Stories, Streets, and Saints: Photographs and Oral Histories from Boston's North End

Given that Stories, Streets, and Saints begins with a deeply moving "In Memory of My Friend Anthony Riccio 1952–2022," by Tommy Damigella, and ends with an equally heartfelt epilogue titled "Anthony's Gift to Us," by James S. Pasto, it is only fitting to add my own fond memories of an old friend and fellow Italophilic scholar. I have read and reviewed several of Anthony's books, including From Italy to the North End: Photographs, from 1972–1982 (SUNY Press, 2017). Riccio was manager of stacks and collections maintenance at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, and he and I often shared the podium on "Little Italy" panels at American Italian Historical Association annual meetings. Over the decades, I attended many of his lectures and, not incidentally, photo-documented many of the places he has so eloquently written about and illustrated. Our last meeting was in 2017 when my wife and I went to the Litchfield Historical Society in Connecticut for a lively and informative talk about his book Farms, Factories, and Families: Italian American Women of Connecticut (SUNY Press, 2014).Although Anthony Riccio will be missed, his work will not, as it is timeless. He has documented in images and words better than most academics who have captured the more detailed facts of Italian America but who in the process have left out its more important soul. The lasting value of his work goes well beyond mere documentary scholarship. Loving a subject is different from knowing it. Those of us trained in the (pre-postmodern) social sciences were taught to differentiate, as did Max Weber, between two ways of knowing—kennen (conoscere) and wissen (sapere). Anthony Riccio knew his subjects intimately, and each of his books conveyed both knowledge and sentiment to their readers.Stories, Streets, and Saints is a carefully detailed, yet idiosyncratic, story about one of the most iconic Little Italies in America: Boston's North End. In it, Riccio has stitched together brief oral histories of mostly elderly local residents to create an intimate, seamless garment of Boston's North End from the age of immigration at the turn of the twentieth century through the era of neighborhood upheaval in the "New Boston" of the 1980s. This vivid record is the result of extensive fieldwork, photography, and library research, as well as translation and transcription of the stories he was told by residents, who also provided images for the book. Some of these stories were of premigration life in Italy, which provided an important context for understanding the cultures they brought with them to enrich the North End. In the process, it becomes clear that there is no "average" Italian, since each piece is unique and must be read. His work is not a survey, because human beings don't live inside surveys.Although many Italian immigrants to the United States were grateful for having escaped from poverty and oppression as well as natural (and manmade) disasters such as the 1908 Messina earthquake, the rise of Fascism, and two World Wars, the North End was not a perfect cocoon for newcomers. The book offers rare firsthand stories of the deadly 1918 Spanish flu epidemic and eyewitness descriptions of the horrific Great Molasses Flood of 1919, about which local papers reported on the deaths of twenty-one "foreigners": "Loading up their homemade wagon with firewood and ice, the Luongo children were about to head home from Foster Street when they heard a loud crack that sounded like a firecracker. Just around the corner on Commercial Street, powerful gases caused the molasses tank to break apart, propelling chunks of steel two hundred feet long and fifty feet wide, which destroyed homes, smashed trestles of the Boston Elevated Railway, and unleashed a deadly fifteen-foot wave of sticky, brown molasses, which engulfed and suffocated people and horses" (121).Each chapter is a snapshot of the most important events in the evolution of the North End, as locals share stories of religious celebrations, street life, the importance of work, simple recipes, and ancient prayers that mimic ancient oral traditions. We hear Boston Italian voices in the chapter "Justice Denied: Sacco and Vanzetti." As explained by Angelo Sardo: "They left the chain around their feet in Italy and here they put it around their necks, the poor devils. Why was this? Because they didn't know how to read or write. So they didn't know how to defend themselves" (167).Helen Luongo complained about the loss of "The Love of the Family": I would rather have a Depression than what we have today. People were happy. You didn't have—my mother couldn't give us cocoa or coffee or milk. She'd buy cocoa shells and make cocoa in the morning, she'd make a big pan. Then we'd get the bread and we'd all have—we couldn't have two or three slices of bread. One loaf of bread had to be enough for the whole family! You didn't have—but the happiness that we had, the closeness of the family! You don't find that today. You don't find the closeness of family now. (73)After his house "got robbed," Fred Bourne lamented that "The Racket Guys Kept Order": "Now in the old days you used to go out of your house, and I'm not giving you a word of exaggeration, leave your door unlocked or even wide open, and nobody as much stepped in your door because if you were a stranger, and you went into a house, people would say 'Who do you want, who do you see?' . . . You see I mixed with rough guys that were supposed to be killers, racketeers, tough tomatoes, and they never bothered a legitimate person" (302).Vladimir Ciani, the North End's men's club president, spoke of a different kind of change.As an urban sociologist who has studied gentrification globally, I was most interested in the North End's transformation that is dealt with in depth in the last four chapters. On my last visit to the North End in 2019, it was clear that it was well on its way to becoming an ethnic theme park. These are places where despite displacement of most of the "natives," some simulated aspects of the neighborhood have been preserved as a spectacle for the appreciation of tourists. These are places where "those left behind are the keepers of the tradition who can tell you how it was in the 'good old days' in the old neighborhoods" (Krase 2017, 536). In words and pictures, Anthony Riccio has captured for us the way it was, as well as the way it will continue to be.