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9780762739745

Boston's North End : Images and Recollections of an Italian-American Neighborhood

by
  • ISBN13:

    9780762739745

  • ISBN10:

    0762739746

  • Format: Trade Paper
  • Copyright: 2006-01-01
  • Publisher: Globe Pequot
  • Purchase Benefits
List Price: $16.95

Summary

Illustrated with nearly 200 vintage photos of Boston''s North End, this book presents a delightful and fascinating social history of one of the last intact Italian-American neighborhoods in the United States. It is the result of many years of interviewing hundreds of Italian immigrants--the last custodians of the ancient oral tradition transported from Italy--who at the turn of the last century left their rural homeland, carrying their Old World "contadino customs and beliefs to the North End, and transformed the urban ghetto of Boston into a Little Italy. These stories are vivid recollections about the immigrants'' life experiences in Italy and the New World. It reveals the remarkable working history of Italian immigrant men and women, the assimilation of these people into the American way of life, the old traditions that they adapted to their new surroundings, and their undying loyalty to family. The North End community''s transformation after the 1980s'' urban redevelopment is also addressed in many of the oral histories. Many people granted the author access to prized family albums containing a wealth of unpublished photog

Author Biography

Anthony Riccio grew up in an old ethnic neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, where the constant hum of the local American Steel and Wire mill could be heard in the well-tended backyards of Italian immigrants. He returned to the ancestral villages of his grandparents while pursuing an M.A. from Syracuse University in Florence and photographed daily life in the rural villages of the south. He later became the director of the North End Senior Citizen Center in Boston, where he conducted oral-history interviews and photographed elderly Italian Americans of the North End neighborhood. He lives in Westbrook, Connecticut.

Table of Contents

Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
Life in the Old Country
1(18)
Journey to America
19(4)
Becoming an American Citizen
23(6)
Life in the New World
29(14)
The Italian Woman at Work
43(8)
The Italian Man at Work
51(14)
The Italian Family
65(10)
A North End Christmas
75(6)
The Molasses Explosion
81(6)
Sacco and Vanzetti
87(4)
The Depression Years
91(8)
Italian Societies
99(4)
The Feast of Saint Rocco
103(6)
Making Wine
109(6)
The Old Ways
115(14)
Local Politics
129(6)
The Waterfront and the ``New Boston''
135(10)
A Neighborhood in Transition
145(8)
Out in the Street
153(10)
Poor Tenant, Poor Landlord
163(6)
Going It Alone
169(9)
Photo Credits 178

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Excerpts

From the book's preface:

The North End I found in the late 1970s was still an intact, self-contained neighborhood of multi-storied brick tenement houses with walk-up apartments, a vibrant community where people walked the streets and elders gathered on corners and in parks speaking regional dialects of Calabrese, Napoletano, Siciliano, and Abruzzese. Open-air fruit and vegetable stands, family-run bakeries named "Boschetto," "Drago," and "Parziale," meat markets, pastry shops, religious society clubhouses with figures of patron saints painted on street-level windows, and corner barbershops lined the narrow streets, reminiscent of the rural southern Italian villages the immigrants had left behind at the turn of the century. . . .

The idea of preserving the neighborhood's history came to me as I listened to a woman recounting how she had to leave school at age 14 to help support her large family, a story similar to my mother's own childhood experience in New Haven. When she articulated what it felt like to step on a scale for weekly weigh-ins under the watchful eyes of officials while wearing a lead-filled undergarment fitted by her parents so she could satisfy the labor-law weight requirements for working children in 1925, it inspired me to start my own kind of neighborhood history project.

Encouraged by Jim, I began interviewing the elderly in either English or Italian. These tape-recorded sessions took place during my many visits to their old-fashioned cold water flats where we often conversed at kitchen tables warmed from the heat of an opened oven door, sipping espresso,or talked in living rooms decorated with pictures of saints, or--during summer months--conducted our conversations amid their rooftop vegetable gardens. Some interviews were recorded during casework conversations at the Drop-In Center, during those troubling moments when old people faced eviction from their homes--the distressing underside beneath the glitter of the "New Boston" not reported by the news media. Prior to the skyrocketing values of real estate and condominium conversion in the North End, the idea of facing a sudden steep rent hike or being evicted by the landlord was unfamiliar and hardly understood in Italian-speaking households. In my daily walks around the neighborhood, I also recorded lively street conversations in local parks and on corners where the elderly gathered, in their cellars where they made wine, and at their summertime religious festivals.

Excerpted from Boston's North End: Images and Recollections of an Italian-American Neighborhood by Anthony V. Riccio
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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