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So... I've been two years in New York City and had not once eaten a cannoli on Mulberry Street. Last weekend, after running an errand in SOHO, I decided it was high time. I wandered through the tourist stalls and in between the patter of raindrops I heard the gentle enticements of "Ciao, bella!" from kindly-looking, aged restaurant owners perched in doorways. Snatches of the lilting, lyrical Italian language wafted out of windows and tarried on street corners. The red, white and green garlands that span the street were at once gaudy, cliche and charming. It seemed there was nostalgia on the tip of everyone's tongue but in the swarm of tourist activity the words could never quite materialize. It was a false nostalgia, a pretense of nostalgia, a manufactured and calculated nostalgia harnessed to rake in the dough.
The Little Italy that parades itself down Mulberry Street is the last vestige of the many Italian neighborhoods that once dotted the island of Manhattan. Made famous in the movie The Godfather, and for Joey Gallo's death and John Gotti's arrest, Little Italy is a surreal misrepresentation of its heritage. What started in the late 1800s with a group of southern Italians fighting to survive in the clustered tenements that seemed a part of an inevitable and unenviable transition to the U.S. has become an unbroken chain of restaurants and souvenir stalls. The resident population of Italians there today is nearly nil, having been colonized by Chinatown of late. In an ironic twist of fate, most of the busboys and kitchen staff are of Latin American descent. What could be mistaken for a whiff of hypocrisy in this caricature of a neighborhood is, in fact, resignation, and therein the true nostalgia lies.
Against the rapidly changing landscape of a gentrified and increasingly homogenous New York, where the requisite uniform is DKNY and the neigborhoods are distinguished by tenure of fortune rather than tenacity of cultural obligation, Little Italy has no choice but to serve the demand of a gawking economic machine that asks for skin-deep satisfaction and a proper alfredo sauce. But can it be any other way? To preserve the true heritage of Little Italy is to remain locked in a past that is no longer valid. To cloister the remnants of this ethnic enclave is to sequester it from public eyes, to preclude our paisanos, to eliminate the possibility of sharing - even if only skin deep.
Of course, it can be posited that we have much to lose by the blurring of these neighborhood lines and by catering to the traffic of tourists. I, too, feel a mite cynical about the metamorphosis our neighborhoods (and indeed our country!) face in the wake of Big Box Mart and Mass Media Giant. But cynicism is easy. The bigger question, the more positive question, the more difficult question, may be 'what have we gained?' What makes a melting pot? Is it segregation? Or integration? Are we a chunky cioppino of a nation? Or are we more of a butternut squash puree? Without even a shallow awareness and exploration of another culture, how are we to grow closer fundamentally? Perhaps Israel would do well to illumine their streets with colorful garlands and meaningless tshatshkes; maybe it's time for Palestine to capitalize on their kanafeh.
I suggest we celebrate that which we are able, regardless of its superficiality. And that is why I hold in one hand the nostalgic resignation that flashes briefly across the eyes of the retentive, elderly Italian gentleman in his restaurant doorway, and in the other I hold my delicious and much-hyped three dollar cannoli.
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