Sicilian & Calabrian · Our Lady of Mount Carmel · The Other Italian West Side
Heritage guide for Italian-American descendants
| Location | West Side of Providence, Rhode Island; west of Federal Hill and south of the Olneyville neighbourhood; roughly bounded by Cranston Street, Plainfield Street, and Manton Avenue |
| Peak Italian settlement | 1890s–1930s; Sicilian and Calabrian immigrants arrived after the first Neapolitan wave that established Federal Hill, building a distinct and slightly later Italian enclave to the west |
| Primary origin | Predominantly Sicilian (from Palermo, Messina, and the interior) and Calabrian (from the toe of the Italian peninsula); distinct from the Neapolitan-dominated Federal Hill community |
| Key institution | Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish — the spiritual centre of Silver Lake's Italian Catholic community; the Carmelite devotion reflects the southern Italian and Sicilian religious tradition brought from Italy |
| Character | Working-class, industrial, neighbourhood-focused; less commercially prominent than Federal Hill but more residentially stable; the neighbourhood where Italian-American families stayed when Federal Hill became fashionable and expensive |
| Social institutions | Italian-American mutual aid societies, bocce courts, social clubs, and small family businesses; the neighbourhood infrastructure of working-class Italian-American life maintained across generations |
| Today | Silver Lake retains more of its Italian-American character than Federal Hill, with family-owned businesses, active social clubs, and a residential population that includes the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original immigrant generation |
Every major American city with a large Italian-American population has its famous Italian neighbourhood — the one that appears in the guidebooks, that tourists visit for the restaurants, that the city's promotional literature celebrates as a piece of living heritage. In Providence, that neighbourhood is Federal Hill, the West Side enclave of Neapolitan immigrants that established itself from the 1870s onward along Atwells Avenue and that became, over time, the public face of Providence's Italian-American community. But Federal Hill was not the only Italian neighbourhood on Providence's West Side, and it was not necessarily the most representative of the city's Italian immigrant experience in its full complexity.
Silver Lake is the neighbourhood that tells the rest of the story. Situated west of Federal Hill, occupying the gentle slopes that rise from the lowlands of Olneyville toward the western edge of Providence, Silver Lake developed as a distinct Italian community from the 1890s onward — slightly later than Federal Hill, and settled by a somewhat different immigrant stream. Where Federal Hill's first Italian settlers were predominantly Neapolitan and Campanian, Silver Lake attracted Sicilians and Calabrians who arrived in the later decades of the great migration: immigrants from the island and the toe of the boot, from communities whose relationship to the Italian state and whose cultural traditions differed in significant ways from those of the Neapolitans who had come before them.
The distinction was not merely geographical. Sicilians and Calabrians in American cities frequently formed separate communities from Neapolitans and northern Italians, maintaining the regional and village loyalties that Italian unification had not erased, establishing their own national parishes and mutual aid societies, and preserving the specific cultural practices — the food traditions, the religious devotions, the dialects — of their particular regions of origin. Silver Lake was, in this sense, an expression of the internal diversity of Italian immigration to Providence, a Sicilian and Calabrian enclave that existed in a relationship of both connection and distinction with the Neapolitan Federal Hill to its east.
Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish was the institutional anchor of Silver Lake's Italian community in the same way that Holy Ghost and Saints Peter and Paul parishes served Federal Hill. The Carmelite devotion — centred on Our Lady of Mount Carmel and deeply rooted in the religious culture of southern Italy and Sicily — reflects the specific spiritual geography of the communities that settled Silver Lake. The devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel was not a generic Italian Catholicism but a specifically southern Italian one, carried from the festivals and processions of Sicilian and Calabrian towns to the working-class streets of Providence's West Side, where it took new form in the urban immigrant context while retaining its essential character.
The mutual aid societies that proliferated in Silver Lake from the turn of the twentieth century onward were perhaps the neighbourhood's most important secular institutions. The Italian mutual aid tradition — the società di mutuo soccorso — was a response to the fundamental vulnerability of immigrant workers in early twentieth-century American industry: the absence of public welfare, the danger of the factory and construction work that most Italian immigrants performed, and the complete dependence of immigrant families on the continued earning capacity of their breadwinners. The mutual aid societies provided sickness benefits, death benefits, and burial assistance; they also served as social clubs, as networks of employment information, and as mechanisms for maintaining the village and regional connections that gave Italian-American community its particular texture.
Silver Lake's Italian-American clubs and social institutions — the bocce courts behind the social club buildings, the card rooms where men gathered in the evenings, the women's associations connected to the parish — were the built environment of a working-class community that was not wealthy enough to create grand architecture but that was rich in the informal infrastructure of collective life. These institutions were not picturesque in the way that Federal Hill's restaurants and Atwells Avenue's commercial strip were picturesque, but they were more fundamental to the daily life of the Italian immigrant community than anything that appeared in newspaper photographs or tourist accounts.
The story of Silver Lake in the second half of the twentieth century is, in important ways, the story of Italian-American neighbourhood persistence in the face of pressures that dissolved similar communities in other American cities. Urban renewal, the suburban migration of the middle class, the arrival of new immigrant communities, and the gentrification of the more commercially prominent Federal Hill neighbourhood — all of these forces worked to dissolve the residential Italian-American character of the West Side. Federal Hill, reimagined as a restaurant district and destination neighbourhood, became more famous but less authentically Italian-American as the original immigrant families moved to the suburbs and their places were taken by restaurants, bars, and the professional-class residents who valued the neighbourhood's aesthetic without necessarily sharing its history.
Silver Lake followed a different trajectory. Less commercially prominent than Federal Hill, less attractive to the gentrification pressures that transformed Atwells Avenue, the neighbourhood retained a higher proportion of its original Italian-American population and its original character. The grandchildren of the Sicilian and Calabrian immigrants who settled Silver Lake in the 1890s and 1900s were more likely to still be living in the neighbourhood — or in houses just beyond its edges — than their Federal Hill counterparts. The bocce courts and social clubs that were the fabric of immigrant social life survived longer in Silver Lake than in the more celebrated neighbourhood to its east.
John O. Pastore, who in 1945 became the first Italian-American governor of Rhode Island and in 1950 the first Italian-American United States Senator, grew up in the Italian-American communities of Providence's West Side — a product of precisely the immigrant world that Silver Lake represented. Pastore's career embodied the political possibilities that had opened for Italian-Americans by the mid-twentieth century, and his trajectory from the son of immigrant parents to the United States Senate was understood by Providence's Italian-American community as a collective achievement, a vindication of the long decades of settlement and institution-building that the neighbourhood's working-class Italian families had invested in the West Side. The political culture that produced Pastore — the Italian-American Democratic machine politics of Rhode Island, deeply rooted in the neighbourhood associations and parish networks of West Side Providence — was the political expression of the same community life that Silver Lake embodied in its bocce courts and mutual aid societies and Our Lady of Mount Carmel devotions.
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