The opening chapter of The Madonna of 115th Street gives the reader a fairly rich and comprehensive overview of the origins of Italian Harlem. It was a place that its residents had come to love despite its shortcomings. I find it amazing that although many of the people living in Italian Harlem endured so much adversity, they still for the most part felt a sincere attachment and affection to their hometown. Even just the act of coming to New York City posed the immigrants with pangs of separation and nostalgia for their family still in Italy and their homeland. They came to America in order to escape from their overpopulated, diseased, unemployed, exploited, and destitue homeland, and arrived in Harlem only to confront the same conditions which they were trying to leave behind. That troubling recognition coupled with the pain of coping with the adverse conditions there stirred more acute feelings of fear, uncertainty and despair. In addition, crime was flourishing in Italian Harlem, and many of the youth became juvenile delinquents. In short, the conditions in Italian Harlem were far from the glowing aspirations that Italian immigrants had in mind for their lives in America.
Despite, or maybe because of their dire straits, the immigrants and their children came to love and appreciate Italian Harlem, and it quickly became their home. Perhaps it is a common phenomenon that when people live in a certain place for a lengthy period of time, they come to love it, if not for any other reasons other than its familiarity. People become attached to familiarity and have an instinctive fear of the unknown. This familiarity and some other advantages of life in Italian Harlem, such as the support of its community members, eventually glossed over the trials of living there, so in hindsight, its residents were able to recall their homes in Italian Harlem with affection and even love. In Italian Harlem, the anxieties and pressures of daily life, and the toll they exerted on its residents defined the immigrants and their children became part of their cultural legacy and a crucial point in New York City’s own history.
