Hi from NYC

I’m here doing some research on my father’s family, who came from Naples in droves from Italy in the late 1800s. I lived in Brooklyn and worked in Manhattan for a handful of years during my early thirties, never realizing my ancestors lived and worked on these same streets eighty years before.

This is 326 E. 11th Street, an apartment building I walked by probably a hundred times while I lived here in the late 1990s. It wasn’t until last week that I realized, thanks to Ancestry.com, that it’s the house where my great-grandfather Tony and grandmother Tessie lived when my grandpa Fred was born in 1907.

Grandma Jo’s family lived further north, on 125th Street, in what they used to call Italian Harlem. Her father Gennarro Santorelli was an upholsterer. Her mother Anna Siano died when Jo was only twelve. They moved north to Mount Vernon after that.

In fact, families were gone from Manhattan by the early 1920s. Josephine’s family packed up and moved north to Mount Vernon, where she met my Grandpa Fred. His family had moved out of Manhattan right around the same time they held the first Feast of San Gennarro in Little Italy. His mother had also died when he was still young.

Anyway. I took the train here from Vermont during a nasty heatwave. I spent most of my first week hiding in the air conditioning. My first venture to the Lower East Side was planned for last week. I had a ticket to see this:

In Sanguine Foedus. Nuovo Mondo (Bonded by Blood. New World) is a 1,000-square meter mural by the artist Vittorio Valiante recently installed in the port of Naples, Italy. I was to attend a talk about it at the museum. But I didn’t make it there, for any number of reasons. It was raining, it was busy doing other things. And I just had this weird feeling I shouldn’t go.

Next day I’m scrolling Instagram looking to see what my favorite tarot readers are up to and I happened on this here: