The Theater on Dante Place

     
           In this post I'd like to share what I have learned so far about Salvatore Rizzo's theater on Dante Place. For the sake of coherence, I'm going to refer to the street as Dante Place, even though it was named Canal Street at an earlier point in time.
        I found an interesting article in one of the scrapbooks held at the Central Library in downtown Buffalo. It was dated April 5, 1908 and appeared in the Express newspaper.

                                                                                                                                Courtesy Buffalo & Erie County Public Library

        Crystal Beach was a popular amusement park across the border in Canada, known to generations of Western New Yorkers, especially Buffalonians. To get there, many boarded the Canadiana, which docked not too far from Rizzo's waterfront theater in Buffalo. The author of the article above describes how to get to the marionette theater: 

"Turn into Dante Place on the right as you leave the Commercial Street bridge, then walk a little way along this street with its huddled domesticity and teeming shops and fruit stands, past crates of fowls and strings of onions, past doorways filled with children and easy-going men and women who carry on the Italian tradition of life in the open."

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/map_item.pl?data=/gmd380/g3804/g3804b/pm005430.sid&style=gmd&itemLink=D?gmd:2:./temp/~ammem_8vnc::&title=Buffalo,+Erie+Co.,+N.Y.+

             The old drawing above shows part of the Buffalo waterfront in 1902 At the upper left you can see a street running horizontally from left to right; it is labelled 'Canat' - it is supposed to say 'Canal.' This is the street that became Dante Place. If you follow this street heading to the right, you will see that it crosses Evans. One block further you see where LeCouteulx Street meets Canal Street, and that is roughly where Salvatore Rizzo's storefront theater was.

                  The writer goes on to describe how every seat in the little theater is filled nightly, and all the wall space taken too. There is the clash of swords and shields, and shouts of 'brava' from the all-male crowd, as the marionettes act out the stories of Charlemagne and his courageous knights. I like the part from the article above where the writer tells how Rizzo let him look behind stage, where rows and rows of marionettes "are hung aloft like so many Bluebeard victims." Salvatore Rizzo had over 75 marionettes, which gives one an idea of how intricate were the stories he told with them.

                  The most commonly given reason I found to explain why there were no women or girls at these performances was that there was often 'rough language' from the audience. That is a plausible explanation, but another factor is the Italian culture operating at that time and place. Little Italy in Buffalo, like the other Little Italy places across the country, was full of very recent immigrants whose traditions had not been worn away by life in the new world. Women did not go out and socialize in the evenings the way men did. According to a study by Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, a woman did not leave her home unchaperoned at that time, and husbands and fathers dominated family affairs. The marionette shows, with their emphasis on courage, honor, chivalry, and loyalty may have helped shape the Sicilian male's self-image.

                    Women weren't entirely absent from the theater, though. Salvatore Rizzo's wife made the little cakes and the lemonade that she sold at the shows. If any of my readers remember hearing about the theater or the marionettes, I'd love to hear from you!