulated the nest eggs that allowed them to flee those first squalid footholds. Now as I walked through the streets of brick row houses with flapping American flags that gave Bensonhurst its characteristic look, I could see that this second-stage Italian village was also splintering and, like Astoria, this classic is fading.

  Bensonhurst's apex may have been reached around the time John Travolta made Saturday Night Fever, the 1977 film that captured the flashy lifestyles of young Italians in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge and Benson-hurst. These were not off-the-boat immigrants, but Italians who could finally afford cars, dance lessons, and razzle-dazzle clothes, who could dream about a triumph on the dance floor instead of a job in construction. But Italians have advanced to a third stage of the immigrant ascent. The children who grew up in those working-class and middle-class rows of brick homes are, like Calabrese, now professionals, academics, managers, and businesspeople who want suburban homes with backyards of grass, not concrete. They may come to Bensonhurst on Saturday or Sunday to shop for mozzarella or cannoli, but they no longer want to live there.

  Indeed, Italian Americans are declining sharply in numbers in all the boroughs except relatively suburban Staten Island. Many New Yorkers worry not only that they will lose the Italian neighborhoods but also that the Italian spice in the city's personality will fade away. After all, it has been Italians who have given New York City much of its charm in emblems as telltale as Fiorello La Guardia and “fuhgeddaboutit,” who gave us pizza and The Godfather, who gave us Sinatra belting out “New York, New York,” DiMaggio cantering across center field, and Pavarotti at the Met (adopted New Yorkers all, but why quibble). The census shows that the number of New Yorkers of Italian descent has fallen below 700,000, compared with more than 1 million in 1980—a number that had held steady in all the years after World War II. In 1980 the proportion of Italian New Yorkers stood at 14.22 percent. It is down to 8.65 percent. (The decline parallels that of most whites; the number of New Yorkers of Irish descent has declined from 647,733 in 1980 to 420,810 in 2000, or just 5 percent.) In the 1980s, Bensonhurst was a favorite stamping ground of John Gotti and his mob family. His son, Junior Gotti, favors Long Island. It is fitting that The Sopranos was filmed in Jersey suburbs such as Belleville.

  This is all surprising to those who savor the anthropological and sociological rhythms of New York. More than any other ethnic group, Italians are famed for their diehard allegiance to their neighborhoods. When the Jews and Irish seeped out of the south and central Bronx, fleeing the influx of black and Hispanic newcomers, Italians stayed put. They clustered fortresslike in a pocket around Arthur and Belmont avenues, completely surrounded by black and Hispanic families but sustaining their village of tidy houses and pork shops as immaculately—and safely—as ever. Sociologist Jerome Krase says that long after East New York became a black and Latino neighborhood feared by many whites, he would find four or five Italian families on a dead-end street clinging cockily to what remained of their turf. But even a reputation for no-holds-barred toughness could not stand up to the power of a more subversive force— upward mobility.

  Inevitable as population change is, a hemorrhage of Italians would be a blow to the city's character. Take just one area—politics. Italian enclaves have been a seedbed for some of the city's and state's most prominent leaders, with such names as Giuliani, Cuomo, and Ferraro. Writer Gay Talese thinks of Giuliani, who in 2007 was running for the Republican presidential nomination, as the first Italian politician to win widespread approval across the nation, a person who managed, by his performance as a crime fighter and on September 11, to shuck off the provincial “of the neighborhood” aura that burdened Cuomo. But Richard Alba, a distinguished professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany, predicts that, Giuliani notwithstanding, Italian politicians will become less common in the five boroughs because Italians are increasingly assimilated and dispersed and voting more often on issues rather than on ethnicity. “Giuliani is probably not the last hurrah, but one can imagine that the influence of white ethnics on the city will decline as newer groups striving for power—immigrants and nonwhites—succeed in achieving it,” he said.

  There is, however, a wide difference of opinion on whether a shrinking Italian population will change the city's characteristic New Yorkness. Italians, after all, have left such a durable imprint on New Yorkers' dialect and physical gestures, on the city's food and music, on such stereotypical attitudes as a wariness of authority. Yet, in a long conversation I had with Gay Talese, who chronicled Italian life in America through his memoir, Unto the Sons, he was not lamenting some of that passing. Many of the signature images, he told me, hark back to a time when Italians, in the public eye, represented the urban underclass. He recalled how the Italians who came over at the turn of the century and before World War I were basically landless farmers—contadini—from Sicily, Naples, and elsewhere in the south who were fleeing the bitter poverty spawned by the upheaval of forging a unified Italy. Illiterate and unskilled, they took the first jobs they could—the women sewing garments, the men picking up garbage or paving streets—and found grubby railroad-flat apartments near work, with a tub in the kitchen and a toilet in the common hallway.

  Those early Italian immigrants brought with them what Talese called a “village mentality” that has lasted more than four generations— an insularity that demanded tight family ties and the kind of loyalty from friends evident a generation later in political dynasties such as the Cuomos and the clannish structure of the Five Families that make up the Mafia. Those pioneers spoke Italian, cooked Italian, married I
talian, and made their families the core around which their lives revolved. The father ruled, and more often than not he wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, even if that meant forgoing college for a job in construction. The stellar Hollywood director Francis Ford Coppola, Talese pointed out, still uses family and friends to make his movies.

  But that insularity has been dissipating as Italians get university degrees, clamber up the ladder in the professions, business, and government, and marry out of their clans. Italians such as Yale president Bart Giamatti, novelist Don DeLillo, and, of course, Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito, Jr., are increasingly those who represent America's Italians.

  But the old ways haven't vanished. Talese, who is in his mid-seventies, volunteers that he himself still retains much of the “village mentality.” Although at the time we talked he lived in a Manhattan town house, was married to Nan A. Talese, a prominent book editor of Irish descent, and was a regular at Elaine's, he visited his ninety-five-year-old Calabrian mother twice a week in his hometown, Ocean City, New Jersey, and took her to a restaurant and then a casino so she could play the slot machines that give her pleasure. “I'm still a hometown, small-town guy,” he told me.

  Obviously, as one of the nation's premier nonfiction writers, he is not as small-town a guy as his father was. And Italians no longer have to be attached to colonies like Bensonhurst. As life moves on there is an aching sadness in the passing of a time and a culture, a painful acknowledgment that the era can never be re-created, except in books and in Hollywood. In a memory piece for The New York Times and in a novel he self-published called Johnny Once, Robert Gangi, a second-generation Sicilian American who is a leading expert on prison reform, remembered the “loud, gaudy” Bensonhurst where he lived for several years as a child and where he visited every weekend on trips to see his grandmother.

  It was “a town of big skies and low buildings,” he wrote, where men were called Tiny, Husky, and Johnny Once (for a person who came around once in a while). The street-corner arguments were over the relative merits of a Lincoln Continental and a Cadillac Eldorado, and one word, spoken with a slight peremptory menace, “Definitely!” could end any discussion.

  I want to stand again on barely sunlit corners and flirt with the girls with showy hairdos, tight pants and heels, popping Chiclets like tiny firecrackers—sadly a lost art. I want to wisecrack with the boys with their short sleeves rolled up, shiny hair and loud voices, moving and chattering with nervous energy, more Tra-volta than John. I want to drive down the busy, narrow streets, squeezing past small delivery trucks parked in front of markets and restaurants, while I watch middle-aged women lugging shopping bags, and expressionless old men sitting on little porches listening to the ballgame on the radio. I want to walk to church on Sunday morning, the unlikely quiet on the streets, the absence of humans and honking cars, the only sign of life the aroma of pasta sauces—gravy, we called it—drifting out of kitchen windows of small brick houses.

  A short time after he wrote the piece, I spoke to Gangi, a tall, stylish man with an open smile and a rangy Italian strut. This time he remembered the “strong physical presence,” sense of style, and “grand, generous gestures” of the neighborhood's handsome men. He showed me a 1930s photograph of his father and three uncles, all nattily decked out in fedoras and double-breasted suits, proud of who they were and how they looked. “Bensonhurst was a village,” he said. “There was something very secure about belonging to something that was self-contained and well defined and was foreign to people outside of it. Often I go to a suburban area and I feel like I could be Anywhere, USA. But Bensonhurst was well defined in its houses, its people, its mannerisms. There was a warmth and strength of feeling about the people who lived there that was engaging. They had definite ways of eating, of expressing themselves. It was all very good-humored and reflected the desire to stay connected, to eat, sing, and have fun together.”

  But there was a flip side to the village's virtues. “The other side of the coin was that it was parochial and very limiting,” he said. He spoke of commonplace expressions of prejudice he often heard, even against other Catholic groups such as the Irish. “Grown-ups were very judgmental and expressed their opinion and could be hard on people who disagreed with them,” he said.

  But something subversive was occurring in Bensonhurst, as it was among the rest of America's Italians. Children were leaving the neighborhood for college, to local schools such as St. John's, Hofstra, and Adelphi, but also every once in a while with breathtaking delight to schools such as Columbia (Gangi, class of 1965) and Princeton (Sam Alito of Trenton, New Jersey, class of 1972).

  Columbia was Gangi's ticket out of the provinciality of Bensonhurst. Except for his uncle Sonny, who went to Catholic Seton Hall, he was the first in his family to go to college. But it wasn't an easy step. His parents worried that he would lose his feelings for family and his Catholic faith. His Jewish friend Bruce Kaplan had to come “to the apartment and explain that they wouldn't lose their son to this godless, communist institution. That helped reconcile my mother.” Besides, his mother, who came from Abruzzi, had been conflicted anyway. She was American enough to know that she didn't want him to be what Gangi called “a greaseball.”

  “They wanted me to go out into the world and be more American,” he said.

  His brother Alfred didn't go to college—he became a beautician. But his uncle Sonny's five children all went, and none of them live in Bensonhurst any longer.

  The halting Italian progression to college stood in sharp contrast to the educational attainment of another group of immigrants, the Jews. “Italians started at a lower place in the American system,” explains Alba. “They were basically peasants moving into cities, and they lacked industrial skills. They also didn't have the reverential attitude toward education that the Jews did. The pull of family tended to keep people in place and helped to make these neighborhoods more stable.”

  Indeed, in Bensonhurst going to college usually meant forsaking the friends in the neighborhood hangouts with whom you had less in common, and often that was a permanent break. Gangi lives on the Upper West Side, not in an Italian neighborhood. He married a Jewish woman, and his Catholic faith, he suggested, has lapsed. His Italian mores and macho mannerisms have thinned out, just like his hair. He told me of a time his mother came to dinner and called him afterward in a state. “They were terribly upset that I was doing the dishes,” he said. His son, Theo, is a writer, not a common Italian occupation two generations ago (though he has taken an apartment in still heavily Italian Bay Ridge to get a whiff of his father's roots).

  Yet the pull of the old neighborhood is powerful. Gangi went back to Bensonhurst on a recent Father's Day and saw a few young men “with their sleeves rolled up being very loud, and very Italian, and I immediately slipped into a comfortable pair of shoes. I was totally aware I was not home but I was in a place where I belonged.”

  There were other ways to leave the neighborhood besides college. With powerful talent, comedian Dom DeLuise and actor Danny De-Vito built careers by tapping the rich vein of Italian shtick they absorbed in Bensonhurst. But whichever way people abandoned the neighborhood, they left those remaining in a state of edginess. Alba thinks the most notorious incident associated with Bensonhurst—the murder of a black teenager, Yusuf K. Hawkins, by a group of local young men in 1991—was rooted in the angry defensiveness Italians began to feel as they saw the population of Italians shrink and newcomers move into their streets and schools. By some neighborhood accounts, the attack was triggered by an Italian girl, Gina Feliciano, who lived in an apartment over a Bensonhurst candy store and violated the neighborhood's mores by dating Latino men. When her Italian friends reproached her, she threatened to bring in a group of her black and Hispanic friends to beat them up. The Italian friends mistook Hawkins, who was in the neighborhood trying to buy a used car, for a member of this supposed dark-skinned posse, or so the neighborhood's defenders say. One can predict that such b
lowups will probably be less common because Italian styles and habits—like their insularity and suspiciousness of authority and outsiders that sometimes rises to belligerence—are also dissipating with assimilation.

  To be sure, Bensonhurst is still very Italian. It is a place of quiet numbered streets lined with tightly grouped two-family brick row houses adorned with Madonnas in the small front yards and American flags snapping over the doorways. Its commercial spine, Eighteenth Avenue, is dappled with the Italian colors of green, white, and red. Il Colosseo Restaurant has penne and rigatoni that rival any of those near the Coliseum in Rome, and Tomasso's on Eighty-sixth Street is the place to snatch a whiff of the lingering culture of wiseguys along with tagliatelle Bolognese. Villabate Pasticceria's window displays wheels of orange-scented cheesecake and pastries stuffed with ricotta, drawing long lines of weekend shoppers—yes, it gives out numbers—driving in from Long Island. There are still a couple of surviving salumerias—pork product stores—such as Trunzo Brothers. SAS Italian Records has CDs of the great tenors as well as stainless steel espresso brewers and machines to grind tomatoes into sauce. Aldo Studio, the neighborhood's wedding photographer, is still famed for its collection of backdrops, including a waterfall, a grand piano, and a white Rolls-Royce, to complete the over-the-top garish Italian wedding. There are at least a dozen still-functioning hometown social clubs, including Societa Santa Fortunata and Militello Val Catania Society, though old-timers remember two and three times that number.

  So Bensonhurst has a long way to go before it becomes what Professor Krase calls an “ethnic theme park” like Little Italy and Arthur Avenue in the Belmont section of the Bronx, neighborhoods where few Italians actually reside but where tourists and “Saturday Italians” flock to get their Italian blast. But its fate seems unavoidable. The Italian American residents, who once passed houses on to their own relatives or those of their neighbors, are selling them to the highest bidders: Chinese moving up from nearby Sunset Park, Russians expanding from crowded Brighton Beach, Arabs and Pakistanis moving east from Bay Ridge.