Long before the Vietnam War, San Jose had its own well-known Italian enclave called Little Italy. And way before the Vietnamese were pushing to call the Vietnamese retail area Little Saigon, the Italian community had already started working on a plan to revive Little Italy and call it just that. But as you can imagine, nobody at City Hall wants to touch that one. However, the Italian American Heritage Foundation is still lobbying the council to build an Italian cultural center along 13th Street in downtown, which was the original Little Italy enclave in the early 1900s. And they are careful not to call the project or the area Little Italy around people who work at City Hall for fear the project would get dropped on its head, said Joshua DeVincenzi-Melander, with the Italian American Heritage Foundation. “Sam Liccardo and all of them want to stay away from that designation with a 10-foot pole,” DeVincenzi Melander said. “When people are rioting outside City Hall, you can’t blame them.” But the Italian community is only going to take it so far. They have no plans to picket City Hall or make a fuss over the naming of the district. Instead, they are hoping that the area would naturally become known as Little Italy again if enough Italian businesses and residents move back to that area. “Eventually, that’s our plan, to have it Little Italy, but the name won’t come for a long time,” DeVincenzi-Melander said.
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Everyone pick a side. You’re either with the Sicilian Mafia, or against it.
I appreciate both their efforts and their classy approach, but the pessimist in me says that their tactics would not mirror those of the Little Saigon supporters simply because they don’t have the numbers. Even the LS debate had enough to protest while even more stood back and shook their head disapprovingly. Is there really that big an Italian community in this city?
Maybe Sam and Pierluigi could chain themselves together in front of City Hall, threatening to starve themselves unless San Jose gives official recognition to Little Italy. After all, that tactic worked well just recently.
Reminds me of a wise ol’ saying: you can’t sell the sizzle without the steak. LS had plenty of Vietnamese businesses to start with. The Five Wounds Portuguese(?) area has a better chance of a designated name. There isn’t much concentration of Italian businesses to create any “sizzle.”
The area around 13th St “WAS” an Italian neighborhood a long time ago. There are still some old Italians but few young ones. The kids moved out. There are more Italians in Willow Glen than downtown. Other than Chiramontes homemade sausage, I can’t think of a single Italian business there.
Sounds like a pipe dream to me.
Instead, they are hoping that the area would naturally become known as Little Italy again if enough Italian businesses and residents move back to that area.
Yeah. Right. Maybe if this were the 19th century. Now it is Little Mexico. Welcome to the 21st century.
Focusing on the “Little Italy” moniker will cause you miss the real story here—which I am familiar with as president of the 13th Street NAC, the local Strong Neighborhoods Initiative (SNI), a neighborhood group, as its name suggests, quite interested in revitalizing the N. 13th St. business district at the heart of our neighborhood.
Our board unanimously supports the project as currently configured because it is the best thing to come along for revitalizing N. 13th St. as a neighborhood-friendly business district in the entire history of SNI. It promises to create the spark for directly and indirectly eliminating blighted auto-body shops and liquor stores and replacing them with restaurants and coffee shops and the like through private investment. Full disclosure: I’m half Italian and I also serve as the neighborhood rep on the Little Italy committee—but you don’t have to be Italian to like this opportunity.
The core of the proposal is a new Italian-American cultural center on N. 13th St. to replace the outdated and out-of-place Italian-American Heritage Foundation (IAHF)headquarters on N. 4th St. in the Hensley Historic Dist. IAHF is joining with other Italian-American groups to create a single cultural center in one-block area that not only sports a century-old Italian deli (Chiaramonte’s Market), but a Catholic church which still holds mass in Italian (as well as English and Spanish), and tournament-quality public bocce courts in the adjacent Backesto Park. There are also many life-long Italians still living in the ‘hood along with some new ones (like me.)
IAHF also has interest from Bay Area Italian businesses to locate in the area if the cultural center project moves forward. In short, the proposal would involve a massive infusion of private investment into N. 13th St. and, Italian or not, their money will be green.
Limited and targeted public funding from the redevelopment agency within its core purpose, and as contemplated by the SNI progam, would also help with the economic revitalization of the N. 13th St. strip. The local Luna Park Business Dist. (also part of SNI) has advocated for a long time (before this proposal) for a dedicated off-street parking lot on N. 13th St. to drive private development of the area, and this would also encourage the proposed Italian American Cultural Center and related investment. The redevelopment agency could acquire or lease a site for that purpose, just as it has done repeatedly in the downtown and elsewhere. Likewise, the redevelopment agency could assist with the analysis of hazardous waste at any site along N. 13th St. acquired for the proposed cultural center.
So the real story here is not a naming controversy (a “Little Italy” will develop organically over time, if at all) but, instead, an opportunity for the City of San Jose to realize a significant infusion of private investment in an officially blighted neighborhood business district to create new jobs and to buttress the city’s general fund, year after year. City and redevelopment agency officials will have only themselves to blame if they let this opportunity slip away.
Regardless, I don’t anticipate any Italian-Americans in these parts missing any meals.
There are some old-time Italian businesses around but they are scattered all over, not in any one particular area.
I rather enjoy visiting these places and I’d like to keep them around. Maybe a sort of “virtual Little Italy” could be put together.
A website, logo, promo material with a map, tours, etc.
Now that the old sausage factory site on S. Montgomery is not going to be used for a baseball stadium after all, maybe the Italian Cultural Center could go there. It’s handy to Paradiso’s, if nothing else.
The Portuguese could do something similar. I was just in the Five Wounds neighborhood recently and I noticed that there are still a number of Portuguese businesses around there. There are some others in Santa Clara on ECR.
Back in the old days there were prominent French and German communities here. I wonder if there is anything left of them now?
San Jose is not a city of ethnic enclaves. That’s something we might be proud of. But we have a great diversity of cultural backgrounds and we should be proud of that too.
I’d like to see some kind of program that would celebrate and promote all of the ethnic groups that go to making our community what it is. That’s one of our strengths, but it seems that many of the people who take on the task of promoting SJ seem to think that the “white bread” image is the one to go for. Not!
We could have a different cultural festival every weekend for the whole summer without much difficulty. There are several already in existence to start with. Just put an organizing umbrella over the top of it and generate publicity material. It doesn’t need a lot of money, just a bit of organization.
The same is true of arts festivals. Arts groups are usually willing to do most of the work. If the city can pull together different events into a cohesive whole it can amplify their efforts. I’m thinking of things like ZeroOne and the Mariachi Festival.
For all the money that was poured down dopey sinkholes like the Grand Prix you could get a lot more payback. You want a Grand Prix?—this is Silicon Valley! How about a Grand Prix for solar-powered cars or robot cars? I would probably even go to see a robot car race.