Boston's North End
Images And Recollections of an Italian-American Neighborhood
Riccio, Anthony V.
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BOOK EXCERPTS
From the book's preface:
The North End I found in the late 1970s was still an intact, self-contained neighborhood of multi-storied brick tenement houses with walk-up apartments, a vibrant community where people walked the streets and elders gathered on corners and in parks speaking regional dialects of Calabrese, Napoletano, Siciliano, and Abruzzese. Open-air fruit and vegetable stands, family-run bakeries named "Boschetto," "Drago," and "Parziale," meat markets, pastry shops, religious society clubhouses with figures of patron saints painted on street-level windows, and corner barbershops lined the narrow streets, reminiscent of the rural southern Italian villages the immigrants had left behind at the turn of the century. . . .
The idea of preserving the neighborhood's history came to me as I listened to a woman recounting how she had to leave school at age 14 to help support her large family, a story similar to my mother's own childhood experience in New Haven. When she articulated what it felt like to step on a scale for weekly weigh-ins under the watchful eyes of officials while wearing a lead-filled undergarment fitted by her parents so she could satisfy the labor-law weight requirements for working children in 1925, it inspired me to start my own kind of neighborhood history project.
Encouraged by Jim, I began interviewing the elderly in either English or Italian. These tape-recorded sessions took place during my many visits to their old-fashioned cold water flats where we often conversed at kitchen tables warmed from the heat of an opened oven door, sipping espresso,or talked in living rooms decorated with pictures of saints, or--during summer months--conducted our conversations amid their rooftop vegetable gardens. Some interviews were recorded during casework conversations at the Drop-In Center, during those troubling moments when old people faced eviction from their homes--the distressing underside beneath the glitter of the "New Boston" not reported by the news media. Prior to the skyrocketing values of real estate and condominium conversion in the North End, the idea of facing a sudden steep rent hike or being evicted by the landlord was unfamiliar and hardly understood in Italian-speaking households. In my daily walks around the neighborhood, I also recorded lively street conversations in local parks and on corners where the elderly gathered, in their cellars where they made wine, and at their summertime religious festivals.
BACK COVER
Illustrated with 100 vintage photos of Boston's North End and the people who made it their home, this book offers a heartfelt and fascinating view of one of the last intact Italian-American neighborhoods in the United States. Written to fulfill the wish of one North End elder, "so that people will never forget us," it is the result of many years of interviews with hundreds of Italian immigrants. At the turn of the last century these individuals left their rural homeland, carrying their Old World contadino customs and beliefs, and transformed the urban ghetto of Boston into a Little Italy.
Through vivid recollections spoken in their unique village idiom, these elderly storytellers bring to life the remarkable working history of Italian- immigrant men and women, their adaptation of old traditions and village lifestyle to their new urban surroundings, their assimilation into the American way of life, and their undying loyalty to family and community.
Together, this collection of images and oral histories clearly depict what the old neighborhood was like prior to the 1980s when the progression of urban development in the North End transformed the community, and life itself, forever.
AUTHOR BIO
Anthony Riccio grew up in an old ethnic neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, where the constant hum of the local American Steel and Wire mill could be heard in the well-tended backyards of Italian immigrants. He returned to the ancestral villages of his grandparents while pursuing an M.A. from Syracuse University in Florence and photographed daily life in the rural villages of the south. He later became the director of the North End Senior Citizen Center in Boston, where he conducted oral-history interviews and photographed elderly Italian Americans of the North End neighborhood. He lives in Westbrook, Connecticut.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
(1) Preface (2) Life in the Old Country (3) The Journey to America (4) Becoming an American Citizen (5) Life in the New World (6)The Italian Woman at Work (7)The Italian Man at Work (8)The Italian Family (9) A North End Christmas (10) The Molasses Explosion (11) Sacco and Vanzetti (12) The Depression Years (13) Italian Societies (14)The Feast of San Rocco (15) Making Wine (16) The Old Ways (17) Local Politics (18) The Waterfront and the "New Boston" (19) A Neighborhood in Transition (20) Out in the Street (21) Poor Tenant, Poor Landlord (22) Going It Alone
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MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 0762739746
ISBN(13-digit): 9780762739745
Dewey Decimal: 974.4/61
Library of Congress: 2005054506
Book Publisher: Globe Pequot Pr
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 180
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