Italian Harlem (East Harlem)

The Neighbourhood No One Remembers

When people think of Italian New York, they think of Mulberry Street in Little Italy or Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. But the largest Italian neighbourhood in New York City — at its peak, possibly the largest concentration of Italians outside Italy — was not in lower Manhattan or the Bronx. It was in East Harlem, on the blocks running east from Park Avenue between 96th and 125th Streets, centred on the corridor of East 116th Street that residents called Via Regale — the Royal Road.

At its peak in the 1930s, Italian Harlem held around 100,000 Italian-American residents, a number that dwarfed the population of Little Italy or any other Italian neighbourhood in New York. It was a city within a city, with its own commercial infrastructure, its own parish network, its own press, its own political machine, and its own internal geography of regional communities: the Neapolitans on one set of blocks, the Sicilians on another, the Abruzzese on a third.

Almost none of this survives. The Italian community of East Harlem dispersed more completely than any other New York Italian neighbourhood. A Puerto Rican population began arriving in the 1940s and expanded rapidly in the 1950s; the post-war Italian-American generation had the economic resources to move to the suburbs and did. By 1970 Italian Harlem was already a memory. By 1980 it had largely vanished from the map. The street that Italian Harlemnites called Via Regale is now Spanish Harlem — El Barrio — and the Italian presence is reduced to the annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and a handful of red-sauce restaurants on 116th Street.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the Feast

The spiritual centre of Italian Harlem was Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church at 448 East 115th Street, founded in 1884 as the first Italian national parish in New York. The church served the Neapolitan and Sicilian immigrant population of East Harlem for over a century and remains standing today, though the congregation that built it is gone.

The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, held annually in July, was the defining public event of Italian Harlem. The feast — which began in 1881, before the church was even built — is the procession of the statue of the Madonna through the streets of the neighbourhood, with the ritual of devotees carrying the heavy statue, pinning money to the dress of the icon, and celebrating the miracle-working power associated with Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Southern Italian Catholic tradition. The feast is still held annually at the church, though the neighbourhood that once surrounded it has changed beyond recognition.

Robert Orsi's book The Madonna of 115th Street (1985) is the definitive historical account of Italian Harlem and the faith practices of the community — it remains the best way to understand what the neighbourhood was and what it meant to its inhabitants.

Genealogy: Researching Italian Harlem Families

For descendants researching family history in Italian Harlem, the key starting points are: New York City Municipal Archives (birth, marriage, death records); US Census records (1900, 1910, 1920, 1930 census records showing East Harlem addresses); parish archives at Our Lady of Mount Carmel; and naturalization records at ancestry.com and the National Archives in New York City.

The Italian-specific resource is the originating comune — Italian Harlem families came predominantly from the regions of Campania, Sicily, Basilicata, and Abruzzo, and the specific home town is recorded on most naturalization papers and death certificates. Once you have the town name, Antenati (antenati.san.beniculturali.it) gives you access to digitized Italian civil records from 1809.