Signposts on Elizabeth Street are painted with red, white and green stripes. Statues of fat Guidos in chef suits, licking their chops, are stationed outside every other restaurant. Website after website claims it has the best Italian cuisine in New York City. But ask an Italian-born Italian, and the culture of Little Italy is utterly foreign. “They put cheese on fish dishes. That’s sacrilege. Little Italy has nothing to do with Italy. They don’t speak the language. They’re not even Italian-American. They’re American,” says my friend Alessandro Elena, a music producer and legal resident born and raised in Rome.
Little Italy is a tourist-friendly façade compared to the original neighborhood that emerged in the late-19th century. True, most of the original tenements remain, preserved as landmarks, rich with ornate architecture and fire escapes that evoke the history and essence of New York City.
But to Elena, going to Little Italy is like stepping into the fabricated culture of Las Vegas. He considers it an inaccurate reconstruction of a bygone era; he is annoyed that many American tourists who have never been to Italy think that this is what it is like. Manhattan’s Little Italy flowered in the years before today’s Italian republic; those years include the time of Mussolini’s dictatorship, an era that most Italians would prefer to forget. “There are several restaurants called Benito’s, named after a fascist, and that pisses me off,” Elena said. “Why don’t I open a German food restaurant and call it ‘Adolf’s’? It’s the same thing.”
Mainstream media redefinition of Italian culture is sanctioned in Little Italy. Today, visitors can venture toward Houston Street into the fashion boutiques of NoLiTa (North of Little Italy) for Italian leather made in China, or south toward Canal Street for counterfeit Italian pastries. “The market for choice beef shrinks while demand for capri pants grows,” reports the Little Italy Neighborhood Association (LINA) web page. The official Little Italy website (www.littleitalynyc.com) even features a “Sopranos” tour, romanticizing the Italian-American experience and appeasing tourists’ expectations.
Elena says he felt more at home when he lived in Washington Heights five years ago because of the sense of community. “Everyone knows everyone and looks after one another up there. To me, that’s more like the culture of home.” The annual San Gennaro festival is the only shred of reality, as it reminds him of a carnival in a remote town in south Italy. The only difference is that it doesn’t smell like it: The fish markets of Chinatown occasionally overpower the bread baking, espresso brewing or pasta cooking of Little Italy.
Essentially, Little Italy is an assimilated neighbor of Chinatown and an American bastardization of Italian culture. The descendants of the original immigrants have long since left for Brooklyn, Queens and the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey. New immigrants no longer flock to the neighborhood. And my Italian friend Alessandro Elena regards it as laughable. “There is nothing like walking through the old streets of Rome. It smells fresh and flowery and old all at the same time. When I walk through Little Italy, I don’t feel like I am at home.”
Robin Laverne Wilson is an Honors College interdisciplinary major senior
at Rutgers-Newark.
