“THE ITALIANS AS A BODY ARE NOT HUMILIATED BY HUMILIATION”
During the last fifteen or so years of the nineteenth century, religious antagonism between Italian- and Irish-Americans in Five Points became even more intense than workplace hostilities. This animosity developed as a result of Five Points’ evolving demographics and the reactions of Irish Catholic leaders to those transformations.
Looking back in 1897 at the changes Five Points had undergone during the previous twenty years, a Catholic priest remembered that the district had once had about thirteen thousand Irish Catholic parishioners. But then
came the Chinese, who gradually usurped all of Pell and Doyers streets, and Mott street from the Bowery to Pell. Then came the Jews, who not satisfied with Baxter street, settled in Mott, Hester, Bayard, and Chrystie streets. Then came the Italians and they drove the Irish from Mulberry and Park streets and took full possession of the “Bend.” Last of all came the manufacturers with their big factories and dispersed our people from Elm, Leonard, and Franklin streets so that at the end of twenty years we have in our parish limits scarcely eight hundred English-speaking people.43
In theory, these changes should not have alarmed the neighborhood’s Roman Catholic clergy. There were virtually as many Catholics in the parish in 1890 as there had been two decades earlier, and a truly “catholic” church ought to have welcomed the Italians who replaced the Irish in the Transfiguration pews. But American prelates viewed the Italian newcomers as inferior Christians. “It is a very delicate matter to tell the Sovereign Pontiff how utterly faithless the specimens of his country coming here really are,” confided one American bishop to another in 1884. “Ignorance of their religion and a depth of vice little known to us yet, are their prominent characteristics.” Even in correspondence with Rome, the Americans found it impossible to conceal their prejudices. “Nowhere among other Catholic groups in our midst,” they complained, “is there such crass and listless ignorance of the faith as among the Italian immigrants.”44
One might imagine that those clergymen who worked directly with the Italians would develop familiarity, respect, and even sympathy for the newcomers, but this was not the case in Five Points. Rev. Thomas F. Lynch, who from 1881 to 1894 served as rector of the parish that encompassed Five Points, often complained about his Italian parishioners. And Lynch’s brother Bernard wrote an article for the Catholic World that seethed with intolerance and prejudice.
In the article, entitled “The Italians in New York,” Bernard Lynch asserted that “the Italians in the jurisdiction of Transfiguration parish . . . come to America the worst off in religious equipment of, perhaps, any foreign Catholics whatever.” They do not know the “Apostles’ Creed” nor the other basic “elementary truths of religion, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Redemption.” Italians instead focused their energies upon “‘devotions,’ pilgrimages, shrines, miraculous pictures and images, [and] indulgences,” while remaining in “almost total ignorance of the great truths which can alone make such aids of religion profitable.” Lynch admitted that some northern Italians arrived in America well educated in the teachings of the church. But most southern Italians, he charged, were not even “well enough instructed to receive the sacraments.”
As if these statements were not incendiary enough, Lynch impugned the Italians’ character as well. Italians, he wrote, lack “especially what we call spirit.” In addition, “they for the most part seem totally devoid of . . . personal independence and manliness. An American or an Irishman will almost starve before asking for charity, and often really does starve. Not so the lower-class Italian. He is always ready to beg.” The Transfiguration Italians, Lynch boldly declared, did not have “the qualities fitting them to be good Americans!”45
How had relations between Five Points Italians and Irish Catholics sunk to this level? While some of the neighborhood’s first Italian immigrants had attended mass at Transfiguration, others had preferred to venture out of the neighborhood to churches run by Italian priests. The first, St. Anthony of Padua, had opened in 1866 a mile and a half north of Five Points at the corner of Bleecker and Sullivan Streets. By 1878, as the Five Points Italian population continued to grow, Transfiguration rector James McGean began allowing his Italian parishioners to hold a separate mass in the church’s basement. Italian priests from St. Anthony’s officiated at these services. But McGean still sent Italians to St. Anthony’s for confessions, baptisms, marriages, and last rites. As the Five Points Italian population continued to increase during the 1880s, Lynch requested that the archdiocese assign him an Italian assistant who could officiate at the Italian masses and administer the sacraments. The first clergyman assigned to this duty arrived in Five Points in the autumn of 1886. A second arrived in 1887. Each Sunday, more than two thousand Italians celebrated mass in the Transfiguration basement.46
Not surprisingly, the newcomers resented their banishment to the basement. Transfiguration’s Irish Catholic leaders asserted publicly that the Italians preferred worshipping separately. But as New York Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan noted privately in 1885, the Irish clergy had exiled the Italians to the Transfiguration basement because “these poor Italians are not extraordinarily clean, so the [other parishioners] don’t want them in the upper church, otherwise they will go elsewhere, and then farewell to the income.” Responding to charges that segregating the Italians was insulting the newcomers, Bernard Lynch asserted that “the Italians as a body are not humiliated by humiliation.” But the Italians clearly were insulted. Complaining of one of the many bigoted comments in Lynch’s article, an Italian priest in New Jersey asserted that “there is no other pastor in New York City who would allow his brother to say this, so disparaging a remark,” against fourteen thousand of his own parishioners. This was proof, he concluded, that the Irish priests were irrevocably prejudiced against the Italians.47
Even Reverend Lynch’s request for the permanent assignment of Italian priests to Transfiguration was motivated by selfishness. Lynch appears to have thought that he could better control and monitor the activities of the Italians if they were ministered to by his own assistants rather than by clergymen from St. Anthony’s, over whom he exercised no authority. An Italian cleric assigned to Transfiguration complained to the head of his order in Italy that “Your Excellency knows that Fr. Lynch said that here the Italian priests, ours included, must be servants, servants, servants.” Another Italian priest informed a superior in Italy that Lynch constantly denigrated him. Poor Italians who dared to enter the upper church and stand to avoid paying pew rent, he added, were scorned and verbally abused by the ushers.48
Transfiguration was only the first New York parish in which such animosity developed. Soon, the treatment of Italian Americans by the predominantly Irish-American Catholic hierarchy became a matter of international debate, referred to as “the Italian Problem,” and discussed in the highest Catholic councils both in the United States and Rome. Pope Leo XIII believed that the American church leaders were neglecting the Italian immigrants, and perhaps willfully mistreating them as well. Beginning in 1887, he expressed his displeasure both in writing and in audiences with American prelates. He also ordered Bishop Giovanni Scalabrini of Piacenza to begin specially training Italian priests to minister to the Italian immigrants in America.49
The American bishops seethed with indignation at this reprimand from Rome. They retorted that the pope and his northern Italian advisers understood neither the depth of the southern Italians’ ignorance nor how the United States’ multiethnic Catholic population would be splintered if each immigrant group received its own parishes and priests. In a letter to Archbishop Corrigan, Lynch propounded an additional reason for opposing the pope’s policy. It was important to keep the Italians in parishes presided over by English speakers, he contended, so that their children “grow up with our (proper) notions of supporting the church.” Lynch was not referring merely to financial considerations. Turning over American parishes to Italian priests
would make it difficult for Irish-American church leaders to impose their “proper notions” of church practice on the newest generation of American immigrants.50
Transfiguration’s Italian parishioners sent two petitions to Rome in the spring of 1888 complaining of their treatment by Lynch and their banishment to the church’s basement, and asking that the diocese set up a separate Italian parish in their neighborhood. A few months later Corrigan consented to the opening of a Scalabrinian-run church on Baxter Street just north of Canal. Services were held in a storefront on Centre Street for three years until, in September 1891, the Church of the Most Precious Blood opened in the yet unfinished Baxter Street building. Many Five Points Italians happily left Transfiguration to attend services at the new church.51
“THE SAINT BELONGED TO THE PEOPLE, NOT TO THE CHURCH”
The support they had received from Rome apparently emboldened the Italians in other ways. For centuries, Italians had organized lavish street processions on important feast days. Archbishop Corrigan had forbidden them from transferring this custom to New York, however, both because he considered it undignified and because these festivals (or feste) diverted Catholics’ attention from what Irish-American church leaders considered the “true” essence of Catholicity. Yet in 1888, Five Points Italians began ignoring the ban on processions, organizing them first at the Scalabrinian church across Chatham Square on Roosevelt Street, and by 1891 in Transfiguration itself.52
The best known religious street celebration in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century New York was the homage to Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The Madonna del Carmine, as she was known within the Italian community, was, according to one immigrant, “the Madonna they worship most.” The Festa della Madonna del Carmine took place not in Five Points but within Manhattan’s other “Little Italy” (as these enclaves came to be known in the 1890s), located in East Harlem around 116th Street. Yet devout Five Pointers, especially those from the Campania region surrounding Naples where the Madonna del Carmine was most venerated, participated in the mid-July festivities anyway. “Some march barefoot the six miles and over from Mulberry street” to the festa, Riis reported, displaying their humility by “choosing the roughest pavements and kneeling on the sharpest stones on the way to tell their beads. Lest there should be none sharp enough, the most devout carry flints in their pockets to put under their knees.” Because there were so many Neapolitans in Five Points, July 16 was always keenly anticipated there.53
Another famous Italian street festa was the one held for St. Rocco, and this celebration was associated with lower Manhattan, Transfiguration, and Five Points. Describing the festivities held in Rocco’s honor each August 16, Riis observed that his “patronage is claimed by many towns.... There were half a dozen independent celebrations going on all day in as many yards, always the darkest and shabbiest, which this saint seems to pick out by a kind of instinct.” He wrote in 1899 that “one of my last recollections of the Bend, and one of the very few pleasing ones, is seeing the vilest of the slum alleys, Bandits’ Roost, lighted up in honor of ‘St. Rocco’ a few nights before the wreckers made an end of it. An altar had been erected against the stable shed at the rear end of it, and made gaudy with soiled ribbons, colored paper, and tallow dips stuck in broken bottle-necks. Across the passageway had been strung a row of beer-glasses, with two disabled schooners for a centerpiece, as the best the Roost could afford.”54
Jacob Riis, “The Feast of San Rocco in Bandits’ Roost,” c. 1894. Collection of the Museum of the City of New York.
Riis’s photo captures the Five Pointers’ humanity as few images ever have. Innocent children excited about the celebration and the accompanying fireworks replace the glowering thugs and withered old “hags” who dominated Riis’s better-known image of Bandits’ Roost. The care with which the altar has been assembled and decorated also reflects a level of devotion and pride one rarely sees in representations of Five Points. Even the stringing of glass tumblers across the alleyway demonstrates that, in whatever manner they could, the impoverished residents of these notorious tenements used every resource at their disposal to create a festive atmosphere.
The Five Pointers who erected this altar in honor of “San Rocco” were probably natives of Basilicata. People all over Italy venerated Rocco, but the Tribune in 1901 aptly characterized him as “the healing saint of Basilicata.” Although Basilicatans may not have organized the first of New York’s San Rocco celebrations, held in 1888 and 1889 at the Scalabrinianrun church on Roosevelt Street, they were definitely in charge by 1890 when, for the first time, the festival became a grand production. In that year, the Brotherhood of San Rocco of Savoia di Lucania (a small mountaintop village in western Basilicata whose patron saint was Rocco) organized the celebrations with assistance from a Basilicata-wide San Rocco society. A decade later, this festa was still associated with this isolated region of southern Italy and this single tiny hilltop village. The Tribune noted that the story of Rocco curing people of the bubonic plague “has been handed down from father to son in Basilicata for centuries,” and quoted a little girl at the parade who said that that “if he [San Rocco] had not come to Savoia none of us would be alive to-day.”55
In order to create a celebration befitting their patron saint, the immigrants from Savoia di Lucania called upon the immigrant fraternal societies of neighboring Italian villages. At the 1891 festa, for example, music was provided by the Society of San Michele Arcangelo (composed of immigrants from Sant’ Angelo le Fratte, just two miles south of Savoia di Lucania on the other side of the Melandro River Valley), the Society of Monte Carmelo (immigrants from Polla, a town five miles southwest of Savoia), and the Society of the Madonna della Pietá (immigrants from Calvello, about fifteen miles east of Savoia). The San Rocco Society band would return the favor by performing when these groups staged feste for their patron saints.56
The festivities for San Rocco generally began on August 15, the evening before the actual feast day, with a street party, music, “lavish and expensive” fireworks, a parade, and visits to the tenement alley shrines set up for the veneration of San Rocco. The streets near the shrines and churches were “decorated with tricolor banners and, at night, flaming with lights and various pyrotechnic spectacles, crowded with people, [and] gay with happy melodies.” Among the preliminary events were competitions to determine which neighborhood residents would have the honor of carrying the statue and banners of San Rocco through the streets the following day.57
On the sixteenth, the celebrations reached their climax. Already by 1893 the San Rocco festa was important enough to merit inclusion in an Italian-language novel entitled The Mysteries of Mulberry Street. The author’s description of the festivities, the most vivid we have from these early years, suggests that he was intimately familiar with the proceedings:
Mulberry Street was on holiday: from the windows of the Italian houses hang tapestries, flags, and three-coloured lanterns, and everywhere were garlands of light-bulbs. . . . In the street, the crowd was happy and noisy: women—and among them several were very young and handsome—wore their holiday dresses and brought the gay note of gaudy colours amid the dark suits of the men and the uniforms of the military societies. San Rocco was being celebrated, and the Italians of Mulberry Street wanted to do things properly. Towards 11 a.m., the call of the trumpets was heard and in the distance flags and banners appeared. The crowd thronged the sidewalks to enjoy the parade in honor of San Rocco. A squad of policemen headed the procession, followed by the Conterno Band, and right after by a banner on which San Rocco was painted in oil, with all his wounds and his dog. Two flags, one Italian, the other American, flapped at the banner’s sides, thus placing the saint under a double protection. Then came the members of the Società of San Rocco, stern and proud in their blue dresses with golden buttons and stripes, as if the whole world belonged to them. In the buttonhole of their parade dresses, they had flowers, ribbons, and cockades. After another musical band, a military society paraded, in th
e uniform of the military engineer corps, with the three colours flapping in the wind; and then came a colossal banner of San Rocco, wounded more than ever, and after it the [societies] of the Carmine, of the Madonna Addolorata, and of other saints like San Cono, Sant’Antonio, etc.58
As the parade progressed, spectators pinned dollar bills onto the banners depicting San Rocco. The procession wound slowly and solemnly through virtually every block of both Five Points and the Italian neighborhood north of Canal Street as well.
Although these were the features of virtually every Italian religious festa, there was one aspect of the San Rocco celebration that made it unique: wax body parts. Because Rocco was said to have miraculously healed thousands in fourteenth-century Europe during the bubonic plague, the devout looked to him to cure their own ailments. They marched in the parade holding lifelike wax body parts representing their diseased limbs and organs or those of a loved one. Merchants and street vendors did a brisk business in these body parts in the weeks leading up August 16. The procession concluded at a neighborhood church (in the 1890s either Transfiguration or Most Precious Blood), where the images of San Rocco and the tremendous pile of wax body parts would be displayed around the altar while the faithful celebrated mass. That evening the festivities reached their climax. Valuable prizes were raffled off, more fireworks were ignited, and there was music, dancing, and “rivers of beer.” Only in the wee hours of the morning did the merriment finally come to an end.59
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