The Italian-Americans of Mulberry Street, Long Before ‘The Godfather’

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Strolling along Mulberry Street in Little Italy during this year’s Feast of San Gennaro, visitors passed stands selling zeppole and sausage and peppers as vendors hawked “Fuggedaboudit” T-shirts and “Godfather”-themed trinkets. But when they reached St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral at the corner of Prince Street, the atmosphere changed, the booths thinned and visitors encountered large banners with historical photographs of the neighborhood hanging on the church cemetery walls.

For modern-day viewers, the simple images of Italian immigrants and their families are a window into the struggle and joys of the residents of Manhattan’s Little Italy in the early- and mid-20th century. But for Msgr. Donald Sakano, they have a somewhat deeper function.

“While we gaze at them, it is almost as if the people in the photos are gazing back at us and are reflecting on our situation from another place, almost like an icon in a religious setting,” he said. “I find that to be magical. You look at these figures and you’re drawn into them and you wonder about the moment that occurred before and after the shutter froze their features on a piece of film.”

The monsignor’s purpose for hanging the banners â€" seven and a half feet tall, five feet wide â€" is to try to bring the festival back to its roots, and away from what he sees as a crass, commercial use of stereotypes of Italian-Americans.

The project was assembled by Mark Bussell, a photography professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a former photography director at The New York Times, with the help of Joseph V. Scelsa, founder of the Italian-American Museum on Mulberry Street.

Mr. Bussell moved to Elizabeth Street in Little Italy in 1974 and enjoyed the sense of neighborhood in the small, family-owned shops and cafes, as well as on the stoops. He found that his neighbors looked out for one another in a way that had become rare in most of the rest of Manhattan.

Over the next 30 years, he watched many young Italian families move to the suburbs as they assimilated; rising rents forced out others. Recently, he became acutely aware of the dwindling number of Italians left in Little Italy. He realized that the “soul of that neighborhood, the Italian people, were quickly disappearing, and that it was incredibly important to document them before that happened.”

So he started a class at N.Y.U., “The Last Italians of Little Italy,” and enlisted his students to make photo essays and videos and to help preserve existing historical images. At first, they faltered. As a local butcher told Mr. Bussell, “A thousand N.Y.U. students have come into my shop to photograph me over the years, and not one ever returned.”

Courtesy of the Italian-American Museum A bakery on Mulberry Street. Circa 1935.

But over the course of three years, Mr. Bussell made sure his students did return, and with the help of Mr. Scelsa, Monsignor Sakano and a couple of neighborhood mainstays, they spent time in residents’ homes and shops.

At the festival last year, the cemetery walls featured life-size portraits of parishioners of St. Patrick’s done by Mr. Bussell’s student Alex Arbuckle. This was the beginning of Monsignor Sakano’s campaign to use photographs to try to refocus the festival on the neighborhood and the people who live there â€" and on a broader, more nuanced view of what it means to be Italian-American.

“The Sopranos,” the “Godfather” movies and the reality television show “Jersey Shore” have helped shape the image of Italian-Americans â€" even, sometimes, among themselves, said Joseph Sciorra, associate director of the John D. Calandra Italian-American Institute at Queens College.

“Italian-Americans are often represented in the broadest caricatures â€" whether undereducated, bigoted people from the outer boroughs who are overly concerned with their own body image or, of course, the ubiquitous Mafioso image,” he said. “There’s very little room in the media for an interesting and nuanced depiction.”

And while popular culture seldom shows the rich musical, artistic and intellectual heritage of Italian-Americans, Mr. Sciorra would be satisfied simply with more complex and subtle portrayals. Too often, he said, the third, fourth and fifth generations of Italian immigrants have their sense of Italian-American identity “created by the ‘Godfather’ movie narrative, as opposed to any story told by their own godfathers.”

Besides the photographs on the cemetery walls of Old St. Patrick’s, there have been other quiet efforts to broaden the cultural portrayal at the San Gennaro festival in the last few years, with buskers playing authentic Italian folk music and the Italian-American Writers Association selling books and holding readings.

And the religious processions, not the dubious items being sold, are still the core feast events for most of the Italian residents of the neighborhood, Mr. Sciorra said.

“Italian-American festivals have always been a mixture of the sacred and the profane,” he said.

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