Bensonhurst, Brooklyn

From Manhattan to Brooklyn

Bensonhurst was the second chapter of the Italian-American story in New York. The first chapter was the Lower East Side and Little Italy — the tenement communities where the immigrant generation arrived and survived. The second chapter was the move across the river or through the subway tunnels to Brooklyn, where a family with some savings could rent or buy a row house, get their children into a better school, and start building the middle-class life the migration had promised.

The Italian movement to Bensonhurst gathered speed from the 1910s and accelerated in the 1920s and 1930s. Sicilian immigrants in particular, many of whom had first settled in lower Manhattan, made Bensonhurst their destination. By 1940 the neighbourhood was substantially Italian, and by the 1950s and 1960s it had become the archetypal Italian-American Brooklyn neighbourhood — the one that appeared in films, in journalism, in the popular imagination of what a New York Italian-American community looked like.

The physical character of Bensonhurst reflected the aspirations of the families who settled it. These were not tenements: they were two- and three-family row houses, brick semi-detacheds with small front gardens, the kind of housing that represented a decisive material improvement on the tenement buildings of the first generation. The homeowning Italian-American family in Bensonhurst — with the extended family clustered nearby, the same parish, the same social clubs, the same buying patterns at the same Italian-owned stores — was the social unit that defined the neighbourhood through its peak decades.

18th Avenue and Italian Brooklyn Life

18th Avenue (which Italian Brooklynites called Via Emanuele — named after King Vittorio Emanuele II) was the commercial heart of Italian Bensonhurst. The avenue had the same function that Mulberry Street had in Manhattan: a street of food shops, social clubs, barber shops, and cafes that reproduced in Brooklyn the commercial life of the Southern Italian town. The pork stores, the pastry shops, the cheese shops, the pasta makers — in Bensonhurst as in Belmont, the Italian immigrant household maintained Southern Italian domestic food practices because the commercial infrastructure to support them had been built on the local streets.

The Catholic parishes that served Bensonhurst's Italian population — St Dominic's, Our Lady of Guadalupe, St Finbar's — were the institutions around which social life organised. The feast days of the patron saints associated with specific Southern Italian regions were observed in Bensonhurst as they had been observed in Palermo or Naples: the processions through the streets, the outdoor shrines, the food and music that marked the saint's day as distinct from ordinary time.

The social club — the men's club attached to a mutual aid society or a local political organisation — was the third institution after the parish and the food shop. These clubs, typically occupying the ground floor of a residential building, were the spaces where the older generation of Italian-American men spent time, played cards, and maintained the social ties that kept the neighbourhood cohesive.

The Neighbourhood's Transformation

From the 1980s onward, Bensonhurst's Italian-American population began to age and decline. The children and grandchildren of the homeowning Italian families of the 1950s moved to Staten Island and suburban Long Island. A significant Chinese immigration beginning in the late 1980s transformed the demographic balance of much of the neighbourhood, and today the Bay Ridge end of the neighbourhood is Chinese-majority in many blocks, while 18th Avenue retains some Italian commercial presence.

The Italian-American community in Bensonhurst is not gone — there are still Italian parishes, Italian bakeries, Italian social clubs — but it is smaller and older than it was, and the neighbourhood's character has shifted substantially. What remains is most visible in the food infrastructure: the pastry shops and pasta stores and pork stores on 18th Avenue that have been in business since the 1940s, still operated by the same families.