Rents are rising, tourists are only just starting to return and the last Italian Americans in Little Italy in lower Manhattan are struggling to keep the wood-fired ovens burning.
Another cloud settled over the neighbourhood when Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, approved a $20 million grant to help restore the fortunes of Chinatown.
She called it a “beacon of cultural richness and diversity, not just for New Yorkers but for the entire world”, ignoring the hard-pressed cannoli and pasta producers next door.
Victor Papa, chairman of the Chinatown-Little Italy Historic District Improvement Association, wrote that a “whole ethnic community” had been “excluded, with many of its businesses facing financial hardships and potential closings and bankruptcies”. He sent a letter to the governor, co-signed by Ernest Lepore of the Ferrara Bakery and John Delutro, the Cannoli King of Caffe Palermo.
Papa, 76, said that the pandemic and climbing rents had left many restaurants in a crisis. “That’s part of the anger [over the grant],” he said. The possibility of state support might lead landlords to be more flexible, he said. “They are poor, they are working-class families that run these restaurants,” he added.
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Joseph Scelsa, founder of the Italian American Museum opening in Little Italy this year, said the grant was sought “to help the Asian community”, which everybody wanted but “there was a blind spot”. Chinatown “surrounds Little Italy so to exclude Little Italy is really ridiculous,” he said.
Ali Tisi, 70, sitting in his restaurant Il Piccolo Bufalo, said he believed that a compromise was being worked out to allow businesses from Little Italy to share some of the funds. “Both areas are suffering from the same problems,” he said. “Little Italy at one time was predominantly Italian-American; Chinatown was predominantly Chinese,” he said. But families in both communities had left for the suburbs.
Many blame New York University, to the north, which has steadily expanded. “The NYU dorms are so expensive,” Tisi said. “Two guys or two girls can rent an apartment here for $2,500, that drives the area’s rents up.”
Tisi said he was lucky that his father bought the building where he lives and runs his restaurant for about $17,000 in the 1940s. “It was a real neighbourhood,” he said. “If you were two blocks away and you did something, some lady would be yelling out the window: ‘I know who your mother is! I’m going to call her.’ Probably half the people that live here now don’t know the people that live on their floor.”
Ernest Rossi, who runs the Italian gift store at E Rossi & Company, was selling a small statue of the Madonna with a broom to a man from Philadelphia to sanctify his kitchen.
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Rossi, 71, whose grandfather opened the shop in 1910, said he went to a school that was half Italian-American, half Chinese-American. The two neighbourhoods rose or fell together. People who ate in Chinatown came to Little Italy for dessert, he said.
He closed his store for months during the pandemic and is struggling to keep it open after having surgery. Last year his wife, Margaret, and their co-worker, Freddy Lopez, reopened the shop. “Both of them came down with the virus,” he said. “They both ended up in hospital and both passed away.”
He felt obliged to keep the store open. But he felt lost without his wife. “You couldn’t give these buildings away 30 years ago. Now you can’t buy them.”
