| Chapter 3: | Stores, Houses |
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My grandmother did not know the true story of St. Benedict the Moor. Before the Church canonized St. Benedict, San Fratello was called San Filadelfio. Fratello in Italian means brother and in the early nineteenth century it was renamed in honor of Benedict, a brother in the Franciscan Order. He was the son of Christopher and Diana, African slaves who worked on the estate of Vincenzo Manasseri of San Filadelfio. Benedict was born in 1526. When Benedict was ten years of age, Manasseri emancipated him. Joining the followers of Jerome Lanza, a Franciscan, Benedict became a hermit. Although Benedict never learned how to read and write, he rose to a top position in the Franciscan community of Palermo. A miracle worker, pilgrims came from Italy, Spain, Portugal and elsewhere to worship with him and get his blessings. He died in 1589. In 1883 the Catholic Church of New York City opened on Bleecker Street the St. Benedict the Moor Church for African Americans. It was later moved to West Fifty-third Street. Eventually the congregation became Spanish primarily. The Italians of East Harlem didn’t know that such a church existed.10
There were other stores on my block: a poolroom for the racketeers, three candy stores, a shoe repair shop, a barber, a Chinese laundry, a pastry store, a grocery store, an Italian cheese store, and two stores where the immigrants met and played cards and talked about the Old World. I never saw the Chinese man and his wife leave his store. Perhaps he went out in the dead of night. Louie Jap took his family’s laundry there but my grandma did her own with her scrub board in the bathtub.
The iceman had his place of business in a cellar across the street