Buffalo's Little Italy

Express, May 4, 1902                                                                                courtesy Buffalo & Erie County Public Library

       
         These young boys in Buffalo's Little Italy could very well have been among those who frequented Salvatore Rizzo's marionette theater. The brave marionettes in the performances who were always ready to do battle and fight for honor could surely have inspired these poses. Does anyone recognize any of the boys in this great photo?

          The Italian born population in Buffalo increased from 6,000 to 16,000 between 1900 and 1920. Italians represented 10% of Buffalo's foreign born population. They tended to settle near others from their village or town, thus there were four or five areas in Buffalo with heavily Italian populations. This blog is concerned with the Italians who settled in the waterfront area near Canal Street (later named Dante Place). Many of them were from the region around Palermo in Sicily. When people write of Buffalo's Little Italy, this is the area they are usually referring to.

          Family was of supreme importance here. Marriage was for life - so said the Catholic Church and so they believed. Family honor was taken seriously, and social life was intertwined with family life. Many of those who immigrated here were formerly agricultural workers in Sicily, most were illiterate, and usually they faced the challenge of a new language along with trying to find employment.

           St. Anthony of Padua Church played a large role in family and social life. It was the only Catholic church in the neighborhood until Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church was built in 1906. That church no longer exists; it was razed in the name of urban development in 1949. St. Anthony's is still here - it stands at 160 Court Street in downtown Buffalo.  Social clubs met at the church, along with labor unions when they came to exist. It was the place to celebrate births and marriages, and where funerals were held. There were parades and festivities to celebrate saint's days.

          Education was important to the newly arrived immigrants. I have read that it was the ambition of every family to have a doctor, a lawyer, and a priest. The public school in the neighborhood was School #2.

                                                                                                                            1910 Photo by Lewis Hines; Library of Congress

     How about it - are there any PS #2 alumni reading this?

Pupi Fratelli Napoli

        Since I obviously can't show one of Salvatore Rizzo's marionette performances, I have found one on You Tube from Sicily. I have read that there were three distinct marionette traditions in Italy: from Palermo and Catania in Sicily, and from Naples. The marionettes from these regions are distinguished by size and by style of manipulation, whether from the top or from the sides. These are the Napoli brothers from Catania, descendants of Don Gaetano Napoli, who opened his theater in in Italy in 1921. Salvatore Rizzo had been operating his American theater on Dante Place for almost twenty five years by then!

The marionettes that Salvatore Rizzo owned and used look similar in size to the ones we see here.
   
        Rizzo's shows were probably not as elaborate as this one. There are at four strong men performing here; if you watch them instead of the marionettes, you will see them wiping sweat from their brows, and note that they are all pretty muscular! Rizzo would have had his sons helping, and would have spoken all of the lines himself. I have not been able to find out whether he had music or not, but I did find an article from the newspaper that described the excitement at Rizzo's performances that was created during battle scenes. Rizzo would stamp his feet on the hollow boards behind the stage during the clash, the same as these Napoli brothers do. The audience would shout for their hero, and there would be the sound of clanging shields and swords. All of Rizzo's shows were in Italian as tradition dictated. Even non-Italian speakers (of whom there were none in Rizzo's theater) can get caught up in the excitement of a Sicilian marionette performance, as you can see.
       For those with shorter attention spans or less patience, the excitement of battle starts at 4:26 :)

The newspaper article from Buffalo also notes that the marionettes usually needed repairs after each performance!

       Has anyone been to Italy and seen one of these performances in person? I'd love to hear from you!

Immigration and Italian Culture in Buffalo

       
            According to an article I saw on the Library of Congress website, Italians were forced to leave their old world homes because of poverty, crop failures, and taxation. Many of them found their way to Buffalo, New York. In 1900, these were the cities with the largest number of Italian immigrants, in order: New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Newark, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Jersey City, Buffalo.

           Between 1900 and 1920, Buffalo's population of Italian born citizens rose from 6,000 to 16,000. Buffalo was and is very much a city of immigrants - in 1920 Italians accounted for 10% of Buffalo's foreign born population, and 7% of her population overall. I found these figures in a book by Virginia Yans McLaughlin called Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo 1880 - 1930. 

            Italian society in the old world was distinctly family oriented, and things were no different when they came to Buffalo. Even if a whole family could not immigrate together, the first arrivals scrimped and saved so that they could send for those left behind. The insularity of some Italian villages was repeated here so that it was not unusual to find many families from the same village living in the same tenement block. The fabric of the neighborhood was woven of family and friends. Just as in Italy, one's nuclear and extended family was the hub of one's social life. They helped each other find work or a place to live, and they formed mutual aid societies to carry each other through especially hard times.

              Italian women rarely left their homes to work. That was the man's job. Her sphere was the home; it was her responsibility to hold the family together. The book I mentioned quotes an Italian proverb: "If the father should die, the family would suffer; if the mother should die, the family ceases to exist." Women's honor and chastity were important, and to be protected. Girls were taught at a young age how to cook and do the marketing; they were often expected to care for younger siblings. Everything women did was done within the neighborhood.

Photo courtesy Buffalo & Erie County Public Library

The only boys present in the scene at left are very young. The older boys may have been at school - education was important to the immigrants - but just as important was helping in any way they could to feed the (usually large) family. I imagine bananas were a rare treat then.

Young boys sold newspapers, shined shoes, acted as messengers, sold apples - in short, they helped in whatever way they could and contributed their earnings to the family pot.

This photograph from the Library of Congress was taken in Buffalo in 1910 by Lewis Hines as part of his 'child workers' series. It is called 'Italian newsies'.

Was there a newsie in your family? I'm always so glad to hear from readers.














references
Italian Immigration: The Great Arrival, Library of Congress, http://www,loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/immigration/italian3.html
McLaughlin, Virginia Yans. Family and Community: Italian Immigration in Buffalo, New York, 1880-1930, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971.

Salvatore Rizzo

   
     
         I first learned about the Dante Place marionette theater while I was doing some research on a totally different subject. That is what I love about research - opening one door leads you to - more doors! The Buffalo and Erie County Public Library (Central Branch) has a collection of almost 200 scrapbooks in the Grosvenor Room. These were a Works Progress Administration project during the 1930s. They contain clippings from Buffalo newspapers dating from about 1900 onward, and they are a treasure trove of primary documents. Much of my information about Salvatore Rizzo came from these scrapbooks.

          Salvatore Rizzo was an Italian immigrant who came to Buffalo from Palermo sometime around 1900. According to a 1930 census I found at Ancestry.com, he would have been about 38 years old at the time of his arrival with his young family. Salvatore Rizzo settled his family on Canal Street. (The name of the street was still Canal; in 1909 it would be changed to Dante Place to reflect the new majority ethnicity of the neighborhood and to distance the street from its unsavory reputation as Canal Street.)

        Like most of the Italians who arrived in Buffalo between 1880 and 1920, Rizzo's background was agricultural. He found work as a fruit peddler, which again was a common occupation for new Italian immigrants. But there was something that set Salvatore Rizzo apart: he came from eight generations of pupari back in Palermo. Pupari is the plural form of puparo - 'puppet master' in Italian. His father had begun teaching him the skill and the art of the marionette performance as a boy, and he had worked in his father's 'teatrino', as his father worked with his grandfather before him. It was a family tradition, as Salvatore's son Frank proudly told a  Buffalo Times reporter in 1932. "My father can trace his ancestry eight generations and find that they were all great masters in marionettes. It was the great show in Italy."

        The Rizzo marionettes were hand carved from Italian wood by generations of the Rizzo men. Salvatore had about 75 puppets, many of which he had carved and painted himself. He also fashioned stage sets, painted scenery, and designed costumes for the marionettes.

        Salvatore Rizzo started his marionette theater in a tiny storefront on Canal Street (hereafter referred to as Dante Place), and every night after work he put on plays there. His audience crammed into the tiny storefront to see tales of Charlemagne and his Paladins come to life on the handmade stage.

          Does anyone remember hearing older relatives talk about the marionettes or the shows or the theater? I would love to hear your comments, as always.

This 1921 photograph from the Buffalo Express shows Salvatore Rizzo on the left, his son Anthony on the right, and three of their magnificent marionettes. They are standing in the rear of 106 Dante Place. Photo courtesy of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.

References: "Buffalonians Discover Marionette Theater", Buffalo Express, April 5, 1908. Buffalo's Foreign Population, Vol. 1,p. 146. Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, Grosvenor Room.

United States Census, 1930. http://www.ancestry.com
Grosso, Thomas X. The Erie Canal's Western Terminus-Commercial Slip, Harbor Development, and Canal District. http://www.eriecanalharbor.com/pdf/72BuffaloGuide.pdf

From Canal Street to Dante Place

  Back during the mid 1850s, when the Erie Canal emptied into Lake Erie, there was a street on the waterfront in downtown Buffalo called Canal Street. It was a tough and dangerous place, frequented by thieves, prostitutes, brawlers, and gamblers, studded with bars and brothels, teeming with every variety of vice. Thirsty sailors and canal men with pay in their pockets roamed the area and were both victims and predators. This map from 1901 shows Canal Street where it started at Commercial Street.

Image courtesy of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library

               When this map was made, the atmosphere of Canal Street had been in a state of transition for a decade or more. What happened? Several things: the railroads had begun to make inroads into the canal trade. Irish immigrants who could move to better neighborhoods were moving. And, most importantly, during the 1880s Italians began immigrating in ever increasing numbers to the United States, forced from their homes in the old county by high taxes, agricultural failure, and poverty. Early in the new century, so many Italians had settled in the area that the name of the street was changed from Canal Street to Dante Place. It was also called 'the Hooks', the Canal district, and Buffalo's Little Italy.

                       Many Italian families in Buffalo can trace their beginnings to this area of the city. I would love to hear from any and all with stories about the neighborhood, whether they have ever heard of Salvatore Rizzo and his marionette theater or not. Your comments are always welcome!