97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (26 page)

Accounts of these food-inspired trips to the Lower East Side appear regularly in immigrant memoirs and immigrant fiction as well. A Fannie Hurst story called “In Memoriam” follows the tribulations of Mrs. Meyerberg, a lonely Fifth Avenue matron who returns—by chauffeured limousine—to her former tenement kitchen. Flooded with memories, Mrs. Meyerberg is moved by a sudden impulse to assume her place behind the tenement stove, and she does, but the experience proves too much for her. In typical Fannie Hurst fashion, the matron literally dies of joy. Anzia Yezierska’s East Side heroine, Hannah Brieneh, makes a similar voyage. Now an old woman, residing in relative splendor on Riverside Drive, Hannah Brieneh is bereft, a living soul trapped in a mausoleum. The answer to her existential crisis is a trip to the pushcart market. “In a fit of rebellion,” she rides downtown, buys a new marketing basket, and heads for the fish stand. The downtown foray is like a splash of cold water for the withering Hannah Brieneh, who returns in triumph, filling the lifeless apartment with the homey smells of garlic and herring.

The subway ride from the tenements to uptown New York proved more disruptive to immigrant food ways than the initial journey to America. Comfortably middle-class, the uptown Jew could eat like royalty, meat three times a day, unlimited quantities of soft white bread, pastry and tea to fill the gap between lunch and dinner. But uptown living came with unexpected constraints. Uptown Jews were plagued by a new and irksome self-consciousness that complicated mealtimes. Americanized children badgered their immigrant parents to give up the foods they had always relished. If the uptown Jew had a craving for brisket and sauerkraut, the aromas of these dishes cooking on the stove wafted through the apartment building and neighbors complained. The once-beloved organ meats became tokens of poverty, and uptown homemakers had to sneak them into the kitchen like contraband on the servant’s day off. What a pleasure, then, to escape to an East Side restaurant for a plate of chopped herring and a basket of onion rolls.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Baldizzi Family

“Whoever forsakes the old way for the new knows what he is losing but not what he will find.”

—S
ICILIAN PROVERB

A
t the start of the twentieth century, 97 Orchard Street stood on the most densely populated square block of urban America, with 2,223 people, most of them Russian Jews, packed into roughly two acres. One hundred and eleven of them resided in the twenty apartments at 97 Orchard, the oldest building on the block.

By the 1930s, the same East Side neighborhood was a shadow of its former self. Many of the older tenements had been abandoned by their owners, who could no longer afford to pay the property taxes, and were now vacant shells. Others had been demolished or consumed by fire and never rebuilt. As a result, a neighborhood once defined by its extreme architectural density was now littered with empty lots. The tenements that survived the 1920s were languishing too, the victims of changing demographics. Immigration had slowed dramatically by the middle of the decade; old-time East Siders, those who had settled in the neighborhood before the war, had dispersed to the outer boroughs. The number of people living at 97 Orchard, for example, had shrunk from one hundred and eleven to roughly twenty-five, leaving one-third of the building’s apartments completely empty. The East Side tenant shortage meant that neighborhood landlords—even the most conscientious—could no longer afford to maintain their properties, and many buildings fell into disrepair.

Built during the Civil War, years before New York had formulated a body of housing laws, 97 Orchard embodied a laissez-faire approach toward lodging for the working class. As the building passed from one owner to the next, it was gradually modernized. In 1905, 97 Orchard was equipped with indoor plumbing. A system of cast-iron pipes now branched into every apartment and connected to the kitchen sink, supplying tenants with cold running water. The same system allowed for indoor water closets. A second major overhaul came in the early 1920s, when the building was wired for electricity. Despite these efforts, 97 Orchard remained an architectural relic. As late as 1935, the four apartments on each floor were served by two communal toilets. None had bathtubs or any form of heat apart from the kitchen stove. Only one room in three had proper windows.

In the years following World War I, 97 Orchard was home to a mix of Irish, Romanians, Russians, Lithuanians, and Italians. Included in this last group were the Baldizzis, a family of Sicilian immigrants that had come to New York to share in the unlimited possibilities of the American economy. Their plans, however, were derailed by the stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting disappearance of millions of jobs.

For most of the nineteenth century, as Germans and then Irish streamed into the United States, the Italian population stayed at microscopic levels. The 1860 census counted only twelve thousand Italian-born immigrants in the entire country, a demographic speck. The great majority of these early settlers were Northern Italians from Genoa, the surrounding province of Liguria, and from Piedmont just to the north. The numbers began to climb in the boom decades after the Civil War as America turned to the work of rebuilding. The rush of postwar construction activity created more jobs than the country could fill with its own citizens. So, America turned to her neighbors overseas. With the encouragement of the United States government, work-hungry Italians—among other immigrant groups—stepped in to alleviate a desperate labor shortage. During the 1880s, fifty-five thousand Italians arrived in the United States, and just over three hundred thousand in the decade following. By the end of the century, more Italians were landing at Ellis Island than any other immigrant group, and the trend continued into the 1900s. The immigrants who belonged to this second wave were overwhelmingly from the southern provinces of Basilicata, Calabria, and Sicily.

Two features of the Italian migration distinguished it from other groups. First was the lopsided ratio of men to women from Italy. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, that ratio was four to one, with men leading the way. Though the numbers balanced out some over time, they never reached an even fifty-fifty. Lone Italian men came to the United States to work in railroad construction, to build dams, dig canals, lay sewer systems, and pave the nation’s roads, “pick and shovel” jobs. The Italian laborer was typically a man in the prime of his working life. Many had wives and children back in Italy, to whom they planned to return once they had saved enough of their American wages to go back home and purchase a farm or maybe start a business. The average length of the Italian’s sojourn in America was seven years. Some Italians became long-distance commuters. They worked in America during the busy summer season and returned home for the slow winter months, when construction was put on hold.

The success of this international labor pool hinged on a figure known as the padrone, an immigrant himself who wore many hats. Part employment agent, part interpreter, part boardinghouse keeper, and part personal banker, the padrone supplied the new immigrant with much-needed ser vices while robbing him of half his wages, and sometimes more. The padrone’s headquarters were in America but his work began in Italy, scouring the countryside for prospective clients—dissatisfied field workers, in good health, who were willing to travel. This work was often delegated to an Italian-based partner, who worked on commission. The padrone also formed relationships with American employers who kept him apprised of their labor needs, so when an immigrant landed, the padrone knew where to send him. In the cities, he kept boardinghouses where his clients were compelled to lodge, charging extortionist rates for a patch of floor to sleep on. Italians who were sent afield to lay railroad tracks or dig reservoirs in the American hinterland were beholden to the padrone for all their basic needs. Other men who worked on these grand-scale building projects—Slavs, Hungarians, and even the occasional American—lived in camps established by their employer. They slept in the company bunkhouse and ate together in the company mess hall. The one group missing from this international community was the Italians, who followed their padrones to all-Italian camps complete with bunkhouses, a commissary for buying supplies, and a kitchen where the men ate. These boardinghouses in the wilderness, catering to a captive and hungry clientele, were another money-maker for the padrone. At the same time, they answered one very important requirement for the laborer: to eat like an Italian.

Where other groups consumed whatever stews, breads, and puddings they were given, the Italian demanded foods from the homeland. Over the course of one month, the typical laborer consumed:

Bread 34.1 lbs

Macaroni 19.3 lbs

Rice .24 lbs

Meat (sausage, corned beef, & codfish) 2.31 lbs

Sardines 2–5 boxes

Beans, peas and lentils 2.06 lbs

Fatback (lard substitute) 5.13 lbs

Tomatoes 2.13 cans

Sugar 2.8 pounds

Coffee .43 lbs
¹

The men purchased their supplies at the commissary or shanty store, a grocery run by the padrone, where everything on the shelves was triple its normal price. The men took turns behind the camp stove, a group of three or four preparing meals for the entire crew. Some camps ran their own bakeries, using commissary flour. Out west, a similar arrangement could be found among Chinese railroad workers. In their separate camps, faced with the unappetizing prospect of the company mess hall, the Chinese workers assumed the job of feeding themselves, the only possible way to procure food that they considered edible. For both groups of men, Chinese and Italian, cooking became a New World survival skill.

Many of the foods that issued from the communal pot would be familiar today. Various forms of lentil soup, macaroni and tomatoes, beans and macaroni, beans and salt pork, and beans with sausage. Next to the familiar were more uncommon preparations. One ingenious food was a kind of homemade bouillon cube, prepared by Italian workers in Newark, New Jersey, circa 1900. Using a beer vat as their mixing vessel, the men first pounded a large quantity of tomatoes. Next,

they poured some cornmeal and flour into the vat and stirred until the stuff became a dough. The next step was to throw this on what bakers would call a molding trough and knead it, adding enough flour to make it a stiff pulp. The less said about the state of their hands the better, but that is a trivial matter. The mixture was molded into little pats about the same size of fishcake. These were placed on boards and taken to various roofs to dry.
²

Come winter, when fresh tomatoes were no longer available, the cakes were dissolved in boiling water, each cake producing enough soup for six men.

A second defining feature of the Italian migration was poverty. After 1865, the great majority of Italian immigrants were poor southern fieldworkers. They arrived at Ellis Island, illiterate and unskilled, with, in 1901, an average life-savings of $8.79. Despite their farming background, most Italians settled in the large industrial cities. Here they found work as street cleaners, pavers, and ditch-and tunnel-diggers—the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs. Immigration officials bluntly referred to the Southern Italian as America’s “worst immigrants,” a judgment echoed in the daily papers. “Lazy,” “ignorant,” and “clannish” were just a few of the adjectives most commonly linked with Italians by the popular press. “Violent” was another oft-mentioned Italian characteristic. American newspapers kept a running tally of crimes committed by the Black Hand, an early name for Italian organized crime, paying special attention to any case that involved explosives. (Bombs were a fairly common means of extortion among gangsters of the period.) America’s fascination with Italian gangsters helped reinforce the argument that Italians were violent by nature. Following this circular logic, Americans were convinced that “no foreigners with whom we have to deal, stab and murder on so slight provocation,” a judgment offered by the
New York Times
.
³

Among the lowest of this low-grade stock were the men and women who rejected honest work in favor of more shiftless occupations. One character was the Italian organ-grinder, a roving street performer with a hand organ suspended from a strap around his neck. The hand organ worked like an oversized music box, with a rotating cylinder inside it that turned by means of a crank. The more prosperous worked with an assistant, a trained monkey in a red vest and matching fez. The animal perched on his master’s shoulder while the music played and collected pennies at the end of the number. The organ grinder’s main patrons were the city’s children.

Another dubious line of work was rag-picking, an urban occupation dominated by foreigners, beginning with the Germans in the 1850s. The Irish also turned to rag-picking, but in smaller numbers. By the 1880s, the industry had been passed down to the Italians, the country’s newest immigrants. America’s first career recyclers, rag-pickers made their livelihood by sifting through the city’s garbage for reusable resources. The tools of the rag-picker’s trade were a long pole with a hook at one end and a large sack slung across her chest. Her workday began before the city was fully awake, when the streets were still quiet. She made her rounds, moving from one trash barrel to the next, examining its contents with the help of her pole, and plucking from it whatever she found of value. Her most fruitful hunting grounds were the cities’ wealthier neighborhoods, where the garbage was rife with discarded treasure—old shoes and boots, battered cooking pans, glass bottles, and the rags themselves, cream of the trash barrel. Once home, she emptied her sack onto the floor to survey the day’s gleanings. Each type of article was sorted into its own box, one for paper, one for leather goods, one for metal, one for glass, and so on. The bones were put into a large kettle and boiled clean. The rags were rinsed and hung up to dry.

The next stop for the sorted garbage was the junk dealer, a refuse middleman who paid the rag-picker a set sum by weight for each material, then turned around and sold it, at a profit, to assorted manufacturers. Old shoes and boots were retooled to look like new or shredded to a pulp, an ingredient used in the manufacture of waterproof tarps. Paper was sold to local publishers, who turned it into newsprint for the morning papers. Bottles were reused or melted. Bones from the family dinner table were turned into umbrella handles, snuff boxes, buttons, and toothbrushes. Rags, which fetched more per pound than any other item, went to make the era’s finest writing paper.

Middle-class America declared the rag-picker too lazy for “real work,” or accused her of ulterior motives. All of that innocent rummaging was, they believed, a cover for her real purpose—casing the best homes in the city for future burglaries. The organ grinder was likewise seen as a threat to public welfare, a nuisance at best, but at worst a common street thug, his stiletto tucked in his boot. Bootblacks, chestnut vendors, and fruit peddlers all belonged to the same itinerant class and all were suspect.

Non-Italians found proof of these immigrants’ lowly character in the foods they ate: stale bread, macaroni with oil, and, if they were lucky, a handful of common garden weeds. No other immigrant diet was as meager. For his nourishment, the Italian fruit peddler relied on the bruised and moldy fruit that was too far gone to sell, even by East Side standards. Organ grinders, because of their aversion to work, subsisted on a diet “so scanty that had they not been accustomed to the severest deprivation from infancy, their system would refuse to be nourished by food that an Irish navvy would shrink from with abhorrence.”
⁴
Their spare diet acted as an impediment that kept the immigrant from rising in the world. A typical lunch for the Italian laborer, a piece of bread and cup of water, was no meal for a working man. American employers, who could choose from an international pool of workers, came to regard the Italian as second-rate. “They are active, but not hardy or strong as the average man”—a rung below the Hungarian or the Slav. The main reason: “they eat too little.”
⁵