The Neighborhood Outfit by Louis Corsino

Author:Louis Corsino [Corsino, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252080296
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2014-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

Sources: The Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910 Population and Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930 Population, Chicago Heights manuscripts.

From the perspective of the entrepreneurs, these local shops also made a good deal of sense. The economic and social threshold for embarking on such ventures was within reach for most Italians despite their limited set of work skills. Thus, it took relatively little professional training—compared, for instance, to becoming a barber, tailor, or shoemaker—to run a successful business. The saloon or tavern business was a prime example. “Human capital . . . was not important for becoming a saloonkeeper,” as Rothbart suggests. “The skills that were important were social skills, which were as accessible to a poor, unschooled immigrant as to anyone else.”63 At the same time, the small financial capital to labor ratio for most businesses also kept the barriers to self-employment relatively low. As such, we see a flood of corner grocery stores in the area, nearly one, and sometimes two if we add in the Polish stores, on every block. As Dominic Pancrazio remembers, “The East Side had more businesses than the West Side. We had a lot of businesses.”64 And Devatenos could slyly comment in 1924 that “there are a few things which are in a way peculiar to Chicago Heights. For example in Chicago Heights we find an overabundance of ‘soft-drink’ parlors, over seventy-five of them.”65

To be sure, these businesses provided a steady path to success for a segment of the Italian community. For example, Gaetano D’Amico began with a neighborhood grocery in the Hill area and while still working at Inland Steel set up a macaroni production plant that employed over a hundred people.66 Provino Mosca opened up a restaurant on Halsted Street in the 1930s. This led to a lifetime success for Provino and his family and eventually a move to New Orleans where Provino established the still popular Mosca’s Restaurant on the West Bank. Another restaurant, Savoia’s, began as a grocery store on Seventeenth street in Chicago Heights. Gus Bamonti turned it into a neighborhood tavern, with no-interest loans from Italian neighbors, to take advantage of all the factory workers who passed by on their way back and forth every day. As an incentive to stop in, Bamonti offered free sandwiches. These became so popular Bamonti eventually transformed his tavern into a restaurant, which has survived in one form or another to the present day.

Yet entrepreneurship by definition is an extremely risky form of commerce, made all the more so in the 1930s by the overwhelming presence of the Great Depression. And ethnic entrepreneurship is even more problematic. As Boissevain, et al. argue, “competition is . . . often structured into an ethnic entrepreneur’s situation.”67 Precisely, as immigrants with roughly the same set of skills and the same economic situations enter into an ethnic enclave, they often follow the path of others and open similar types of businesses. This creates an

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