On a midsummer morning on Pleasant Avenue, the smell of basil and frying dough still drifts past a stone church with a green-capped bell tower. For a few days each August, brass bands play, a towering spire of papier-mache and steel rocks down the block on the shoulders of a hundred men, and old men in folding chairs trade stories in a dialect that has almost vanished from these streets. This is the last living echo of Italian Harlem, once the beating heart of Italian New York. The Italians in East Harlem built the first and largest Little Italy in the city, and a stubborn fragment of it refuses to disappear.
East Harlem: The Place
East Harlem sits at the northeast corner of Manhattan, running roughly from East 96th Street up to the Harlem River, east of Lexington and Madison Avenues. Today most New Yorkers know it as El Barrio or Spanish Harlem, the historic capital of the city’s Puerto Rican community. But for the better part of a century it answered to a different name. Long before it was El Barrio, this was Italian Harlem, and a few blocks near Pleasant Avenue still carry the proof.
How East Harlem Became Italian
Before the Italians
Harlem began as a Dutch farming village in the seventeenth century, named for Haarlem in the Netherlands. For two hundred years it stayed rural, a patchwork of estates and market gardens north of the growing city. By the middle of the nineteenth century, German and Irish families had begun filling the tenements rising along the new avenues, drawn by cheap land and the promise of the elevated railways. The uptown blocks were raw, half-built, and far from fashionable when the first Italians arrived.
The Italians Arrive
The story of the Italians in East Harlem starts, fittingly, with hard labor. In the 1870s a contractor laying trolley tracks on First Avenue brought in Italian laborers as strikebreakers, and many simply stayed. They settled first in a shantytown near East 106th Street, then spread north toward East 115th Street and west toward Third Avenue. By the mid-1880s roughly four thousand Italians had put down roots in the neighborhood.
What turned a foothold into a city was chain migration. A man from a town in Campania or Basilicata would cross the Atlantic, find work, then send for a brother, a cousin, a neighbor from the same village. Those newcomers crowded onto the same blocks, so that East Harlem came to be organized street by street according to the old country. People from one province clustered on one cross street, people from another on the next, recreating the map of southern Italy across the tenement grid.
At the center of it all stood the church. Construction on Our Lady of Mount Carmel began in 1884, its cornerstone laid that September, and the parish became the first dedicated to southern Italians in New York. The men who built it worked at night, after long days of labor, raising the stone walls themselves. The feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, celebrated on or around July 16, grew into one of the great religious spectacles of immigrant America, drawing crowds that at their height were counted in the tens and even hundreds of thousands.
Italian Harlem at Its Peak
By the 1920s, Italian Harlem was the largest Italian American community in the United States, roughly three times the size of the famous Little Italy on Mulberry Street downtown. The neighborhood approached its peak in the 1930s, with more than 110,000 Italian Americans packed into its tenements. The 1930 census found that 81 percent of the population was first or second generation Italian.
Daily life followed the rhythms of the village transplanted. Pushcarts lined First Avenue, the Italian market filling the air with the noise of haggling and the smell of fish, cheese, and bread. Mutual aid societies, named for hometown saints, lent money, paid for funerals, and kept the old loyalties alive. Storefront cafes, social clubs, and pastry shops gave the streets a texture that was unmistakably southern Italian.
The community produced figures who shaped the city. Vito Marcantonio, born in 1902 near East 112th Street and First Avenue, rose from these blocks to become a fierce, radical congressman who represented East Harlem for seven terms. His old teacher Leonard Covello, an immigrant from Avigliano in Basilicata, became the founding principal of Benjamin Franklin High School in 1934 and built it into a model of community education for Italian and, later, Puerto Rican children.
The Change
The decline did not come all at once. As the children and grandchildren of immigrants prospered, they began to leave the cramped tenements for more space in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Long Island, and the suburbs of Westchester and New Jersey. The pull of a private house and a patch of yard proved stronger than the ties to the old block.
Public works finished what mobility started. Beginning in the 1940s, large stretches of East Harlem were cleared to make way for public housing, and the new towers scattered the tight Italian blocks that had defined the neighborhood. In the same decades a great wave of Puerto Rican migration arrived, and by 1950 the newly dominant Puerto Rican population had reached around 63,000. By then East Harlem was already becoming the Spanish Harlem the world knows now.
The Italian presence lingered longest around Pleasant Avenue, where families held on into the 1980s and beyond. But the numbers tell the story plainly. By the 2000 census, only a little more than a thousand Italian Americans remained in the old quarter, the last of a community that had once numbered six figures. (The Puerto Rican story that followed deserves its own telling, which you can read in our portrait of the Puerto Ricans in East Harlem.)
The Landmarks of Italian Harlem
Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, 448 East 116th Street (entrance on East 115th Street off Pleasant Avenue). The spiritual anchor of Italian Harlem, begun in 1884 and built at night by immigrant hands, it was the first southern Italian parish in New York. Inside it enshrines an image of the Madonna brought from Polla, in the province of Salerno, by an immigrant named Antonio Petrucci. The church was honored with a papal coronation in 1904 and remains a place of pilgrimage today.
Rao’s, 455 East 114th Street at Pleasant Avenue. Founded in 1896 and run by the same family for well over a century, this tiny southern Italian restaurant became one of the hardest tables to book in America, its handful of booths effectively owned by regulars who pass them down like heirlooms. It has outlasted the neighborhood that made it, anchoring its corner long after most of its Italian neighbors moved away. The kitchen also gave rise to a line of jarred sauces now found in supermarkets across the country.
Patsy’s Pizzeria, 2287 First Avenue at East 117th Street. Opened in 1933 by Pasquale “Patsy” Lancieri, who had learned his craft at Lombardi’s coal-fired oven downtown, it is one of the oldest pizzerias in New York. Patsy’s claims to have pioneered selling pizza by the slice, and its coal oven still burns in the same spot. Local legend ties the place to Frank Sinatra, one of many who made the trip uptown for a pie.
Thomas Jefferson Park, along First Avenue between 111th and 114th Streets. Opened in 1905 to give the children of the crowded Italian tenements room to play, the park became a fixture of neighborhood life. Its grand swimming pool, dedicated in 1936 by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and Robert Moses, was built with federal relief funds and could hold nearly 1,500 swimmers. On hot summer days it offered an alternative to the dangerous currents of the East River.
Benjamin Franklin High School. When it opened in 1934 under principal Leonard Covello, this school became one of the great experiments in immigrant education in the city. Covello drew the surrounding community into the building and turned the school into a bridge between the Italian families of East Harlem and the Puerto Rican families arriving alongside them. The original building on the East River later became the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics.
Claudio’s Barbershop, on East 116th Street. For decades this was the last visibly Italian holdout in the old quarter, presided over by Claudio Caponigro, a barber from the Salerno region of Campania who had cut hair here since the 1950s. Saved from eviction by loyal customers in 2011, the shop finally closed in 2019 when Caponigro retired after more than sixty years at the chair. Its shuttering marked the quiet end of an era.
Where the East Harlem Italians Came From
The Italians who filled East Harlem were overwhelmingly from the Mezzogiorno, the poor agricultural south that sent the great majority of Italy’s emigrants to America. Their roots lay in Campania, Basilicata, Calabria, Apulia, and above all Sicily, which gave Italian Harlem a strongly Sicilian character before the Second World War. They came not as a single people but as villagers, fleeing failed harvests, heavy taxes, and a land that could no longer feed them.
Specific towns recur in the records of the neighborhood. The Madonna at the heart of Our Lady of Mount Carmel came from Polla, near Salerno, carried across the ocean by a single devout immigrant. Leonard Covello hailed from Avigliano in Basilicata, and Claudio Caponigro from the Salerno area of Campania. Because migration moved one family and one village at a time, whole blocks of East Harlem were settled by people who had been neighbors back home, which is why the streets read like a map of the southern Italian countryside.
East Harlem Today
Walk Pleasant Avenue now and the Italian past is a presence rather than a population. The community that once numbered well over a hundred thousand has dwindled to a few hundred, most of them elderly, and Spanish is the language you hear on the sidewalks. The public housing towers and the long Latino chapter of the neighborhood have reshaped almost everything the immigrants knew.
Yet the anchors hold. Our Lady of Mount Carmel still opens its doors, and every second weekend of August the Giglio Society of East Harlem dances its towering giglio down Pleasant Avenue, a tradition revived in the year 2000 after a long absence. Rao’s still fills its few booths, and Patsy’s coal oven still turns out thin-crust pies a block from where it started. Much of the living Italian culture, meanwhile, migrated north to Belmont, so that the Italians on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx now carry the torch that East Harlem once held, much as the older downtown enclave of the Italians on Mulberry Street faded in its own way.
For the descendants scattered across the Bronx, Long Island, and beyond, East Harlem remains a place of return, summoned each August by the bells and the brass bands. The neighborhood that built the first Little Italy no longer looks Italian, but the memory keeps its appointment with the calendar, and as long as the feast survives, so does the story.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle in East Harlem?
The first Italians in East Harlem came in the 1870s as laborers brought to lay trolley tracks on First Avenue, and many stayed and sent for relatives. Chain migration from southern Italian villages then filled the cheap uptown tenements block by block. By the 1920s it had become the largest Italian American community in the country.
Is East Harlem still an Italian neighborhood today?
No. East Harlem is now best known as El Barrio or Spanish Harlem, with a large Puerto Rican and Latino population, and only a few hundred Italian Americans remain. Still, the legacy of the Italians in East Harlem survives at Our Lady of Mount Carmel church, at Rao’s and Patsy’s, and at the annual August feast.
What are the famous landmarks of Italian Harlem?
The best known are Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church on East 115th Street, Rao’s restaurant on Pleasant Avenue, and Patsy’s Pizzeria on First Avenue. Thomas Jefferson Park and the former Benjamin Franklin High School also date from the Italian era. Several remain in operation more than a century after they opened.
Where in Italy did the East Harlem Italians come from?
They came almost entirely from southern Italy, especially Sicily, Campania, Basilicata, Calabria, and Apulia. Specific towns include Polla near Salerno, the source of the church’s Madonna, and Avigliano in Basilicata, home of the educator Leonard Covello. Migration moved village by village, so neighbors in Italy often became neighbors in Harlem.
When did Italians first arrive in East Harlem?
The first significant group of Italians in East Harlem arrived in the 1870s, and by the mid-1880s about four thousand had settled there. The community grew rapidly over the following decades and peaked in the 1930s with more than 110,000 residents. Decline set in after the 1940s as families moved away and public housing reshaped the area.
Every neighborhood like Italian Harlem is really a collection of family journeys, each one beginning in a particular town and ending on a particular block. If you want to trace where your own people came from and the streets they made their own, we can help you map it.