| Chapter 1: | The Family |
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ments with or near Irish, German and Jewish residents. Most of the Italians came from southern Italy. In streets where the majority of residents were Italians, neighborhood loyalties were strong. Housing was substandard in Italian East Harlem. In the 1930’s Italian women marched for better housing and cleaner streets. By 1930 East Harlem housed eighty-nine thousand Italians of the first and second generations. East Harlem stretched from Ninety-Sixth Street to One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street and from Lexington Avenue to the East River.
The New York City Department of Health conducted a study comparing the health of Italians living in lower Manhattan and East Harlem with their contiguous non-Italian sections for the years from 1929 to 1931. In lower Manhattan the Italians had higher percentages of tuberculosis and pneumonia cases than the contiguous non-Italian neighborhood. In East Harlem the Italians had a lower percentage of tuberculosis cases than their contiguous non-Italian community and only a slightly higher percentage of pneumonia cases. Cancer cases were very low in Italian East Harlem compared with the contiguous community and with the Italians in lower Manhattan. The East Harlem Health Center had been in existence for more than a decade and the authors of the study attributed the good results in the East Harlem community to its work.
Italian unskilled laborers were an embattled group in East Harlem in the early years of the twentieth century. The New York subway was built primarily by Italian immigrant workers. They were not members of unions and were exploited by contractors. Early in 1903 Tito Pacelli of the Masons’ Union and Herman