This
was like a paradise, Mr. Uvenio said. Thats why we always come back.
Half a century
later, the members of the stickball team had gathered again. This time, they
were swinging hammers, not sticks. They had nearly finished building a
seven-story-tall wooden platform that will be covered in flowers and saints
made of papier-mbchi, and lifted on Sunday during a
traditional Italian festival, the Dance of the Giglio,
which means lily in Italian.
The festival will
be held near where Italian immigrants first celebrated their hometown
tradition, even though the
But the festival
survives because of the Giglio Society of East
Harlem, which was formed six years ago to bring the celebration back to
Yet despite the
Italian diaspora from the neighborhood, the giglios return has been a great success.
Nobody lives
in the neighborhood anymore, said Mr. Uvenio,
who lives in
Its not just
the dance that brings hundreds of Italian-Americans flocking back to the old
neighborhood, trading green lawns for East Harlems asphalt for a day.
Here, old neighbors feel like family, and childhood memories of simpler times
come to life. The Giglio Boys, as they call
themselves, even play a nostalgic, if slower-paced, game of stickball.
For the rest of
the year, a couple of well-known restaurants, a bakery and elderly men lounging
in front of Claudios barbershop are about the only reminders that this
used to be the citys biggest Italian neighborhood.
Its all
gone, said Nick Esposito, 85, as he leaned back in his folding chair on
116th Street on a recent August afternoon. He waved and smiled as a Mexican
mother pushed a stroller through a group of Puerto Rican teenagers milling
around the sidewalk. Theres not too many of us left of the old
school, he said.
Mr. Esposito is
one of the few who didnt leave in the exodus of
Italians from East Harlem that began after World War II, when dozens of
tenements that had housed a population of thousands of Italian immigrants and
their children were demolished to make way for public housing projects.
In its heyday in
the first half of the 20th century, Italian Harlem was the most Italian of
the Little Italys, said Gerald Meyer, a history professor at Hostos Community College who wrote about the neighborhood
in his book about Vito Marcantonio, an
Italian-American congressman from East Harlem.
The
demolition of blocks and blocks of the community completely shredded the
fabric, Dr. Meyer said. At some point it became a remnant.
Now, there are
only 1,130 Italian-Americans left in
The Rev. Anthony
Kelly, an Irish priest who speaks Spanish and was brought to the parish 31
years ago when the neighborhoods demographics began shifting from Italian
to Puerto Rican, believes it wont be long before the Italians disappear
from East Harlem.
They used to
come back for weddings, he said. Now they just come for
funerals.
Thats
something the Giglio Boys hope
to change. Although they say they have no illusions about recreating
On
Skip Bosco, 57, stood next to Mr. Uvenio.
They used to live a few doors down from each other in crowded tenement
buildings that long ago disappeared. Mr. Bosco
reminisced about running through the unlocked apartments, where pots of pasta
sauce bubbled on every stove and the oppressive heat forced them to sleep on
the fire escapes.
Everybody
had nothing, he said. Yet we had everything.