Arthur Avenue, The Bronx

Why the Bronx, Not Manhattan

When the Italian community of lower Manhattan began to disperse in the early 20th century, some families moved to Brooklyn and others to Queens. But a substantial number moved to the Bronx — specifically to the Belmont neighbourhood in the west-central Bronx, around the blocks of Arthur, Hughes, Belmont, and Crescent Avenues near the New York Botanical Garden and Fordham University.

The Belmont neighbourhood's Italian population built up in the 1900s and 1910s, drawing largely from the same Southern Italian provinces as Manhattan's Little Italy — Calabria above all, along with Campania and Sicily. The specific character of Belmont's Italian community reflected the migration chain: people from the same comune in Calabria settled near one another, so whole streets in Belmont in 1920 were effectively colonies of specific Calabrian villages, with the same dialects, the same feast days, the same surnames.

What made Belmont different from Manhattan's Little Italy is that it didn't dissolve. As Mulberry Street's Italian character faded through the mid-20th century — absorbed by Chinatown from the south and SoHo gentrification from the north — the Belmont community, protected partly by its Bronx location and partly by the stability of the homeowning families who had settled there, maintained its Italian identity much longer.

Arthur Avenue and the Indoor Market

Arthur Avenue became the commercial spine of Italian Belmont. The street's food shops — the pork stores, the pasta makers, the bread bakeries, the fishmongers — reflected the Southern Italian domestic economy transplanted to the Bronx. Italian-American households in Belmont in the 1940s and 1950s were still making fresh pasta, buying whole animals from the pork store, getting bread from the baker on the corner: the shopping habits of the Italian paese maintained in the Bronx because the street infrastructure to support those habits had been built and was staffed by people who knew what was needed.

The Arthur Avenue Retail Market — the indoor market building on Arthur Avenue — was built in 1940 by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, himself the son of an Italian immigrant father, to move the pushcart vendors off the street and into a covered hall. The market is still operating: the same building, many of the same families (in succession) running the same stalls. The cheese shop, the pasta shop, the tobacco vendor — the market is genuinely still a working Italian food market, not a heritage theme park.

The Bronx's distance from the tourism infrastructure of lower Manhattan is probably what preserved it. Visitors to New York's "Little Italy" go to Mulberry Street for the restaurants and the Feast. People who actually want to buy Italian food go to Arthur Avenue. The distinction matters: one is performance, the other is function.

The Community That Stayed

The Italian-American families who remained in Belmont into the 1960s, 70s, and 80s were those who had bought their homes and whose children had stayed in the neighbourhood. This is a different demographic from the tenement renters of the earlier period: homeowning families with deeper roots, less incentive to move, and stronger ties to the specific parish and block that defined their Belmont identity.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church on Belmont Avenue — founded in 1906 as a Calabrian parish — remained the spiritual centre of the community. The annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (July) was the Belmont equivalent of the Feast of San Gennaro in Manhattan: a week-long street fair with the same roots in Southern Italian Catholic practice that the immigrant generation had brought from their home regions.

From the 1980s onward, Albanian immigration brought a new community to Belmont — many of the residential streets that had been Italian are now predominantly Albanian. But the commercial identity of Arthur Avenue has remained Italian, maintained by the families that operate the market stalls and restaurants and by the Italian-American visitors who come from across the metropolitan area specifically for the food.

Genealogy Research: Bronx Italian Families

For descendants researching Italian-American Bronx ancestry, the key resources are: the Bronx County Clerk's office for marriage and property records; the New York City Municipal Archives for birth and death records; parish archives at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and other Belmont-area parishes; and the online naturalization records at ancestry.com and familysearch.org.

Belmont families came predominantly from Calabria, which means the originating records are in the Calabrian provincial archives — particularly the Archivio di Stato in Catanzaro, Cosenza, and Reggio Calabria. Calabrian civil records from 1809 are partially digitized and accessible through Antenati (antenati.san.beniculturali.it). The specific comune of origin — obtainable from naturalization records, death certificates, or census records — is the key to finding those original documents.