An Unlikely Union by Paul Moses

Author:Paul Moses [Moses, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036080 History / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic (dc, De, Md, Nj, Ny, Pa)
Publisher: NYU Press

Faced with that trend, Foley promoted Michael Angelo Rofrano through the ranks of his Downtown Tammany Club; he couldn’t retain power without Italian support. Rofrano, five feet, six and a half inches tall, stocky, with a handsome round face, dark hair, and a quick, upright gait, was born in Potenza in the Basilicata region of southern Italy in 1873. He migrated with his parents to New York, becoming an American citizen at the age of fourteen. A personable young man, he prospered as a plumbing contractor and grew popular through his involvement in various Italian organizations. On January 26, 1902, he married twenty-year-old Mary A. Corrigan at St. James Catholic Church. His wife was the daughter of two Irish immigrants.18

The upwardly mobile Rofranos lived at 11 Oliver Street in a four-story home built with cream-colored brick in the upper stories and brownstone on the first floor and steps. It was close to Chatham Square in what would later be considered Chinatown. By 1910, the couple had four daughters: Lillian, age six, four-year-old Grace, and two-year-old twins Mary and Eloira. In 1911 they would add a fifth daughter, Louise. Michael Rofrano became a lawyer that same year after studying at New York Law School. Eugene Driscoll, a contractor whose parents were Irish-born, lived next door with his wife; they had seven of their nine children by then. His politically connected brother, First Deputy Police Commissioner Clement Driscoll, also lived with the family. Tom Foley kept an address at 9 Oliver Street, although he had moved uptown to 122 East Thirty-Fourth Street. The Mulligans—John, a bricklayer, and his wife, Mary, both had Irish parents—lived next to the Rofranos on the other side, with five children aged seven and under. Dr. Joseph S. J. Manning, son of Irish parents, his wife, Margaret, and their five children lived at 19 Oliver Street. And Assemblyman Alfred E. Smith resided in a three-story brick building at 25 Oliver Street, renting from St. James Parish, where Smith had been an altar boy. The pastor and other priests were all of Irish ancestry, as might be expected for a parish where the Ancient Order of Hibernians had founded its first U.S. chapter.

Smith and his wife, Katherine, had five children. Katherine’s Irish-born mother, Emily J. Dunn, lived with them, as did Katherine’s brother Lawrence. Throughout his storied political career, Al Smith would portray himself as Irish American, and his mother was indeed descended from immigrants from County Westmeath. But his father, Alfred E. Smith Sr., was the son of a Genoese immigrant named Emanuel and a German-born mother. Smith used his middle initial but even close associates—the campaign manager during his 1928 presidential bid, or Jimmy Walker—didn’t know that it stood for Emanuel, the name of his Italian grandfather. Smith may not have realized his Italian roots, but his father was known to defend Italians when neighbors complained that they were ruining the neighborhood.

Smith’s daughter Emily recalled Oliver Street fondly in her 1956 memoir about her famous father. Just

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