East Side Italian Section

My father’s family was a very complicated business. In the year 1956 my grandmother was already dead, and so my grandfather lived alone in an extremely small house out at the end of Lansing Street, in the Italian section of Utica. If one were to visit the neighborhood now one could still see traces of the fact that it was an Italian section because of the names on the signs of businesses long closed and shuttered. Today the neighborhood is Bosnian, Spanish and Black. In the time I am describing, 1956, the neighborhood called the East side, was distinctly Italian with numerous small grocery stores and churches, those little churches that appear to be have been built for a large family rather than a congregation. Furthermore, the churches were painted strange colors like hot pink and red.

It was the intent of every single Italian family on the East side, to move away as soon as possible and buy a house in any other section of the city, preferably the South end. Over the years they all did move away. My family was one of the first to relocate to the South end.

These Italian families left a great many things behind in the Italian section: things like real bread, home-made wine, sausage aged in the attic from the rafters, hugh gardens surrounded by wooden palings with doors attached with hinges of tied up rags. Very loud laughter. The smell of stogies. The pinching of the face on both cheeks. Real names with real histories and real meanings. Names like Bennacasa (good house).

They left all these things behind and replaced them with Wonder bread and Campbell’s soup. There were those, however, more educated I think, who understood the value of what we possessed back then, for example Uncle Tommy. From him we all were in the habit of referring to bread as “Real” bread, and "American" bread. The difference was so striking that we could not really have thought of it otherwise. Uncle Tommy’s bakery was in the back of a garage on the East side. The oven was entirely made of brick, and when you opened the door you entered a room where the bread was being taken out of the oven with long wooden paddles. A customer might say, “Is it fresh? I want fresh bread.” And Tommy would had that person a loaf saying “See for yourself.” The bread in question, would be so hot, that you couldn’t hold it in your hand, but Tommy could hold the bread in his hands which had become sort of heat-proof over the years.

The bread itself defies description. We would bring three loaves home on Sunday morning. It had to be morning because by one o’clock every loaf would be sold. We children, in the back seat of the car would eat an entire loaf of the unsliced bread. We would tear the heal off and then scoop out the hot inside of the bread and pass it around among ourselves. When we were done we would have eaten the entire inside of the loaf and the rest would still be completely intact. The fact that it didn’t change its appearance even though we had eaten the whole thing was always comical to us. People would say, “Tommy, why is the crust so hard?” And he would say. “We mix lead in with the dough.”

Or he might say, “Wonder bread! It’s a wonder it’s bread. Use it to wash the windows in your house.

The reason that the Italian community was in such a rush to exit the Italian section, to stop talking Italian and to change their names to something Anglo Saxon sounding, was because of a very intense fear of, and hatred of, Italians in Utica New York, in the middle fifties. The Appalachian Gangland Meeting had been uncovered and broken up at that time and Utica was in the news as a result as the "Gangland Capital of America." People were terrified of the Mafia, and the Mafia was a serious menace and threat to small business like for example Uncle Tommy’s Bakery. Italians were the principal victims of the Mafia, and for this reason it was the Italians who hated the Italians the most, and wanted to be disassociated from them.

It was difficult for Italians to buy houses outside of the East side. But it was easier if there was a name change involving the dropping of the vowel, but more importantly, an alteration of speech patterns such that the grammar and pronunciation of words was subtly different. Young woman of high school age took jobs as maids for rich families. My Mother worked for a Mrs. Owens whose husband was a factory owner. From Mrs. Owens she brought home a small salary, plus the correct pronunciation of the English language according to Anglo Saxon usage. Mrs. Owens was a member of the Christian Science Church, which my mother attended even as a child, hence the connection. Growing up in my house, therefore, everything was American middle class, and I actually did not understand that I was Italian in the Mafia sense of the word.