Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
In the NYC area, any regular white middle class neighborhood within 100 miles or so of Manhattan will have an Italian presence. Of course Italians are suburbanized alongside everyone else, but there are still some old-school urban enclaves.
Putting aside the touristy Little Italies of the region, places that are both old-school Italian and where you may hear Italian spoken would be:
Dyker Heights Brooklyn (around 13th Ave.)
Morris Park, Bronx (around White Plains Road and Williamsbridge Road)
Middle Village, Queens (along Metropolitan Ave.)
Howard Beach, Queens (along Cross Bay Blvd.)
Then there's the South Shore of Staten Island, which is definitely Italian, and where you are very likely to hear Italian, but the problem is it's newer and more suburban, so you lose the feel, even if the shopping plazas are full of salumerias and Italian bakeries.
There are other Italian enclaves, but I would say less intense these days. These would be East Williamsburg around Metropolitan Ave. (yeah, hipsterville still has an Italian section, where you still see little old Italian ladies making "gravy" outside their house), Bensonhurst around 18th Ave. (though the Chinese are really taking over this section), Whitestone, Queens, Mill Basin, Brooklyn, Gravesend, Brooklyn (which has some really good Sicilian places still) and even Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn (though this area is also super yuppieville).
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Which is quite different from the Italian geography of the city ca. 1940. At that time East Harlem was the biggest Italian neighborhood in the city and Little Italy in Manhattan was still going strong. The major Italian areas of the outer boroughs then I believe were Arthur Ave/Belmont in the Bronx, and Red Hook/Carroll Gardens and Bushwick and Williamsburg in Brooklyn.
After the war, Manhattan ceased to be attractive to Italian Americans or to new immigrants.
My guess is the "old" Italian areas of Brooklyn were the initial settlements for the postwar immigrants but the center of Italian life in Brooklyn spread southward, with Bensonhurst and environs soon becoming the city's biggest Italian neighborhood. It's interesting that it went from Jewish to Italian, rather than an earlier Italian population attracting a later one.
The "old" Italian American population, meanwhile, moved to Queens and out of the city altogether to Long Island in the postwar years. So I'm guessing the Italian neighborhoods of Queens, like Howard Beach (which is pretty suburban in character) attracted both "old" Italian Americans and postwar immigrants.
Meanwhile, I suspect Staten Island is really just an offshoot of Bensonhurst and a suburban outpost that really took off a generation later than LI.
At this point I suspect the descendants of Italian immigrants a century ago mostly live in far-flung suburbs and exurbs like Suffolk County, Dutchess County, central NJ etc., with some assimilated yuppies and hipsters living in Manhattan and the "hip" parts of Brooklyn rather than in the Italian enclaves that are still largely first and second generation.
Third and fourth generation Italian Americans still living in the "old neighborhood" is probably more of a Philadelphia thing.