Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [891]
Italian women took jobs outside their homes in small tobacco or candy factories or in noxious shops where they glued paper boxes together. The great majority stayed (or were kept) at home in cramped tenements where they looked after kin and boarders or did needle-trades outwork. For wages one-third less than the already abysmal compensation paid Jewish seamstresses, they felled and finished garments or made artificial flowers.
To save money to bring over their wives, sisters, and parents, Italian men accepted wretched living conditions, especially as the meanest Manhattan life was often an improvement on what they’d left behind. They headed for slum streets just west of the Bowery (between Canal and Houston), where earlier poor Italian immigrants had settled in among the Irish, and worked as scavengers, selling their rags, bones, and cans to nearby junk dealers. By the late 1890s Italians had supplanted the Irish along Mulberry, Mott, Hester, Prince, and Elizabeth streets, making the “Mulberry Bend” area the most concentrated Italian “colony” in the city.
Slum landlords welcomed the new arrivals: no matter how cramped and squalid the housing, they paid their rent and seldom complained. A three-room apartment (at twelve dollars a month) might house sixteen: a husband, wife, four daughters, two sons, and eight male lodgers. A two-room apartment (eight dollars a month) could hold eleven: a widow, her son, and nine male lodgers.
As Mulberry Bend filled to bursting, the colony threw off satellite settlements. Some were virtually contiguous: newcomers spread north and west of Houston into Greenwich Village south of Washington Square, pushing remaining blacks out of the former Little Africa toward the Tenderloin. Others left Manhattan altogether. In Brooklyn they clustered near the Hamilton Ferry, along Union and President streets, near the docks, warehouses, and factories of Red Hook. Newcomers also went to Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Fort Greene, the Navy Yard area, and Sunset Park; by the end of the 1890s there were also small colonies in Astoria, Long Island City, and Flushing.
The preeminent offshoot was up in East Harlem. Italians came to northern Manhattan in the 1870s when an Irish American contractor building the First Avenue trolley tracks imported them as strikebreakers, and a workers’ shantytown sprang up along the East River on 106th Street. As construction opportunities expanded in the booming Harlem community, Italians made their way to the wide-open uptown spaces. Wide open didn’t mean pastoral: the area stank from gasworks, stockyards, and tar and garbage dumps. By the mid-1880s four thousand had arrived. They boarded with families or pooled expenses in all-male rooming houses where they shared cooking and washing, even made their own wine. By the end of the 1890s Italians had pushed north to 115th Street and west to Third Avenue, pressing hard against Irish, German, and Jewish neighborhoods.
A Black and Tan Dive on Thompson Street, photograph by Jacob Riis. As Italians moved into Greenwich Village, Riis wrote, the neighborhood once known as “Africa” was “fast becoming a modern Italy.” (© Museum of the City of New York)
Italian Harlem, unlike Mulberry Bend, was new enough for residents to leave their mark on it. Paesani settled near one another—Neapolitans between 106th and 108th, Basilicatans from 108th to 115th, Aviglianese at First Avenue and 112th—but a broader Italian community also emerged, with distinctive sights, sounds, and smells. The populace resisted Americanization (few became citizens), eschewed the English language (perhaps a third couldn’t make themselves