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Inventing “Little Italy”1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Donna R. Gabaccia
Donna R. Gabaccia
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Extract

Digitized texts open new methodologies for explorations of the history of ideas. This paper locates the invention of the term “Little Italy” in New York in the 1880s and explores its rapid spread through print and popular culture from police reporting to fictional portraits of slumming and then into adolescent dime novels and early film representations. New Yorkers invented “Little Italy” but they long disagreed with urban tourists about its exact location. Still, from the moment of its origin, both visitors and natives of New York associated Little Italy with entertainment, spectacle, and the search for “safe danger.” While the location of Little Italy changed over time, such associations with pleasure and crime have persisted, even as the neighborhood emptied of its immigrant residents.

Type
2006 Shgape Presidential Address
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , January 2007 , pp. 7 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2007

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References

2 I have chosen not to litter the page with recurring quotation marks around the many terms I seek to problematize in this analysis. I do on occasion, however, call attention to the ways in which those quotation marks have been used for the terms historically.

3 On urban tourism, I've been influenced by Cocks, Catherine, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915 (Berkeley, 2001), ch. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Koven, Seth, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although both Cocks and Koven, in quite different ways, refer to tension between safety and danger, I am more indebted to a recent discussion of the cultural dynamics currently linking middle-class white suburbanites and today's black ghetto youth; see Stephens, Michael, “Safe Danger & Virtual Slumming: Gangsta Rap, Grand Theft Auto & Ghetto Tourism,” Popmatters, June 17, 2005Google Scholar, <http://www.popmatters.com/columns/stephens/050617.shtml>.

4 “A Global Geography of ‘Little Italy’: Italian Neighbourhoods in Comparative Perspective,” Modern Italy 11 (Feb. 2006): 9–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 6:1 (January 2007)Google Scholar

5 Until very recently, the term found little use outside of the U.S. or in languages other than English. This, I hypothesized in an earlier article, pointed toward the origins of the phrase in English speakers' curious, and also curiously racialized, “Italo-phobia.” See , Gabaccia, “A Global Geography of ‘Little Italy;’”Google ScholarHarney, Robert, “Italophobia: English Speaking Malady,” Studi Emigrazione, 22 (March, 1985): 6–43Google Scholar. Harney's article might be regarded as the first salvo in what has become a complex debate about the color and race of Italians, in Italy and in the wider world. See Guglielmo, Jennifer and Salerno, Salvatore, eds., Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

6 Thus the apparently frivolous “NoSweat Shakespeare” site can now proclaim with authority that Shakespeare used 17,677 words, <http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/shakespeare_words_phrases.htm>.

7 Although it is a visually ugly solution, I use throughout this paper to signify root words subjected to Boolean searches.

8 African-American newspapers are available through subscription from <http://www.accessible.com/>; for digitized southern publications, see <http://docsouth.unc.edu/>; for women's voices, cross-culturally, see <http://gerritsen.chadwyck.com/html/help/about/about.html>. The Library of Congress, American Memory has a number of collections related to westward expansion, e.g. <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/umhtml/>.

9 See Alexander Street Press, North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories, <http://www.alexanderstreet.com/products/imld.htm>. All are in English. One of the few digitized texts in Italian is by Italian reformer Amy Bernardy, <http://pds.harvard.edu:8080/pdx/servlet/pds?op=f&id=4837114&n=8&s=4>.

10 “Making of America” is: <http://www.hti.umich.edu/rn/moagrp/> and <http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/>. For two other important digitization projects, see: <http://www.bartleby.com/> and <http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page>.

11 What is particularly noteworthy about the labeling of residential clusters of Italians in the Times is the insignificance of terms used so widely today. For example, references to Italian neighborhood(s) were extremely rare before 1900, and for the first decade of the twentieth century they appeared almost exclusively in real estate notices relating to the sale of residential properties. Similarly, the term popularized by the new social histories of immi-grants in cities—commun—was almost completely unknown before 1900 and rarely used between 1900 and 1920. References to the Italian commun in the Times became common only in the late 1950s and 1960s.

12 Gerald Meyer, “Italian Harlem: America's Largest and Most Italian Little Italy,” <http://www.mibarrio.org/italian_harlem.htm>.

13 See, e.g.Riis, Jacob A., How the Other Half Lives; Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York, 1890), 25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 26, 48, 161; and A Ten Year's War: an Account of the Battle with the Slum in New York (Boston, 1900) and the slightly expanded version of this book titledGoogle ScholarThe Battle with the Slum (New York, 1902), 110Google Scholar, 296, 308, 375. Four articles of Riis's appear as part of the “Making of America” digitized collection of journals; in all, references to Little Italy are to Harlem. For other New Yorkers’ insistence on litde Italy's location in Harlem See Report and Proceedings of the Senate Committee Appointed to Investigate the Police Department of the City of New York (Albany, 1895)Google Scholar, which discusses “policymakers” (roughly the equivalent of the later “numbers racket") in the uptown Little Italy, and Laurence, Franklin, “The Italian in America: What he has Been, What he Shall be,” Catholic World, April 1900, 74, 76Google Scholar. Surprisingly, in other writings in this periodical, it is difficult to ascertain the physical locations of the Little Italy under discussion, e.g., Earle, E. Lyell, “Character Studies in New York's Foreign Quarters,” Catholic World, March 1899, 786–88Google Scholar.

14 Pozzetta, George, “The Mulberry District of New York City: The Years before World War One” in Little Italics in North America, ed. Harney, Robert and Scarpaci, Vincenza J. (Toronto, 1981), 7–40Google Scholar, cited material, 7.

15 Higham, John, “The Re-Orientation of American Culture in the 1890s” in The Origins of Modern Consciousness, ed. Weiss, John (Detroit, 1965).Google Scholar

16 One possible exception here was “the Bend,” which did often appear encased in quotes, while Mulberry Bend more often appeared without them, at least in the New York Times.

17 Describing political cartoons in the British comic sheet Puck, a Times foreign correspon-dent described “burly France threatening to assault poor Little Italy, while Prussia taunts him with the advice to ‘take one of his size.’” Writing in the Times from the Vienna Exposition of 1872, U.S. Commissioner Thomas B. Van Buren regretted that the U.S. had not yet filled its allotted space at a time when even “litde Italy has appropriated $2,000,000” to a display of its machinery, inventions, and products. Iitdeness mattered also to Jacob Riis, who in 1889 in his first reference to Litde Italy, referred to the Harlem neighborhood as “a miniature copy of the Bend.” “Foreign Notes,” New York Times, Dec. 1, 1867Google Scholar; “The Vienna Exposition,” New York Times, Aug 19, 1872, p. 8Google Scholar; “How the Other Half lives,” 660. See also, “litde Japan,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 27, 1895Google Scholar.

18 Gabaccia, Donna, Hoerder, Dirk, and Walascek, Adam, “Emigration and Nation-Building during the Mass Migrations from Europe,” in The Politics of Emigration, ed. Green, Nancy and Weil, Francois (forthcoming).Google Scholar

19 Choate, Mark, “From Territorial to Ethnographic Colonies and Back Again: The Politics of Italian Expansion, 1890-1912,” Modern Italy, 8 (2003): 65–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories. Nor can the exact phrase “Little Italy” be found in the Library of Congress digitized American Use Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers Project, 1936-1940 A rare Italian voice, indirectly present in digitized texts, is that of a realtor who provided data for the Report on the Cost of hiving for an Unskilled Laborer's Family in New York City (New York, 1915), 34Google Scholar. In the data he provided, he distinguished between the Mulberry Bend District and Little Italy (ensconced in quotes in the original).

21 Chapin, E.H., Humanity in the City (New York, 1854)Google Scholar. A recent scholarly study is Anbinder, Tyler, Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum (New York. 2001)Google Scholar.

22 New York Times. May 24, 1854, p. 8Google Scholar. like Italians, furthermore, German speakers of that era who discussed Kleindeutschland—“litle Germany”—referred to the entire “German-American metropolis” in New York, not to a specific neighborhood. Nadel, Stanley, Kleindeutschland: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in NewYork City, 1845-80 (Urbana, 1990)Google Scholar. For a single reference to “Little Ireland,” see “The Wild Irishman,” New York Times, Dec 21, 1879, p. 4Google Scholar. Significantly, the reporter noted that while many believed “a Little Ireland is a dangerous spot for a foreigner,” in fact the drunken, wild threats of the Irish “signify nothing.”

23 Brace, Charles Loring, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work among Them (New York, 1872).Google Scholar

24 See the series of articles, March 4-6, 1880, that began with “Miscellaneous City News: Chinamen Coming East; The Car-Load which Arrived in this City Yesterday,” New York Times, March 4, 1880. p. 8Google Scholar. The article located Chinatown along the lower part of Mott Street. Times reporters had been referring to Chinatowns in California for several decades.

25 Before 1900, New Yorkers had experimented with many other names for the neighbor-hood, including Judaea: Illustrated New York: the Metropolis of Today (New York, 1888), 45Google Scholar. The first Times use of the term ghetto for the Jewish Lower East Side appeared in Milton Reigenstein, “Pictures of the Ghetto,” New York Times, November 14, 1897, p. IWM3Google Scholar. The spread of the terms Iitde Italy and ghetto followed somewhat similar paths: Hutchin Hapgood's Spirit of the Ghetto (1902)Google Scholar appeared six years after his older brother, Norman Hapgood had written a short story (discussed below) set in Little Italy.

26 Riis's account of his own life is The Making of an American (New York, 1901)Google Scholar ; see the digitized version: <http://www.bartleby.com/207/>.

27 On , Jewtown, “old Africa,”Google Scholar “Mulberry Bend,” and other neighborhood designators, see Riis's first mainstream publication, “How the Other Half Lives—Studies among the Tenements,” Scribner's Magazine, Dec. 1889Google Scholar.

28 Brouwer, Norman, “Harbor Master,” South Seaport Museum MagazineGoogle Scholar, <http://www.southstseaport.org/magazine/articles/1997a-02.shtm>. Coney Island was known for attracting “rough” (meaning working-class) visitors already in the 1870s; see “Summer Resorts,” New York Times, May 10, 1873Google Scholar.

29 The first article describing this Litde Germany is “Glen Island and Rockaway: Large Crowds at Both Popular Resorts Yesterday,” New York Times, July 3, 1882, p. 8Google Scholar. Reports continued throughout the summers of 1882 and 1883. A few also appeared in 1884. A long sequence then again accompanied the hot weather of summer 1886, just months before Little Italy made its first appearance in the Times.

30 , Koven, Slumming.Google Scholar

31 Editorial, New York Times, July 24, 1884, p. 4Google Scholar.

32 “Slumming in this Town: A Fashionable London Mania Reaches New York, Slumming Parties to be the Rage this Winter—Good Districts to Visit—Mrs. Langtry as a Shimmer,” New York Times Sept. 14, 1884, p. 4Google Scholar.

33 “Undesirable Immigration,” New York Times, June 21, 1884, p. 4Google Scholar.

34 Riis expanded his 1889 Scribnet's article into How the Other Half Uves. In the previous half-decade, the New York Times had been drawing on Riis's reporting without ever naming him as their source, e.g., “Masquerading as a Priest, a Tramp Steals a Surplice and Strolls through 'the Bend,” New York Times, Dec. 26, 1884, p. 5Google Scholar; “Cleansing Foul Places: A Sanitary Visit to ‘the Bend’ in Mulberry Street,” New York Times, July 8, 1885, p. 8Google Scholar; “Raid on Stale Beer Dives,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 1885. p. 2Google Scholar and many more. A direct reference to Riis did not appear until “Her Point of View” described the exclusion of women from a Brooklyn YMCA Lecture Series that included him as a speaker, New York Times, Oct. 21, 1894, p. 18Google Scholar.

35 Nevertheless, one can scarcely ignore as an influence Riis's life-long interest in entertainment and his realization in the 1880s that the education of Americans about the poor would require novel, attention-grabbing strategies. Riis frequently gave lantern shows already in the 1870s, and his decision to include photographs of slum dwellers may have held the key to his success in broadening his audience for How the Other Half Lives and for his early Century and Scribner's articles about slum life.

36 J.F.E, “Romance vs. Reality,” New York Times, May 23, 1899. p. 6Google Scholar.

37 Krase, Jerome, “Seeing Ethnic Succession in Little Italy: Change despite Resistance,” Modern Italy 11 (Feb. 2006): 79–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Even more focused on ethnic theme parks is Krase's online publication, “The Present/Futures of Little Italies,” <http://www.brooklynsoc.org/semi-otics/vl nl/index.html>.

38 , J.F.E., “Romance vs. Reality,” p. 6.Google Scholar

39 New York Times, July 27, 1888, p. 8.Google Scholar

40 , Koven, Slumming, 273.Google Scholar

41 Orsi, Robert, Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven, 1985).Google Scholar

42 New York Times, July 18, 1905, p. 2.Google Scholar

43 Ingersoll, Emest, Handy Guide to New YorkGoogle Scholar, 11th ed., cited in , Cocks, Doing the Town, 197Google Scholar.

44 “Another Cosmopolitan Colony Has Planted Itself in Eastern Harlem Within the Last Few Years—Its Population Already is 250,000 Foreigners—a New Field of Usefulness of Social Workers,” New York Times, Oct. 9, 1904, p. 8Google Scholar.

45 , Cocks, Doing the Tom, 174, 195.Google Scholar

46 Fales, William E.S., “About Little Italy,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1887.Google Scholar

47 For sketchy details of Fales's life, see his obituary, New York Times, May 18, 1906Google Scholar. His 1887 book is Brooklyn's Guardians: A Record of the Faithful and Heroic Men who Preserve the Peace in the City of Homes (Brooklyn, 1887)Google Scholar.

48 Not the most original of reporters, Fales borrowed this phrase from the police memoir Savage, Edward H., Police Records and Recollections: Or, Boston by Daylight and Gaslight (Boston, 1873)Google Scholar.

49 The only one of Fales's books to receive some review and the only one with a professional printer named on its publication pages was Bits of Broken China (New York, 1902)Google Scholar. The book easily falls into the genre, discussed below, of “fictional slumming,” with ironic stories (all of them decidedly sympathetic to the Chinese characters) such as “Poor Doc High,” “The Red Mogul,” The Temptation of Li li,” and “A Mott Street Incident.” The book confirms that Fales was quite familiar with San Francisco's Chinatown as well as with southern China. Hamm was by far the more successful journalist of the two, an editor of New York's The Journalist (1894-1899)Google Scholar, and the author of a wide variety of books about U.S. expansion in the Pacific and Caribbean (including one collection of valuable early photographs) and studies of eminent American and New York families. Hamm also authored a work of fictional slumming in the same year as Bits of Broken China, although by then she was married to John Robert MacMahon; it was called Ghetto Silhouettes (New York, 1902)Google Scholar. References to Hamm's writings about China are in Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1893Google Scholar, Mar. 8, 1896, and Nov. 19, 1899. The Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 25, 147 (March 1985): 332Google Scholar, describes Hamm in its “Chit Chat” column of literary gossip as the wife of Fales but her Who's Who entry makes no note of the marriage to Fales but reports a marriage to John Robert MacMahon. Fales died in 1906, Hamm in 1907.

50 Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1894Google Scholar; Nov. 8, 1894.

51 E.g. Dec. 29, 1894; Jan. 28, 1901; Dec. 15, 1901; Sept. 19, 1902; Mar. 14, 1904.

52 E.g. June 24, 1902.

53 See for example, “High Day of Little Italy; Children in White Greet Their Busy Bishop; Picturesque Street Scenes in Los Angeles; Mission is Dedicated—Cross, Banners and Hymns,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 14, 1904, p. 10Google Scholar.

54 Chicago Tribune, February 26, 1888Google Scholar; August 7, 1888.

55 Washington Post, November 17, 1889.Google Scholar

56 Thompson, Vance, “From Rome to Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1890Google Scholar; “In Defense of Italians,” Chicago Tribune, March 2, 1890Google Scholar.

57 See Shepp, James W., Shepp'sNew York City Illustrated: Scene and Story in the Metropolis of the Western World: How Two Million People Live and Die, Work and Play, Eat and Sleep, Govern Themselves and Break the IMWS, Win Fortunes and hose Them, and So Build and Maintain the New York of To-day (Chicago, 1894)Google Scholar, which is typical in locating “Little Italy,” “African Quarters,” and the “Chinese Quarters” adjacent in Lower Manhattan.

58 Here, I adapt the use of Stephens, Michael, “Safe Danger & Virtual Slumming.”Google Scholar

59 , Koven, Slumming, 95.Google Scholar

60 , Brace, The Dangerous Classes, 160–65.Google Scholar

61 For example, in his Children of the Tenements (New York, 1903)Google Scholar, which, like most of his later publications, was lavishly illustrated. See also , Riis, Neighbors: Life Stories of the Other Half (New York, 1914)Google Scholar.

62 See Riis's introduction to Children of the Tenements.

63 Taylor, Walter Fuller, The Economic Novel in America (Chapel Hill, 1942), 79Google Scholar. A fuller recent treatment is Carrie Bramen, Tirado, “The Urban Picturesque and the Spectacle of Americanization,” American Quarterly 52 (2000): 444–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 For a recent treatment of “grand tours” to southern Italy, See Astarita, Tommaso, Between Salt Water and Holy Water: A History of Southern Italy (New York, 2005)Google Scholar. Thanks to Giorgio Bertellini for reminding of the rich literature on European and American travel in Italy's south and for the importance of the picturesque in relationship to ethnography in shaping American visions of Italy and its inhabitants.

65 Aldrich, Robert, The Seduction of the Mediterranean (New York, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66 It is striking that authors of guidebooks and fiction alike consistently referred to the resemblance of Little Italies to Naples—the only significant tourist destination in southern Italy—and not to Palermo. In many cities, such as Kansas City, there were probably more Sicilians than Neapolitans in little Italy.

67 Howells, WD., “Doorstep Acquaintance,” The Atlantic Monthly, April 1869, 484–93Google Scholar; reprinted in Suburban Sketches (Boston, 1887)Google Scholar.

68 Hapgood, Norman, “The Promotion of Cadet Norcross,” The New England Magazine, Dec. 1896, 502–08Google Scholar. The author would later become editor of Collier's Magazine, where he sup-ported both fiction and factual journalism that shared the goal of “muck-raking.” As noted above, he was the older brother of Hutchins Hapgood, who helped to popularize the use of the term ghetto for the Jewish Lower East Side.

69 Fry, Horace B., Little Italy, A Tragedy in One Act (New York, 1902).Google Scholar

70 , Fry, Little Italy [Incidental music from the tragedy] (New York, 1899).Google Scholar

71 Thomas, Henry Wilton, The Last Lady of Mulberry: A Story of Italian New York (New York, 1900)Google Scholar. Thomas also published in pulp fiction magazines on both sides of the Atlantic.

72 Foster, Mabel G., The Heart of the Doctor—A Story of the Italian Quarter (Boston, 1902).Google Scholar

73 Ruddy, Anna C., Heart of the Stranger, A Story of Little Italy (New York, 1908).Google Scholar

74 Ruddy sometimes wrote letters to the Times, calling attention to the problems of immi-grant children growing up in Harlem, and she wrote a novel for boys, From Tenderfoot to Scout (Toronto, 1911)Google Scholar. The Garden settlement in Harlem, where Ruddy worked, was well known for encouraging children's love of nature and flowers in its backyard garden, a theme that appeared in almost all of her fictional writings. Leonard Covello, Italian-American educator, high school principal, and Harlem activist, was among the young Italian boys who visited the settlement.: <http://www2.hsp.org/collections/balch%20manuscript_guide/html/covello. html>.

75 , Ruddy, Heart of the Stranger.Google Scholar

76 My account of the film does not differ significantly from the one offered online by Rosanne De Luca Braun, “Made in Hollywood: Italian Stereotypes in the Movies” <http://www.osia.org/public/commission/only_a_movie.asp>. In a personal communication, Bertellini has called my attention to Griffith's “In Little Italy” (1909) and “The Musketeers of Pig Alley” (1912), which feature ethnographic excursions into the immigrant neighborhoods and gangster dens of Italian New York. See also Bowser, Eileen, ed., Biograph Bulletins, 1908-1912 (New York, 1973)Google Scholar.

77 Additional illustrations from “The Black Hand” from the Library of Congress collection, including a frame of the blackmail note, and a discussion of the film, can be found in Bertellini, Giorgio, “Black Hands and White Hearts: Italian Immigrants as ‘Urban Racial Types’ in Early American Film Culture,” Urban History 31 (2004): 375–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 See “At the Theaters,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1899Google Scholar and July 30, 1899.

79 See, for example, “The Drama—Players, Playhoues, Gossip of the Stage,” and “'Overnight’ at the ‘Maj.’” Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1907Google Scholar , pg. vii, and April 8, 1912, p. 115.

80 On early filmed portraits of Italian immigrants, See , Bertellini, “Italian Immigrants.”Google Scholar

81 “A Story of Little Italy,” New York Times, Oct. 7, 1906, p. 3Google Scholar.

82 Winner library published in the same years and in much the same format the even more flamboyant Red Raven series. It featured tales of pirates and buccaneers.

83 Sims, George Robert, Living London: Its Work and its Play, its Humour and its Pathos, its Sights and its Scenes (London, 1906)Google Scholar. Since Sims, British scholars have felt free to adopt what had originated as an American label for immigrant neighborhoods, e.g. Sitwell, Sacheverell, Little Italy in London (Brackely, UK, 1977)Google Scholar; Rea, Anthony, Manchester's Little Italy: Memories of the Italian Colony of Ancoats (Manchester, 1988)Google Scholar; Taylor, Ian, European Ethnoscapes and Urban Re-Development: The Return of Little Italy in Twenty-First Century Manchester (Salford, UK, 2000)Google Scholar.

84 Fewer know that Zangwill was a British Jew who did almost all his writing in London, where most of his plays were also performed—yet another story of what Daniel Rodgers has called Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar.

85 , Koven, Slumming, 4.Google Scholar

86 “Theatrical Gossip,” New York Times, Sept. 17, 1897, p. 7Google Scholar. As best as I can tell from Duse's most recent, and exhaustive, biography, no European production was mounted. See Sheehy, Helen, Eleonora Duse—Biography (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

87 Bernardy, Amy A., Piccola Italia (Firenze, 1906)Google Scholar. See also Tirabassi, Maddalena, ed., Ripensare la patria grande; gli scritti di Amy Allemande Bernardy sulk migrazioni itatiane (1900-1930) (Isernia, 2005)Google Scholar. For now, at least, a Harvard University digitization project is the closest thing we have in the digitized world to a source on immigrant Italians written in Italian: Bernardy, Amy A., Italia randagia attraverso gli Stati Uniti (Torino, 1913)Google Scholar, <http://pds.harvard.edu:8080/pdx/servlet/pds?id=6098225>.

88 Italian scholars of the U.S. have adopted American use when writing about piccola Italia. Martellone, Anna Maria, Una little Italy nell'Atene d America; La comunit italiana di Boston dal 1880 al 1920 (Napoli, 1973)Google Scholar. But they have also used the phrase to distinguish between smaller and larger understandings of Italian national territories in studies of irredentism; see for example Bianciardi, Luciano, Un volo e una canzone: D'nnunzio: I'eroe immoralista della piccola Italia (Milano, 2002)Google Scholar.

89 <http://www.kataweb.it/sport/sportdetail.jsp?extra=true&idCategory=5661&id Content=1718490&serie>.

90 For a suggestive early analyses of Little Italy by Italian-American intellectuals, See Viscusi, Robert, “Making Italy Little,” in Social Pluralism and Literary History, ed. Loriggio, Francesco (Toronto, 1996), 61–90Google Scholar; Gardaphe, Fred L., Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Culture (Albany, 2004)Google Scholar.

91 <http://www.italianamericans.com/messages/Feb2004-Sept2004/3979.html>.

92 Gabaccia, Donna R., “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Italy's Transnational Migrations and the Immigrant Paradigm of American History” in “Special Issue on Transnational History,” Journal of American History 86 (Dec. 1999): 1115–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

93 French-speaking scholarship certainly suggests Quebec as the connector between Canadian and French discussions of la petite Italie. Ramirez, Bruno, Le premiers Italiens de Montreal: I'origine de la Petite Italie duQuebec (Montreal, 1984)Google Scholar. See also Maltone, Carmela, Aroldo Buttarelli, Une petite Italie a Blanquefort du Gers: Histoire et Me'moire, 1924-1960 (Talence, FR, 1993)Google Scholar. More recently a September 2006 conference, held in Paris, “Les Petites Italies dans le Monde,” organized by Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaleard and the Spring 2005 conference, “Petites Italies dan l'Europe du Nord-Ouest,” organized by Judith Rainhorn, suggest the expanding acceptance and use of the phrase.

94 Steiner, Edward A., On the Trail of the Immigrant (New York, 1906), 264, 271.Google Scholar

95 Jones, Thomas Jesse, The Sociology of a New York City Block (New York, 1904).Google Scholar

96 Guglielmi, Francesco, The Italian Methodist Mission in the Uttle Italy of Baltimore (Baltimore, 1912).Google Scholar

97 Greer, Caroline Virginia, “The Americanization of the Children of the People of Little Italy in Kansas City, Missouri (A study of social conditions and social problems of Kansas City's Little Italy—taking, insofar as possible, the viewpoint of the Italian Child)” (M.A. thesis, University of Kansas, 1915).Google Scholar

98 Report on the Cost of Living, 34; Reed, Dorothy, Leisure Time of Girls in a Little Italy (Portland, 1932)Google Scholar.

99 See , Martellone, Una little Italy nellAtene d'America.Google Scholar

100 Pozzetta's Mulberry District was bounded by Worth Street to the south, East Houston to the north, the Bowery to the east and Broadway to west; it includes all of today's much-geographically reduced Little Italy.

101 For example, Dionne, Eugene Joseph, “Little Italy Lost; the Breakdown of Italian Hegemony in East Harlem” (Honors Thesis, Harvard University, 1973)Google Scholar, listed in Hollis, the online catalogue of Harvard University; Sandier, Gilbert, The Neighborhood: The Story of Baltimore's Little Italy (Baltimore, 1974)Google Scholar; Alissi, Albert S., Boys in Little Italy: A Comparison of their Individual Value Orientations, Family Patterns, and Veer Group Associations (San Francisco, 1978)Google Scholar. The final study focuses on Cleveland.

102 Historians’ focus on Little Italies in a variety of American cities again increased in the 1990s. See, for example, Juliani, Richard N., Building Little Italy: Philadelphia's Italians before Mass Migration (University Park, PA, 1998)Google Scholar; Immerso, Michael, Newark's Little Italy: The Vanished First Ward (New Brunswick, 1997)Google Scholar; Sullivan, Joseph W., Marxists, Militants & Macaroni: The I. W. W. in Providence's Little Italy (Kingston, RI, 2000)Google Scholar; Aleandri, Emelise, Little Italy (Charleston, SC, 2002)Google Scholar. For literature, See , Gardaphe, Leaving Little ItalyGoogle Scholar, Marazzi, Martino, Misteri di Little Italy: storie e testi della letteratura italoamericana (Milano, 2001)Google Scholar.

103 Mazzucco, Melania G., Vita: A Novel, trans. Jewiss, Virginia (New York, 2005).Google Scholar

104 See, for example, the work of Ermelino, Louisa: The Black Madonna (New York, 2001)Google Scholar and The Sisters Mallone: Una Storia diFamiglia (New York, 2002)Google Scholar. Ermelino's first book did feature Iitde Italy in its title: Joey Dee Gets Wise: A Novel of Little Italy (New York, 1991)Google Scholar.

105 Compare Illustrated New York—which contrasted the districts “known as the ‘tony’ or ‘swell’ region” with “Litde ‘Italy,’ ‘Germany,’ ‘China,’ Africa,’ ‘Judaea,” but referred to the area around the Five Points as “Italy,” in pages 45 and 47—to Moss, Frank, The American Metropologis, from Knickerbocker Days to the Present Time: New York City Life in All its Various Phases (New York, 1897)Google Scholar, which sharply distinguishes the “Italian quarters” on Mott Street and Little Italy in Harlem, in pages 28-32.

106 Dyke, John Charles Van, The New New York A Commentary on the Place and the People (New York, 1909), 162, 239.Google Scholar

107 Bercovici, Konrad, Around the World in New York (New York, 1924)Google Scholar; see also Lubschez, Ben Jehudah, Manhattan, The Magical Island, One Hundred and Eight Pictures of Manhattan (New York, 1927)Google Scholar.

108 Graham, Stephen, New York Nights (New York, 1927), 167.Google Scholar

109 Huneker, James, New Cosmopolis, A Book of Images: Intimate New York (New York, 1915)Google Scholar. Huneker's book is noteworthy in visually comparing New York images to those of prewar European cities.

110 Roseboro, Viola, “The Italians of New York,” The Cosmopolitan, January 1888, 396–408.Google Scholar

111 “A Sample of Fraternal Hatred: It Came Little Short of Causing a Murder in ‘little Italy,’” New York Times, May 5, 1891Google Scholar.

112 “New Shrine for Italians: They Leave Washington Square and Garibaldi for Columbus,” New York Times, Nov. 28, 1892Google Scholar.

113 “Seen in the Shops,” New York Times, Dec. 16, 1900Google Scholar. The item described was a child's toy goat that supposedly resembled the ones raised in the litde Italies of Harlem and Brooklyn, according to the author. Somewhat later, in 1904 a “Little Italy Neighborhood Association” began providing setdement house services to Italian immigrants at 146 Union Street.

114 “Strikers Held in Check by Troops: Cavalry and Infantry Control Situation at Cornell Dam,” New York Times, April 18, 1900, p. 1Google Scholar.

115 “Saw Bomb Kill Her Boy,” New York Times, Oct. 14, 1902Google Scholar.

116 McAdoo, William, Guarding a Great City (New York, 1906), 3, 145Google Scholar, 149, 159, 179.

117 e.g. “Immigrants from Italy,” Oct 6, 1895.Google Scholar

118 Boolean searches for references in the New York Times to Little Italy + Harlem compared to Little Italy + Mulberry give the following results: 1880s (2/0); 1890s (21/7); 1900s (84/25); 1910s (58/3); 1920s (25/3); 1930s (20/8); 1940s (10/6); 1950s (4/4); 1960s (7/9); 1970s (16/84); 1980s (71/217).

119 New York Times, Sept. 19, 1949. p. 40Google Scholar

120 Gardaphe, Fred, From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities (New York, 2006).Google Scholar

121 New York Times, June 7, 1903, p. 28.Google Scholar

122 New York Times, Nov. 18, 1906.

123 For a discussion of the role of San Francisco and New York Bohemians in popularizing the Italian restaurant and hedonistic pleasures of the table as part of a general critique of Victorian American culture, See , Gabaccia, We Are What Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 99–102Google Scholar.

124 , BesidesIllustrated New YorkGoogle Scholar and The American Metropolis, See Beck, Louis J., New York's Chinatown: An Historical Presentation of its People and Places (New York, 1898)Google Scholar.