The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Wooster Square preserved on film
Documentary includes stories, photos
NEW HAVEN — Because Interstate 91 tore through Wooster Square in the 1960s, Frank Carrano can no longer stroll by the house and market at 460 Chapel St. where he grew up with his parents and six older sisters.
But Carrano has held his memories close and recently began sharing them in a Facebook group, “Wooster Square Neighborhood Heritage Exchange.”
Meanwhile, Steve Hamm had moved to an apartment on the square, with a clear view of St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church, a Wooster Square landmark. Hamm is a former business writer and editor — including time at the New Haven Register in the 1980s — who is a freelance journalist and documentarian. The view from his window and the posts by Carrano — “one of the most active people on the page,” Hamm said — inspired him to record the rich history of the Italian-American neighborhood. Carrano even supplied the title for the documentary, “The Village,” evoking the sense that everything a person needed — family,
friendly neighbors, church, merchants, the Italian immigrant culture — could all be found in Wooster Square, a small section between downtown, New Haven Harbor and the Mill River.
“I work in this window; this is my workspace,” Hamm said while sitting in his living room in a renovated 1857 home, turned into condos. “So I look out on the square and I look out on the church and whenever there’s a funeral it comes by me, and I would look at that and I would say, ‘There goes another lifetime of stories.’ That interested me, and I said, ‘Well, I want to capture these stories.’
“And I actually have a view of history, which is that I think an important part of history is the stories of regular people. And that maybe some of the most telling and valuable parts of history are the stories of regular people, understanding what they went through and the context of their lives, which is the context of our life,” he said.
Carrano served for 25 years as head of the New Haven Federation of Teachers and was president of the New Haven Labor Council. More recently, having moved to Branford, he was chairman of that town’s Board of Education.
Carrano’s parents, Matteo and Antonetta Carrano, immigrated to New Haven in the early 20th century and lived above their Chapel Street market with seven children and one bathroom. He joined Hamm and me to recount his memories.
He’s one of the current and former residents of the neighborhood featured in “The Village: Life in New Haven’s Little Italy,” which Hamm is creating with no budget or thought of monetary gain. The project took off when the pair met at Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana for a white clam pie.
It was “the defining moment,” Carrano said.
“Steve’s call was a very exciting moment for me, because as I’ve grown older I’ve come to better understand what an enriching experience it was for me to live here and grow up here in this neighborhood,” Carrano said. “You don’t necessarily pay attention to all the things happening in your life while they’re happening, but later you have a chance to reflect.”
When he posts his memories on Facebook, “I’m always so impressed by how those stories resonate with people,” Carrano said. “There’s an immediate response from people, very emotional response. … The reaction is always one of such great pleasure that ‘I’m so lucky to have grown up here’ or ‘such a wonderful place to grow up.’
“We didn’t have an awful lot. But we thought we had everything because of the friendships and the strong family ties and the comfort of living in a neighborhood where you know everybody and you share the same values and, in our case, the same language and customs that makes you feel like you all belong together. A neighborhood is a place where everyone should feel that they belong,” Carrano said.
Christmas Eve fish sauce
Food and holiday traditions bring a huge response. One is the Christmas Eve feast of the seven fishes.
Carrano said, “I asked a question the other day: ‘What kind of fish sauce do you make on Christmas Eve?’ And like a hundred people responded. ‘I make crab sauce.’ ‘I make sauce with lobster tails and I cook it two days in advance and let it sit and develop its flavor.’ I mean they get so excited about that. Because it’s part of the tradition and so many people want to maintain those traditions. It’s so important to them. It not only helps them remember where they’re from, but it’s a way of defining who they are, really.
“My strongest memories are how we celebrated holidays in our home. My mother kept all the traditions for every holiday. Special foods and things that we did, they were always done, year after year.”
Immigrants’ strength
Hamm said Carrano “framed the story for me” but it “almost tells itself.” Wooster Square gave residents “a launch pad for becoming Americans. … I believe that immigration is one of the essential American activities, and we’ve had these waves of immigration and each wave has brought new energy and strength and value to the society. And I think at a time like this, when some people have very negative attitudes toward immigration, it’s an important reminder of how essential it is to what we are as Americans.”
Carrano agreed. “The important thing to remember is that the immigrant experience doesn’t necessarily demand that you give up who you are culturally, ethnically or your language. What it does require is that you learn to love your new country and become a good productive citizen of that country. … To become an American doesn’t mean you can’t also be a proud Italian American or Scotch American or … Muslim American.”
“The Village” will include decades-old photos and even films that were in danger of being thrown away. One, from the 1920s, shows young boys running out on a greased-up pole above the water trying to grab the American and Italian flags at the end before falling in. The contest was held at the end of the St. Andrew Apostle Society’s annual parade.
“I thought it was really important … to get people’s voices and faces and to get their stories straight from their mouths,” Hamm said. “They light up. They remember things; they’re funny. It’s just such a great experience to talk to people.”
“I think what Steve is doing is adding a much deeper dimension to the story of Wooster Square than had been told before,” Carrano said. It’s a story much bigger than the neighborhood’s renowned pizza, he said.
In Wooster Square, all your needs were met. “There was the community bank on the corner of Olive and Chapel that was where everybody banked … and it was founded by Italian businessmen. … (When) people bought insurance they went to Mr. Russo and his sons.”
“He had a real estate business, he had a bank,” Hamm said. “He was an interpreter for the court, I believe,” Carrano added. “And he had an Italian-language newspaper,” Hammsaid . There were nine or 10 funeral homes in the area, he said.
St. Michael Church was a unifying institution for the immigrants. “Msgr. Gerard Schmitz told me he believed this church was the glue that held the community together in the immigrant days,” Carrano said.
But the new Americans also brought with them the tradition of each town having a patron saint. For those from Amalfi, it was St. Andrew; for those from Atrani, it was St. Mary Magdalene. The St. Andrew Apostle Society and Santa Maria Maddalena New Haven still host their annual “festas” along Wooster Street.
The community was so close “it was like there were micro-neighborhoods, you might say,” Carrano said. “You pretty much stayed close to where you lived. The two blocks that I lived on were filled with stores.” When Carrano went to Notre Dame High School, “that was my first experience meeting people of other ethnic backgrounds.” He said he found the experience “wonderful,” even though it occurred “later than other people might have had it.”
People went to the markets each day to buy that day’s meals. Carrano remembers being sent to the store where there were racks of live chickens, his mother telling him to bring home a “spring chicken.”
The proprietor would select a chicken, kill it and pluck it. “Feathers were flying off the chicken! And
then I would walk home with this warm chicken in a bag, but I never thought anything of it,” Carrano said.
War’s end and redevelopment
As the years passed, so did the neighborhood. Carrano said one major influence was the end of World War II, when the troops returned to start families.
“Three of my sisters got married within two months of each other when the war ended,” Carrano said. “That whole generation getting married. There was no place to live so they had to move elsewhere.”
Quonset huts were set up on Long Wharf and elsewhere to house the newly married couples.
In the 1950s, Mayor Richard C. Lee launched the so-called Model City program, which Carrano called “a failure on many levels.” On the other side of the city, the heavily Jewish Oak Street and Legion Avenue areas were razed for a highway that never arrived. In Wooster Square, redevelopment brought demolition of many homes, but there were some bright spots, including the renovation of the area’s large 19th century houses and creation of a pedestrian-only block on Court Street, lined with row houses. “They were rooming houses,” Carrano said. “They had unsavory people living there. They were transients.”
“I think that there was this massive kind of slum clearance … that was happening all over America,” Hamm said. “I think what happened here with saving Court Street and saving some other buildings rather than destroying them was a turning point in American history.”
Interstates 95 and 91 also had a major impact. I-95, opened in 1958 “went through Sargent’s, which employed thousands of people,” Hamm said. I-91 cut the Wooster Square neighborhood in half.
“People were beside themselves” when they heard their houses would be taken by eminent domain to build the highway, Carrano said. His family still lived above the store at 460 Chapel St. at the time.
“It was a fruit market with some groceries,” he said. “Women who worked in the shops would come and shop at lunchtime to buy what they were going to have for supper, and we would keep it in the store and when they got out of work they’d pick up the bag and go home and cook it. It was like they do in Italy. What you’re going to eat today you buy this morning and you eat it today. That’s the kind of business it was. We had all the fresh vegetables and fruit and all that. And we lived upstairs.”
When redevelopment arrived, Antonetta Carrano was running the store alone, Matteo having died shortly before. She bought a house on Peat Meadow Road in the Annex section, across the Quinnipiac River. “She hated it. She just couldn’t ever really resign herself to it,” Carrano said.
Women renewed Little Italy
Hamm said he has noticed the strong role of women who stayed in the neighborhood, especially after redevelopment. He said to Carrano: “In terms of community leadership, Theresa (Argento), your sister, Luisa (DeLauro), Beverly (Carbonella) — these people were … the leaders in kind of a second wave … true community leaders. They created the Cherry Blossom Festival.”
Argento, 95, and Carrano’s only surviving sister, was longtime president of the St. Andrew’s Ladies Society and helped revive the Columbus Day parade. DeLauro, who died in September at 103, served on the Board of Aldermen for years. Her daughter, Rosa, is the longtime member of Congress. Carbonella served as a Historic District commissioner.
“I think they helped to resurrect the notion of Wooster Square as a neighborhood, because it had been totally dissipated by the redevelopment and people moving away and I think most people thought ‘Wooster Square is gone. It’s no longer Wooster Square,’ ” Carrano said. “And I think by doing what they did they helped … give new life to the notion that it’s not the same Wooster Square, but there’s enough of it left so you could still enjoy and appreciate what it was and what it is.”
Still seeking stories
Hamm has taken on his project as the first-generation Italian Americans are passing away, and he believes it’s an opportune time for younger generations to collect their family stories.
“I think the combination of the internet and the iPhone or whatever has really democratized storytelling,” he said. “I would encourage young people to use their phones to go and talk to their elders, interview them. It will be a magnificent experience for them.”
“It’s really fortuitous that it’s happening when it is, because Steve is able to find people,” Carrano said. There are “enough of us who have memories to share, and that’s what Steve is capturing. He’s finding those people who still can talk about it and it’s not getting lost.”
Carrano said his sisters, who were as much as 20 years older than he, had even stronger memories. “As immigrants to this country, my parents hadn’t yet acclimated as much as they had by the time I was growing up as the youngest person in my family. … For them, it was one step away from Amalfi, because she came here at age 14 and had kids when she was 21.”
It’s the memories of people living ordinary lives that particularly interests Hamm. “When I was in college I read ‘Working,’ by Studs Terkel, which is an oral history, and it so excited me about the stories of regular people that, in fact, I decided to become a journalist as a result of this. It was an inspiration, so oral history, the attractions of oral history, have always been important to me.”
Hamm is still looking for stories, vintage photos and films about Wooster Square to add to the documentary. He can be contacted at stevehamm31@hotmail.com or at 914-843-9475.