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New York City’s Vanishing Italian Roots

It’s underdog against underdog, as Italian American Museum evicts 85-year-old tenant

by
Rachel Shukert
April 29, 2015
(Sean Pavone / Shutterstock.com)
(Sean Pavone / Shutterstock.com)

Well, it looks like New York City’s Little Italy is going to have one less little Italian to kick around.

After five years of notice of rising rents, and a subsequent 5-year battle to fight them, 85-year-old Adele Sarno, one of the very last descendants of the immigrants who gave the neighborhood its name, has finally been served an official eviction notice by her landlord: the Italian American Museum.

For the past five decades, Sarno has occupied the apartment now owned (along with five others) by the museum in its adjoining building, and they’ve decided it’s time to get the kind of value out of it that its current tenant—living history though she may be—cannot offer.

To put it plainly, the average rent for a one bedroom apartment in Manhattan is $4,183 (just typing that number sent a horrible shiver up my spine.) Sarno’s upstairs neighbors pay $4,500 (another horrible shiver, with an accompanying dry heave. Sarno pays $820. So you can understand the problem. It’s an unfortunate situation for all involved. (You can read all the back and forth about it here.)

Obviously, it’s tempting to vilify the big bad museum for pushing a little old lady out of her lifelong home. That is, until you remind yourself that the Italian American Museum, the only one of its kind in the city, is a small, not-for-profit institution trying to hold on to its mission and pay what is sure to be a terrifying mortgage on prime Manhattan real estate.

We’re not exactly talking about yet another Citibank or Jamba Juice here, but the kind of place you expect to see disappear any day now to make way for yet another mirrored building of luxury condos that no one can afford. Underdog fighting underdog, that’s what New York City has come to. It’s only a question of which can win enough table scraps to stay alive for now.

Whenever I start to get depressed at how I have inexplicably become so very ancient (and my birthday is on Sunday, so it’s a lot right now; cards and gifts should be forwarded to me from the Tablet offices), I remember how lucky I am to be just old enough that my childhood still had some remnants of the Old Country in it.

If I were only about ten years younger, I’d have no memory of relatives with Yiddish accents, no Lithuanian nursery rhymes, no family stories about this or that rich uncle/cousin in Warsaw or Vienna. I’d never have tasted my great-grandmother’s apple strudel, for which there is no known written recipe, or known what ptchah is (which, frankly, might have been a blessing.) I’d have the same relationship to my roots as say, your average WASP has to Scotland—a certain amount of pride, an interest certainly, but no real hands-on knowledge. No sense of what it was like for the people who were there.

And I guess that’s what’s been on my mind as I’ve been reading about this case about how an institution devoted to preserving memory of a place is compelled to displace someone with living memory in order to do it.

But even if they were to let Adele Sarno stay in her apartment for the rest of her life (they’re not), it wouldn’t change the fact that the old Little Italy was always going to disappear in its Italian form. All the rent-control in the world can’t keep people from, you know, dying. Every culture in the world has been swept aside from its original place at some point, and replaced by another, with the hints of its former residents only to be found in place names and local legends. (I don’t think, for example, that there have been any Native Americans in Amagansett for quite some time.)

This is the way of the world, and I don’t know that the answer is to preserve things in amber, or try to reconstruct some sort of Colonial Williamsburg of the Lower East Side (although anyone who has lived there in the past 15 years is more than familiar with tenement living/paying out the nose for the privilege of taking a shower in your very own kitchen sink.) The question is whether the old culture is being replaced with one equally vibrant, one that will leave behind similar colorful artifacts and crusty old survivors full of fascinating stories when it starts to fade away.

The New Yorkers of 2015 won’t forget Adele Sarno and those like her, but the New Yorkers of 2115—who are they going to remember? All those luxury condos come with a cost much higher than any bank can guarantee.

Rachel Shukert is the author of the memoirs Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going To Be Great,and the novel Starstruck. She is the creator of the Netflix show The Baby-Sitters Club, and a writer on such series as GLOW and Supergirl. Her Twitter feed is @rachelshukert.