A Source for Information

   

    I thought you might be interested in seeing where I found so much of this information about Salvatore Rizzo and his marionette theater. These scrapbooks were a Works Progress Administration project during the 1930s. Clerical workers who were out of work were paid by the government to sift through the library's collection of old newspapers, find and sort articles, and paste them into scrapbooks. There are about 200 of these scrapbooks in the collection and they are a tremendous resource for anyone curious about Buffalo life in years past. To see them, just go to the Central Branch at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, and enter the Grosvenor Room. That is the room with local history resources of all kinds. You will see the shelves of scrapbooks on your left as soon as you walk in the door. Be prepared to be swept away. There are scrapbooks about Buffalo's Foreign Population, Buffalo Homes, Buffalo Streets, Industry, Churches, even Buffalo Trees!

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! 

                    

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!

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