East Harlem Remembered by Christopher Bell

Author:Christopher Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Published: 2013-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

The End of Italian East Harlem

The anti-immigration statutes also curtailed the population of Italian East Harlem, which never rose above 80,000. During the depression some Italians left the neighborhood and returned to Italy. And by the 1940s, Italians abandoned East Harlem in large numbers. Italian East Harlem further declined with the construction of the George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Robert Wagner public housing projects. The remaining Italian East Harlemites reluctantly moved into the housing projects with its high floors and elevators.25

George Di Martino: You didn’t have an option and if your house was brought for $3,000 it could have been worth $20,000. And people sold their properties. Those Italians that could afford to move left East Harlem and this happened block after block and this led to the decline of the housing stock in East Harlem.

Audrey Berghaus: My family tried to fight it, but we were the little people and we didn’t have any money. The city promised everybody in my building that we would be relocated to a nice area, and my grandmother, being an old-fashioned person who barely spoke English, said, “I am never going to leave this area.” But my family moved when the city found us an apartment in the Soundview Houses, in the Bronx, but she said no way. Then the city found her an apartment in the Jefferson Houses. And she accepted the offer. My family left in July 1956 when the area was completely cleaned out, but it was devastating for the whole neighborhood. Many people moved to Pelham Bay, Gun Hill Road and Throggs Neck: all parts of the Bronx. Some diehards remained but the neighborhood was never the same again.

Lois Pascale Evans: I remember 119th Street in the summertime when people played and cooled off in front of the hydrant near the tenements. And those blocks would be teeming with people. The neighborhood changed when the city demolished the buildings and built the projects. And many Italians moved out, but before that happened East Harlem was a bigger Italian neighborhood than the one that exists today in Little Italy.

By the late 1960s the population of Italian East Harlem declined rapidly to about 11,000.26 Today, approximately 600 to 1,000 Italians reside in East Harlem. Along with the Italian East Harlem, the small enclave of Greek East Harlemites where Calliope Gravanis once resided also vanished. She still returns to the neighborhood to visit the Greek church.

Calliope Gravanis: We moved to Astoria in 1954 because of [East Harlem] started to get bad. Also, we were on the fifth floor and there weren’t any elevators and it was a little hard. We moved to Astoria because of the nice rents, but we still came to East Harlem be close to the St. Demetrios church.

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