| Chapter 1: | Italian Americana 1920s–1930s |
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It served also for the development of a provincial outlook, in which youngsters boasted that the kids on their block could defeat neighboring blocks in sports contests or in plain street brawls. This ethnocentric perspective ill-prepared us for those times when boys from other blocks attacked ours, sending us scampering to the safety of our homes or trying to hide in neighbors’ cellars and hallways. To my adolescent mind, it was perfectly natural to look at the world from my street and my neighborhood; a viewpoint shared by Nat Scammacca.
Physically, the block comprised primarily of 18 three-story wood frame tenement houses on both sides of the street, most of which housed six families in railroad rooms. These were flats of either four or five consecutive contiguous and modest cubicles bereft of separate hallway access and incapable of providing minimum privacy. In the absence of central heat, at first a coal-burning then an oil-burning cast iron stove in the kitchen supplied heat in decreasing intensity to the distance of rooms from the source, that meant the parlor was always cold in the cold winter months. The stove also served as the medium to cook meals. Built originally for a proletarian German population in the early 1900s, closet space was exiguous able only to accommodate the sparest of wardrobes.