Louis Gigante, 90, priest who led South Bronx revival
NEW YORK — The Rev. Louis R. Gigante, a Roman Catholic priest who was instrumental in rebuilding one of America’s most notorious slums, in the South Bronx, into a thriving and safer neighborhood with thousands of new homes, died Wednesday. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by Joseph Zwilling, a spokesperson for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. Zwilling did not specify where Rev. Gigante died or the cause.
If the surname is familiar, it’s because all four of his brothers were mobsters, including Vincent (“the Chin”) Gigante, boss of the Genovese Mafia family that dominated organized crime in New York City for decades. After the deaths or imprisonment of Vincent’s rivals, he was widely recognized as the most powerful crime boss in the nation until he went to prison in 1997.
In an era when drugs, arson, and abandoned housing made the South Bronx a symbol of urban decay, Rev. Louis Gigante was a savvy street priest, a political and spiritual leader for thousands of residents who, a city medical examiner said, had only a 1-in-20 chance of dying of natural causes. The priest became a city council member, a developer with clout in Washington, the chaplain of the Italian American Civil Rights League, and an outspoken defender of criminal kingpins.
Although revered by the predominantly Hispanic community in the South Bronx, Rev. Gigante had many personal and political enemies, who accused him of conspiring with organized crime to take graft and even secret real estate holdings in upstate New York. But he also won $50 million in legitimate grants and subsidies for his projects from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
He sometimes carried a baseball bat to defend himself in the streets, and once went to jail for refusing to tell the authorities about his underworld contacts. He lost a race for a congressional seat but doled out patronage jobs as a Democratic district leader, even as he celebrated Masses, officiated at weddings and funerals, heard confessions, visited the sick, and buried the dead.
In a black cassock and a white reversed collar, he was a familiar figure in the South Bronx for nearly a half-century, an ebullient associate pastor of St. Athanasius Church who gave sermons and greeted friends and parishioners in English or Spanish. As his hair went white, he still had the springy step of the basketball star he had been at Georgetown University in the early 1950s.
Father G., as he was known from Hunts Point to City Hall, founded the South East Bronx Community Organization, or SEBCO, in 1968 as a cornerstone to resurrect the South Bronx. For years, it was just another neighborhood tax-exempt anti-poverty group with few resources, no master plan, and little hope. It needed political muscle, and Rev. Gigante, as SEBCO’s president and driving spirit, went after it.
Brash and inexperienced, he reached too far too fast, losing a congressional primary to Representative Herman Badillo in 1970. But a year later, he was the first priest in the city’s history to become an accredited political boss, winning the Democratic leadership of the 77 th Assembly District. His busy headquarters, the storefront Bruckner Democratic Club, was a visible sign of progress. “It’s an advantage for me to be a priest as well as the district leader,” he told The New York Times in 1972. “At first there were those who felt it was wrong for a priest to be a politician. But then when I did a few favors for them, these same people changed their minds. Patronage is where it is.”
He said that by 1981 he had orchestrated the construction and rehabilitation of 1,100 federally subsidized apartments in Hunts Point, the heart of the South Bronx. SEBCO said that it made $1 million, but that it had poured most of the money back into the community for jobs and building services.
The Times reported: “The achievement — a concrete and brick miracle in a neighborhood that was legendary for the resoluteness of its death march — has earned him the highest respect and praise from government officials as well as from a grateful community.”
“What he’s done for that area is fantastic,” Anthony Gliedman, the city’s housing commissioner, told reporters. “It’s almost like a phoenix rising from the ashes.”
The renewal was hardly a smooth passage. There were false starts and long delays. Building flaws were inevitable. Even with subsidized rents, tenants fell behind. Co-ops that sold for $90,000 had roof and plumbing problems. Some tenants called Rev. Gigante a slumlord. Drug dealers and prostitutes lingered on corners. It was no utopia.
Rev. Louis Robert Gigante was born in Manhattan on March 19, 1932, the youngest of five sons of Salvatore and Yolanda (Santasilia) Gigante, immigrants from Naples who never learned English. The father was a watchmaker and the mother a seamstress. Louis and his brothers, Vincent, Mario, Pasquale, and Ralph, grew up in Greenwich Village.
Louis attended Public School 3 in the West Village and Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, where he starred on a basketball team that won the Catholic schools city championship in 1949. He graduated from high school in 1950. Louis received an athletic scholarship to Georgetown, became an outstanding guard and co-captain of the Hoyas basketball team and graduated in 1954.
He trained for the priesthood at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y., and was ordained in 1959. Over the next three years, he was posted to Puerto Rico, where he learned Spanish, and to St. James Church on the Lower East Side, where he worked with youth groups. He was transferred to St. Athanasius in 1962 and remained there until 2002, when he retired as a priest.
Complete information on who he leaves was not immediately available. All of his brothers are deceased.