Mamdani needs to erase Little Italy?

In New York City, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration put out a map of all the ethnic enclaves of New York City — with a few exceptions:

Read more NATO’s last stand?

Seems Little Italy — and Bensonhurst, Howard Beach, Bay Ridge, Belmont, Greenwich Village, and Staten Island, aren’t Italian-American anymore, so aren’t there anymore; they’re dead to Mamdani. This, despite all the evidence of one’s eyes that they are still very Italian-American in those parts, with Italian restaurants, to the San Gennaro festival, to rose rosary beads in shops, to tough dads with garden hoses speaking like Frank Sinatra. Anyone who’s been to New York City, coming in through La Guardia Airport — remember Fiorello La Guardia? — Or for that matter, Rudy Giuliani? — has seen and appreciated them all.

Italian-Americans have an amazing and impressive history in New York City. Unlike many other immigrant groups, such as the Swedes, who arrived in New York and moved inland, the Italians, who began arriving in the 1880s in big waves that extended to about 1920, often stayed in New York City — it was a third of them, actually — to build it into the city it became.

Oh, and by the way, where are the Jewish neighborhoods? The Upper West Side, Borough Park, Crown Heights, Williamsburg, Washington Heights suddenly aren’t Jewish? All these places we know from our American Literature classes now have no Jewish people? That isn’t what we see in voting patterns.

Where are the Irish (Hell’s Kitchen, Inwood) neighborhoods? You know a neighborhood with a name like Hell’s Kitchen might just be Irish. And don’t forget St. Patrick’s Cathedral, built by Irish immigrants. Invisible now, too.

And how is it an ethnic enclave which is famous in Saturday Night Live skits — ‘cheeborger, cheeborger,’ and the blue paper ‘Anthora’ coffee cups with ‘we are happy to serve you’ written on them  — Greece — somehow not on Mamdani’s map? Any visitor to New York City immediately feels the Greek presence, all the more so in neighborhoods in Astoria, Bayside, Bay Ridge, and parts of Manhattan. But nobody who’s Greek made the Mamdani map.

Seems that in Mamdani world, some ethnicities are more equal than others. New York is an amazing layer cake of ethnicity upon ethnicity, some presences fading for sure, but certainly not the Italian-American ones. The Italian-Americans, who had so much of their Columbus celebrations and statues trashed and removed — are fortunately fighting back:

And fortunately, seem to have won. Mamdani now promises to include Italian ethnic enclaves in his salad bowl map of New York.

Seems the whiter cultures — and for Italians who know Italian-American history, this is ironic, Italians used to be considered ‘black’ — were erased, as if the people weren’t still living there with many customs from the old country. 

Charlie Gasparino points out some of the missing history about the struggles of Italian-Americans for Mamdani’s information:

… and has a great op-ed tying it to Mamdani’s Marxist beliefs here.

Mamdani tried to get rid of the Columbus statue a few years ago before he was mayor. He snubbed the installation of the Catholic archbishop of New York, which is the religion of the Italian-Americans. He mentioned many religions in his America 250 speech, but conspicuously left out Catholics, his speechwriter reportedly saying: “meh, can’t get everyone.”

As Giuliani noted: 

We all know what’s going on here, indeed.

Seems the celebration of ethnicity in New York City, which is a very New York-y thing, is now confined to just the ‘approved’ ethnicities, the ones full of socialists and America-haters, not the ones who built the city, assimilated into American values, and whose presence remains even if some of their numbers are diminished owing to immigration policy over the last fifty years, and the fact that some have moved to Long Island or into the interior of the U.S. 

That is disgusting. This is the first we have seen of a despicable effort to erase the salad bowl of America’s contributing peoples of the ‘wrong’ nationality and skin color in the name of anti-Americans and won’t be the last. Sure, Mamdani has backtracked and said he will put Italian-Americans on the map now. But Giuliani — a far greater man than Mamdani will ever be — was right about the Mamdani agenda.

Read more Between Iran and a hard place

Image: Screenshot from X // fair use