Joseph V. Scelsa has heard the talk about how Little Italy is little
more than a tourist destination whose boundaries are being squeezed by NoLIta to the north, SoHo to the
west and
Little
That, says Dr. Scelsa, a sociologist who is the president of the
The museum plans
to announce today that it is buying a cluster of historic buildings in Little
Italy for $9 million and will begin raising money toward $19 million worth of
renovations.
The three
buildings, at 189, 187 and 185 Grand Street, are at what Dr. Scelsa calls the epicenter of the Italian-American
community. But Dr. Scelsa, who is a professor at
Queens
College, estimates that fewer than 1,000 Italian-Americans now live
in Little Italy, which covers the area bordered by
So it is tourists
who will make the museums new location viable. Even if Little Italy is a
shrinking version of the teeming neighborhood the museum memorializes, it draws
visitors, he said.
The tour bus
stops right here, said Dr. Jerome Stabile III, whose family has owned the
three buildings that will house the museum since the 1880s. More than
once, someone has come up to me and said, Can you tell me where Little
Italy is?
But the museum is
looking for more than exhibition space. Its long-term plan calls for a
two-story addition above the three-story buildings it is buying.
We wanted to
demonstrate the continuance, the old and the new, Dr. Scelsa
said. So we want something modern on top.
The three
buildings date to the first half of the 19th century, Dr. Scelsa
said, and in their early years were home to a bank.
Its the
way it looked when I was a kid, said Dr. Stabile, 76, a retired surgeon,
and great-grandson of the banks founder, Francesco Rosario Stabile.
Were happy Joe is taking over so this does
not become another restaurant.
Dr. Stabiles
father and uncles were born in the apartment above the bank, Banca Stabile. The bank remained independent until the
Depression, when it merged with Banca Commerciale Italiana Trust Company and his grandfather added an
insurance and travel agency.
One of the
banks safes remains in the building, a double-door unit that takes up
about half the space behind two tellers windows.
This was challenging to me as a kid, Dr. Stabile said, pulling open
one of the safes heavy doors. Even though I had the combination, I couldnt open it.
The museum began
after a 1999 exhibition at the New-York Historical Society on Italian-Americans in
The museum
received its charter in 2001 and became an affiliate of the City University of New York in 2003. Since
then, while searching for a new home for the museum, its leaders decided that
it needed to be in Little Italy, even as the neighborhood has become home to
fewer and fewer Italian-Americans. Figures from the 2000 census put the Asian
population in Little Italy at more than 8,200, which was about eight times the
number of residents of Italian descent.
It has not
been gentrifying the way the
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