Chapter One:
Once Upon a Time In America "A spirit ... has spread deep into the hearts of the people of the whole of southern Europe. The eyes of the poor are turned with longing fancy to "New York." That is the magic word everywhere. The sound of it brings light to a hundred million faces.
-Historian Broughton Brandenburg, 1902
Precisely at one second after midnight, the bell of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church began pealing. From its patch in the church campanile high above the streets of New York City, the bell rang out slowly and sonorously; the sound echoed far in every direction in the moist night air.
It echoed down the quiet streets, among the gray tenements, and small stores of that are of upper Manhattan along the East River known as East -- or, more commonly, Italian-Harlem to the west, to Lexington Avenue,, the inviolable boundary between the two worlds of black Harlem and Italian Harlem; to the south, toward, a more indefinite line that marked the end of the Italian neighborhood and the beginning of the Puerto Rican mundo; to the cast, across the Pad River and into the sprawling suburb of Queens; and to the north, across the dark river separating the Wand of Manhattan from the- Bronx, into the small Italian enclave along the river's shore.
There, in one of the drab, five-story tenements beside a narrow street, Mm Fannie Gotti and her husband John Joseph stiffed. In years past, they had anticipated that first peal of the bell, the signal for them to rise, dress the children and themselves in their Sunday best, and prepare to make an annual pilgrimage south, across the river, deep into Italian Harlem and a final destination at Our Lady of Mount Carmelchurch at 115th Street for an important event in their lives.
But to her sorrow, Mrs. Gotti would not be making the pilgrimage that hot summer of 1940. She was having a difficult pregnancy, made even more difficult by the unusually hot summer, and could barely walk a few steps. She already had four children (she would eventually produce thirteen, two of whom died in infancy), and caring for them while pregnant -with a fifth was no easy task. Certainly not in the neighborhood of the Italian immigrants in New York, where home typically meant a tenement walkup, with a single toilet for an entire floor in the hallway; where the generally large Italian families somehow managed to live, in apartments of a few rooms; where children slept on the rickety fire escapes during the summer heat waves, when the tenements seemed almost to melt, where few houses had steam heat, and winters were spent around a single coal stove.
Someday, Mr. and Mrs. John Gotti were certain, they would leave their world of tenements and crowded streets; somehow, they would achieve the dream of every Italian immigrant- a home in a nice neighborhood on a quiet street, with a real yard big enough for the children to play in, and room left over to grow some tomatoes (and perhaps even a fig tree). The dream was a dim, shimmering chimera somewhere for on the horizon, for there seemed no way to achieve it--assuredly not for a day laborer such as John Joseph Gotti, who had only his brawn to sell, a man who had spent the last twenty yews since his arrival in America digging ditches and hauling cernent, yet had little to show for it.
Like other men in his neighborhood, John Gotti could point out buildings all over thecity dug bore his invisible imprint, from the brownstones whose distinctive stoops had been shaped unerringly in wet cement by hand, to the soaring skyscrapers, great cathedrals of commerce that needed armies of men to erect. Those silent monuments to the immigrants' labors existed outside their own neighborhoods, in a world that had no place for the immigrants, except, as workers. In that world, Italian immigrants like John Gotti were most often called "wop," "dago," "greaseball," or "guinea."
But in their own neighborhood, where such slurs were never heard, language and culture. remained intact in a familiar universe of packed tenements, cages of racing pigeons on the roofs, streets alive with noisy traffic and playing children, and the clatter of old country accents among the people who congregated every night on the broad stoops, the neighborhood's social halls. The neighborhood, with its culture, traditions, and deep -religious faith transplanted intact from southern Italy, was a place of refuge against what the immigrants perceived as a hostile outside world.
No matter how comforting this universe of the neighborhood, the Gottis wanted something better. But as much as Fannie Gotti talked of moving to the suburbs, she had vowed that no matter where she eventually settled, she would always return each year for the one event which -for several weeks transformed the grim life of the Italian ghetto. It was the event whose beginning was signaled by the slow pealing of the church bell one summer night in July: the annual festa of Our Lady of Carmel.
The event is difficult to describe, and had to be experienced. Part solemn religious observance, part carnival, part blockparty, part family reunion, the Festival of Our Lady of Carmel began just after midnight on July 16 every year, and continued for weeks afterward. Proclaimed grandiloquently in the church's monthly bulletin as an event in alto i curori, oggi e la grande, memorabile solemne, the festival virtually consumed the mom than two hundred thousand southern Italians -- mostly Sicilian-who lived in the neighborhood of a hundred square blocks known as East Harlem.
It also preoccupied several thousand other Italian-Americans who flocked into the neighborhood to participate. Those lucky enough to have relatives or friends in East Harlem crammed into already crowded apartments; many others simply camped out in Jefferson Park near the river. With the sound of the church bell just after midnight, they rose and attended a solemn midnight mass, the first in a series of religious observances in honor of the Madonna of Our Lady of MOW Carmel, an especially significant religious symbol to southern Italians.