Statue highlights differing views
Columbus monument, symbol of pride for some, is reviled by others in the community
NEW HAVEN — For most of the few dozen Italian Americans who stood in support of the Christopher Columbus statue that overlooked Wooster Square Park for 128 years — until Wednesday — their support isn’t, and never was, about Columbus.
They were there in the name of Italian heritage and out of respect for the neighborhood they or their families grew up in — and the hard- working Italian immigrants who raised money to put the statue there on Oct. 12, 1892.
“I was down there because of my parents and my grandparents,” said John Scafariello of New Haven. Scafariello grew up in The Hill section and now lives on Orange Street but has long been a member of the Santa Maria Maddelena Society, as his parents were before him, which still is headquartered on Wooster Street.
He said he showed up in hopes of stopping the city from taking the statue down “out of of respect to my grandparents and my parents — and to myself and to my family, too.
“It’s a sad day,” Scafariello said.
Wooster Street and Wooster Square are still considered “Little Italy,” although they long have been more diverse than just that, and continue to grow that way.
The statue, which a rigging crew hired by the parks department carefully removed from its pedestal Wednesday after a brief, heated clash between supporters of the statue and activists and neighbors who wanted it gone, was installed back in 1892 ostensibly to celebrate the 400th Anniversary of Columbus and his three ships landing in the New World.
Several of the statue’s supporters pointed out, however, that it was installed just a few months after the mass lynching of 11 Sicilian- born Italian Americans in New Orleans — which took place on March 14, 1891.
Columbus Day, itself, began in the wake of the lynchings when President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation in 1892, urging Americans to mark the day, initially as a one- time celebration. Both Lou Pane and Marc Conte, who coorganized Wednesday’s protest — and were not among the people involved in the skirmish — said their support of the now- removed statute is not about Columbus.
Conte and Pane also are organizers of the ItalianAmerican Heritage Group of New Haven, which has filed for two injunctions; one to prevent the removal of the statue and one Friday asking where the statue is being stored and seeking assurances that the statue and the base are preserved.
“For me, in 1892, the Italian immigrants when they came to the United States, they donated this to the city of New Haven...” said Pane, pointing out that the statue was erected not long after the New Orleans lynchings.
“What bothered me the most about that was, the hard- working immigrants, the immigrants that came here, they rallied up their gifts ... to give the area this statue,” said Pane, who is East Haven’s recreation director and the longtime East Haven High School hockey coach
“It’s about my heritage,” Pane said. “When the Italians came here, they were given the toughest time. When they stopped slavery in this country, they recruited southern Italians to work in the fields ... they were getting the lowest grade of wages.”
The original copper statue was recast in bronze in 1955.
In the wake of widespread unrest following the death of George Floyd beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, calls to remove statues of Columbus, as well as Confederate war figures, have rolled across the country. A similar issue currently is unfolding in South Philadelphia, where another longstanding statue is expected to come down.
While the story of Columbus and his ships, the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria arriving in the New World has been taught for decades in schools, the history of Columbus encountering the Awawaks in the Caribbean, as written by Howard Zinn, is a story of genocide and slavery.
Based on reports by a priest — Bartolomé de las Casas — Zinn wrote that the Arawak tribe resorted to suicide because of their treatment. “Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead,” Zinn wrote.
Pane said that if you go back in history, “everyone has a clouded past.” He said Eli Whitney’s cotton gin greatly increased the need for slave labor; Ehihu Yale, for whom Yale University is named, owned slaves, as did George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
After hearing about the possibility of the statue being taken down, Conte and Pane organized the “Italian American Heritage of New Haven” Facebook page, now up to nearly 800 followers, a couple of weeks ago.
Then they got the ball rolling for Wednesday’s protest with a post urging people to come out early Wednesday after they got word that the city was going to remove the statute.
They quickly canceled a rally that had been scheduled for Saturday after the statue was taken down — and especially after a few people on both sides boiled over into a brief flurry of violence Wednesday morning
No one was arrested, although one supporter of the statue was briefly detained.
“We’re not going to have a rally, that’s for sure, because we’d probably have a blood bath — and I don’t want that on my head,” said Conte.
At one point after Wednesday’s events, “I said to Louie, “somehow, do I think that we caused this?” Conte said. “Did we do something good or bad here?”
Strong ties
Pane bristled at the idea, suggested by some of the activists who favored taking down the statue, that he shouldn’t have a say because he, like many of the people who joined him, don’t live in Wooster Square, or New Haven.
“As an Italian American who was born in New Haven and as a child who grew up in the Annex,” Pane, who has lived for years now in East Haven, said he remains connected to the Wooster Street area as the traditional center for Italian community in Greater New Haven.
He acknowledged, however, that the neighborhood is a diverse one that continues to change.
Pane comes from a multigenerational family of Neapolitan entertainers.
His grandfather, Luigi Pane, brought Neapolitan theater to New Haven in the 1900s and his grandmother, Giuseppina Pastore Pane, was a Neapolitan singer who was famous well beyond New Haven and Connecticut. His aunt, Nina Pane Sanseverino, has continued her mother’s legacy, entertaining Italian Americans and others for many years in New Haven and beyond.
Learning history
For Conte, who grew up in New Haven’s Fair Haven Heights section, has lived in East Haven for 28 or 29 years and is East Haven’s former Democratic town chairman, “it was gutwrenching” to lose the statue “in that it’s been there for so many years.
“I can’t help what happened 400 years ago. My father had nothing to do with it. My grandfather had nothing to do with it,” he said. “But “you’ve got that sense of pride and ( removing the statue) was like somone blowing up a balloon in the middle of the Green saying, “Everything your family” ever did or stood for doesn’t matter, he said.
Conte said of the people who erected the statue, “I don’t think they knew that much about ( Columbus.) ... They did it for different reasons.”
Conte didn’t dispute that Columbus might have subjugated or killed indigenous people, but said the Italian Americans who erected the statue — many of whom had just come on boats from Italy and settled in New Haven to work at the Sargent Co. and other industries — didn’t know that.
“If it were back then that you were taught about some of that, then maybe the feeling would be different,” he said. But for the people who erected the statue, “His struggle was their struggle ... struggling with funds to come to this country.”
He wondered aloud, “Why the Italians? It seems like all you hear are the negative things. None of the cures or discoveries” that Italians have brought to the world are singled out for attention, he said.
“It’s good that this is all being talked about,” said Conte.
“We have more in common than they think,” said Conte, whose parents grew up in and around Wooster Square. “I want to bring it together.”
Conte, 56, who is white, said he probably has more Black friends than most people he knows, but “I don’t want to see it that way. I don’t want to look at it that way. They’re my friends.”
Asked why he thought there was violence Wednesday — a New Haven Independent video appears to show it beginning with a blow from an older statue supporter — Conte said, “Those guys, the old school, there’s no way of talking ... They went through tough times,” he said.
A symbol
For Conte — who once worked with Pane at Sargent, following in the footsteps of his mother and grandmother — the connection to Wooster Street and Wooster Square “is a family, generational thing. That’s the tie back to everything,” he said. “Everybody had a family member who lived there.”
And just as the Italian American societies such as the St. Andrew the Apostle Society and the Santa Maria Maddelena Society trace their origins back to the specific towns in Italy where their founders’ families came from, Italian Americans all over Greater New Haven trace their lineage back to Wooster Street.
Even though he’s now in East Haven, “That’s your zone,” Conte said of the old neighborhood. “That’s where I trace everything back to.”
But that doesn’t mean Wooster Square can’t continue to grow more diverse, he said.
“If people said, ‘ I want a Martin Luther . King statue there,’ I’m fine with that!” he said. “Put it up on the other side.”
Andrew Consiglio, president of the Santa Maria Maddelena Society and a retired New Haven police captain, also was there Wednesday morning.
“I lived two blocks from that statue ... That statue has been a symbol to us” for many years, he said. “The Italian people put their heart and soul into putting that statue there ... and it was part of our heritage.
“I’m not saying that maybe Christopher Columbus didn’t do some bad things,” said Consiglio, who now lives in North Haven. “I don’t know. But it’s still history. .. It’s history, and you can’t just do away with history.”
As a New Haven police officer, “I worked with many policemen that were minorities — and we always got along,” Consiglio said. “We went to each other’s weddings and we always got along.”
He worries that “people are not living in harmony anymore ... I just hope everything comes to settle down eventually.”
While many of the people protesting to keep the statue in place might not live in the neighborhood anymore, “They lived there at one time — all of them — and a lot of us own property over there,” Consiglio said.
In addition to being part of the protest, Consiglio is the father of a current police officer, Patrolman Ralph Consiglio, who is a Wooster Square beat cop and was at the skirmish.
Andrew Consiglio said he was proud of his son for the way he handled himself.
“I was proud of my son, that he held his composure,” he said.
While the skirmish didn’t last long, “It could have been a huge thing ... It could have gotten out of hand, bad,” he said. “Things like that can get out of control.”
With regard to the statue and what happens now, “I think they should put back something that has to do with Italian heritage, because that was the community,” Consiglio said. Whatever they do, “I think the neighborhood should be consulted and the people that lived there should be consulted.”
Gene Ruocco, 75, another former East Haven Democratic chairman who was born on Chapel Street across the street from the current location of the St. Andrew’s Society before later moving to the Annex and eventually East Haven, said his grandparents arrived in the late 1890s and settled around Wooster Street.
The people who put up the statue didn’t do it because they supported everything Columbus did, Ruocco said.
They erected it as “something to cling to to show pride in their homeland, and they happened to pick this guy ... They picked this guy and they put him on a pedestal, not because of what he did 500 years ago but because they were looking for someone to represent them,” he said.
Ruocco said he went to Wooster Square early Wednesday morning “out of respect for those immigrants ... really out of respect for my own grandparents ... and out of respect for them, that’s why they should leave the statue as it was.”
Ruocco said he left about 9 a. m., before the skirmish, “because the word was out that they were going to remove it.” He said of the whole episode, “It’s sad.”
“I don’t know who started that. But I know those old guys who were sitting there didn’t know how to handle someone screaming at them with a bullhorn ... and even though they’re old men now, I don’t think they’re the kind of people to allow for that.”