A recent article on the website “Harlem Focus” details how the “real” Little Italy was not actually on the lower East Side, but uptown in East Harlem.
An interesting report, it contains nothing that can’t be found in Christopher Bell’s “East Harlem Remembered,” which is not to criticize, rather to illustrate the need for the retelling of stories to keep them alive.
As such, we reconsider Bell’s work, which was published in 2013 ...to retell it, and review it in light of the time which has passed since and, perhaps, to mine it for further value.
Of particular interest to this website is Bell’s inclusion of a stand-alone, chapter-length, mini-bio of Vito Marcantonio, establishing him as the emblematic East Harlemite “non pareil” in spite of a local constellation that includes folks like Burt Lancaster, Langston Hughes, or the most-contemporary Marc Antony.
While addressed directly in said chapter, Marcantonio’s imprint upon East Harlem’s neighborhoods can be perceived throughout the book in passages where he is not mentioned by name.
Resident Felipe Luciano noted how in the 1960s and ‘70s the Young Lords Party had a group that, “simply advocated for people who need help to pay a ConEd Bill, or if they needed translation with the Welfare Departments or if you needed help with the homework.”
Such were the needs of Marcantonio’s constituents and the way in which he handled them became the blueprint for those who took up the tasks in the wake of his sudden departure.
Bell noted that, after World War II, the city’s housing and planning entities failed to engage neighborhood agents, “unlike before when Leonard Covello and the East Harlem community worked with Vito Marcantonio and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to bring the East River Houses to the neighborhood.”
Which is a reminder that a locale doesn’t necessarily recycle good leaders in succeeding generations and that their presence is a matter of good fortune, their death, the opposite.
A noteworthy achievement is the voice, the bullhorn even, “Remembered” gives to the residents of East Harlem.
The Written Words
A cursory review of East Harlem literature brings to mind Patricia Cayo Sexton’s “Spanish Harlem: Anatomy of Poverty,” which contains testimonials from the neighborhood, but is an academic document that provides the uninitiated with an institutional and demographic topography of the area, moreso than the soul of a people.
Poet Gil Fagiani’s “A Blanquito In El Barrio,” is rich in local idioms both visual and verbal, but the work is primarily in one voice, the poet’s -- with its shadow of the suburban Connecticut youth -- observing East Harlem as much as living it. Though Fagiani’s life was linked to the place in fateful ways, “Blanquito” is the voice of an eternal visitor delighting in exotic urban fauna.
Piri Thomas’s “Down These Mean Streets,” harnesses the power of literature to enmesh readers in a gritty personal drama with East Harlem as the backdrop, but it is a largely personal journey and, as with Cayo Sexton’s work, features portraits drawn primarily from the Puerto Rican community.
Michael Parenti’s “Waiting for Yesterday:Pages from a Street Kid’s Life” is a remembrance of the old haunts and characters via a singular voice--Parenti’s.
Bell’s book is, still more, a lively pastiche of vox populi, the purest presentation of East Harlem in its own words. Rife with colorful, colloquial recollections presented “as-is,” and homemade snapshots, “Remembered” hums with authenticity.
These people were there and Bell was able to land some big fish such as author Thomas, and Raoul Abdul, a confidante of the poet Hughes, but these have nothing over the rank and file residents he rounded up for recollection.
Here is Piri Thomas describing Marcantonio: “I thought he was Puerto Rican because he helped everybody, all nationalities. The Puerto Ricans and Italians were always fighting and he was helping everybody out.”
Joe Monserrat remembered how Marcantonio’s mentor Leonard Covello, “believed Italians should have rights, and African Americans and Puerto Ricans should have rights too. Despite the tension and fights between the groups, Pop Covello was one of the first to recognize Puerto Ricans in the school [ Benjamin Franklin High School] and in the community. The school was a community center and it was a very nice place.”
The Grassroots Perspective
These are examples of how East Harlemites actually viewed such community leaders; not through a prism of left and right, or career arcs to be analyzed, but through neighborhood, political interaction and personal contact.
With statements such as these we learn as much about Marcantonio as we do from an analysis of his legislative record or adherence to a particular party line.
In the following statement from Hortencio Morales, we learn of unique skills the city kid picked up during an apprenticeship on the streets:
“You had the fire hydrant, or the water pump, which we called la pumpa. The water pump was always open on every block in East Harlem. Someone in the neighborhood would get this big wrench to turn the water on. Next you found an empty can and scraped both sides of the can until both lids came off. With the water coming out of the hydrant at full blast, you placed the can in front of the nozzle and you had a powerful force of water gushing out.
Now that’s an East Harlem story.
Parenti’s remembrance marveled at the adaptability of street kids to their environment. Willie Lopez fills in the details, brings that spontaneous creativity to life.
Lopez recalled how stickball was: “...played on every block….You pitched or bounced the ball once on the street and you have one swing. The batter runs into the ball and, hopefully, you hit a hard line drive down the street. If you hit it on the roof, that’s an out, but when you played on the block, you always had fire escapes. Your goal was to hit the fire escapes or the wall because, if it bounced down off the wall, that’s how you could get an extra run.”
A Disappeared World
The assembled oral accounts, a few of which harken back to the late 19th century, recall forgotten features of quotidian life, provide a description of James Bryants’ iceman [maybe it was Michael Parenti’s father], the icebox and its operation, an explanation of the prevalent use of dumbwaiters in tenement buildings.
Bell gets into the weeds with the formation and history of local institutions, but this detail aids in spinning the web of relationships that make neighborhood a community; the wispy thread tying LuLu’s Candy Store to Joe Cuba’s vibraphone player. No group is slighted where their history and contributions are concerned. Bell even dug out a member of the small Greek community nestled among all the Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans and African Americans.
None of the accounts deny the area’s poverty, but neither do they dwell on it. For all its poverty and crime, people looked back fondly upon pre-redevelopment East Harlem as a collection of neighborhoods with what Robert Stern, another of Bell’s subjects, called a “dense network of associations.”
Said Morton Ross: “When I was a kid we threw away the key because we didn’t lock our doors in East Harlem. It was a “whose a dare?” system and anyone came in the building there was a superintendent or a janitor. And if someone came by your building that didn’t belong there, or if a person banged on the door, our Italian janitor said “whose a dare” and that trespasser ran like hell.”
Carlos De Jesus recalled an “open community” of fluid exchange and relation between residents.
Bell, for his part, provides naught but the unvarnished truths where East Harlem’s afflictions are concerned, but even in an accounting of street-gang presence, something of an ebullient urban lexicon surfaces:
“There were gangs all over the place. On 102nd Street the gang was called the Demons; 103rd Street gangs were the Dragons, and also the Copian (Copasetics) patrolled that area. No gangs existed on 104th Street until we started our gang, the Condemners. The Viceroys’ turf was on 110th Street and sometimes they came to 103rd Street to fight the Dragons on 105th Street was the Corsicans territory and on 106th the Colts ran that area.” [Manny Segarra]
The Public Housing Phantom
Bell tarries long on the identity imposed upon East Harlem via public housing policies decided beyond its confines; the immutable reality that transformed the area and erased its past save for voices like those archived here.
“Remembered” is a guided tour through both the time and space that has been, and is, East Harlem, an excursion through successive East Harlems. Bell even applies a tour guide’s language, opening up one chapter: “Here we will read how one man’s vision...”
The author, while constructing a fair balance sheet on redevelopment’s record in East Harlem, is not afraid to render judgement, calling it, “The tenement carnage and relocation.”
Arnie Segarra, resident of the Johnson Houses on Lexington Avenue, put things within the context of the times: “Housing projects were luxury housing back then and it was the first time anyone rode in an elevator and had a maintenance crew.”
Manny Segarra summoned the scars redevelopment left behind both on the landscape and individual psyches. ”Scores of tenements were destroyed, which left empty lots and this practice was commonplace throughout the city. I was ten years old and I kept thinking that everything would be OK. But I went downstairs and saw the empty buildings."
Bell maintains a loose, progressively tinted narrative history of the United States throughout the arc of East Harlem’s tale, always tying what was happening in the neighborhoods to larger societal trends, while highlighting a community asserting its own relevance beyond the East River.
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