Anthony V. Riccio - From Italy to the North End: Photographs, 1972-1982

From

ITALY

to the

NORTH END

From

ITALY

to the

NORTH END

Photographs, 19721982

ANTHONY V. RICCIO

F OREWORD BY J AMES P ASTO

Cover credit: Mailboxes on 22 Sheafe Street, 1981. Anthony V. Riccio.

Published by

S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY

2017 Anthony V. Riccio

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

E XCELSIOR E DITIONS is an imprint of S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

www.sunypress.edu

Production, Jenn Bennett

Marketing, Fran Keneston

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Riccio, Anthony V., author.

Title: From Italy to the North End : photographs, 19721982 / Anthony V. Riccio.

Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Series: Excelsior editions

Identifiers: LCCN 2016053169 (print) | LCCN 2016057159 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781438466996 (hardcover : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781438467016 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Italian AmericansMassachusettsBostonHistory20th centuryPictorial works.

| Italian AmericansMassachusettsBostonBiographyPictorial works.

| ImmigrantsMassachusettsBostonBiographyPictorial works.

| North End (Boston, Mass.)Ethnic relationsHistory20th centuryPictorial works.

| North End (Boston, Mass.)Social life and customs20th centuryPictorial works.

| Little ItaliesMassachusettsBostonHistory20th centuryPictorial works.

| Boston (Mass.)Ethnic relationsHistory20th centuryPictorial works.

| Boston (Mass.)Social life and customs20th centuryPictorial works.

Classification: LCC F73.68.N65 R53 2017 (print) | LCC F73.68.N65 (ebook) |

DDC 305.8009744/61dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053169

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To the people of the North End who accepted me as part of their community, welcomed me into their homes, and trusted me to tell their unique Italian-American neighborhood story in print and image.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

James Pasto

Richard Alba has argued that Italian Americans are in the twilight of ethnicity. A formerly thick ethnic identity built on deeply lived practicesverbal, culinary, religious, and occupationalis being replaced by (at best) what Herbert Gans calls a symbolic ethnicity, built on more abstract notions of heritage, ancestry, and occasional ethnic celebrations. If Italian American ethnicity is in its twilightand it is hard to argue against Albathen the Italian American neighborhoods that made their mark on the American landscape and mind, either as fact, fiction, or myth, are most certainly in that deepest moment just before the end of twilighttheir dusk. There are three main causes of this. The first was the out-migration to the suburbs that was only partially offset by the influx of new Italian immigrants after World War II. The second was the urban renewal program of the 1950s and early 1960s in the form of an outright demolition of whole neighborhoods that seemed to particularly target Italian sections of major US cities. The third was gentrification. Many Italian neighborhoods had disappeared by the early 1960s; others clung to ever-shrinking space into the 1970s; while a few persist today, in attenuated form, saved by gentrification and centered around one of the most persistent elements of Italian culturefood. However, as Hegel reminds us, it is with the falling of dusk that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings, and it is thus only now that we can begin to understand and fully appreciate these neighborhoods for what they were through all the romance and beyond all the slander.

Anthony Riccios From Italy to the North End helps us do this. The book is a visual Rosetta stone of Italian American life in the North End of Boston in the late 1970s and early 1980s, providing clues to help us to understand the cultural logic of what made Italian American neighborhoods the extraordinary places they were. The book stands in a long tradition of urban images. Here we could list the iconic photographs by progressive reformers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine in New York City, depicting arrivals at Ellis Island, crowded slums, and child labor. There are also the equally iconic images of Jules Aarons and Leslie Jones in Boston, showing urban window-watchers, street-corner societies, and child-filled streets. But whereas Riis, Hines, Aarons, and Jones were on the outside looking in, Riccio is on the inside looking out. Moreover, while Riis and Hine gave us the dawn of Italian American ethnicity, and Aarons and Griffin gave us its midday, then Anthony Riccios photographs reveal its evening; its buona sera , the beautiful sunset that, as Levi-Strauss suggests in Triste Tropiques , brings with it a complete synopsis of all that has happened.

Riccio is a visual storyteller who shows us the last generation of Italian-born living in their Italian American urban village, with their children and grandchildren, carrying on the daily rituals and annual festivals that they created here. Riccio calls these elders the last custodians of the small village ethos transported from southern Italy. I call them the last of the Founders. Look at them and you will see the faces of hardworking, selfless people. People who took a risk and came to a new place and an uncertain future. See the weariness in their expressions and bodies, borne from a life of hard work. But see also the joy in the knowledge that, by and large, their children were better off than they were when they came. See something else. Something that is so evident and so bold: their dignity. It is a dignity that came both from their pasthowever much they were displaced from their home villages, in America they remained grounded in its peasant ways and wisdomand their present: whatever obstacles their children might still face, they knew that those children could now do so as Americans and on American terms, because their parents had taught them to live in a new land, even at the cost of their own cultural irrelevance.

From Italy to the North End is a book for all people about a place all people can feel in these photos. Those who grew up in the North End will see familiar scenes and familiar faces. They will be reminded of those days in that place. Italian Americans who grew up in places like the North End will no doubt see resemblances to their own special Italian place in America. Non-Italians living in the North End today will see the past that created the space that many still feel to be very Italian, and understand how it came to be. Those outside of the North End, whether they be in America, or China, or back in Italy today, will see something familiar too, perhaps a humanity that they share in a facial expression or store front or a face that reminds them of someone they knew. Yes, a book for all people.

Before writing this I spoke to Anthony about, among other things, his goals for taking these photos. He was not trained as a photographer, but learned it in the small villages of Italy and the streets of the North End. He did not come to the North End to take photographs. But he found that the Founders of the North End wanted their stories to be known and remembered. As Anthony put it: