Some streets hold more than pavement and addresses. They hold the first footsteps of people who had just crossed an ocean, the smell of simmering tomato sauce and frying garlic drifting from open windows, the sharp cry of a street vendor, the soft clatter of wooden pushcarts on cobblestones. Mulberry Street in New York City and Taylor Street in Chicago were two such places. For hundreds of Italian immigrants—and for my own family—they were the closest thing to home that the New World would ever offer.
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| My great-grandfather Fedele Poppa lived at 114-118 Mulberry Street in NY, c 1906-1910 before settling in Bridgeport, CT |
fact that almost everyone understood what it meant to have left everything behind. On summer evenings the air itself seemed Italian—thick with the scent of basil, espresso, and laundry hung between tenement windows.New York was the great doorway. In the nineteenth century most immigrants stepped ashore at Castle Garden; after 1892 the processing moved to Ellis Island, which stayed open until 1954. Once the inspectors finished their work, many Italians walked straight to Mulberry Street. That short stretch of Lower Manhattan was the heart of the city’s Italian colony during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
My great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my great-uncles were among them. They lived for a time in tenements, one at 62 Mulberry Street and two others at 114–118 Mulberry Street—buildings that no longer exist.
I can almost picture the narrow stairwells, the shared hallways that smelled of coal smoke and cooking, the single window that looked out onto a fire escape crowded with geraniums and drying clothes. One lot later became a parking area, and by 2019 the others had been rebuilt yet again into mixed-use structures with luxury apartments. The place where so many families first “parked” while they found their footing has been transformed more than once, as if the city itself kept rewriting the story.
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| My grandfather, Isidoro Poppa lived at 114-118 Mulberry St in NY, then Bridgeport, CT and later, at 2160 DeKalb St in Chicago, c. 1920 |
The neighborhood began as Mulberry Bend, a densely packed section once described as “the foul core of New York’s slums” by the reformer and photographer Jacob Riis. In those years the street pulsed with life: the constant murmur of southern Italian dialects, the rattle of wagons, the high-pitched calls of children playing in the gutters. Mass immigration from Italy in the 1880s filled the area with families, pushcarts, and storefronts.
After World War II many residents moved outward to Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey. When immigration rules loosened in 1965, neighboring Chinatown expanded northward. In 2010 the combined Chinatown and Little Italy area was listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places—recognition that arrived long after most of the original families had moved on.
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| My great-grandfather Leonardo DiFoggia lived at 62 Mulberry St in NY and later in Chicago, c. 1906/1910 |
On market days the sidewalks smelled of fresh bread, sharp cheese, and the sweet, yeasty air that poured from bakery doorways. Men stood outside social clubs arguing politics in the old language; women leaned from windows to call children home for supper.
The air itself seemed to carry the neighborhood's pulse—garlic and basil drifting from open kitchens, the rattle of pushcarts, the quick laughter of kids darting between stoops.
Many Italians first arrived in Chicago in small numbers in the 1850s. By 1880 the city counted 1,357 Italian residents. Immigration accelerated sharply in the decades that followed; the foreign-born Italian population rose from roughly 16,000 in 1900 to a peak of nearly 74,000 in 1930. The Taylor Street area held the largest concentration. By the late 1920s Italian-owned businesses—hundreds of grocery stores, restaurants, and pastry shops—had become a familiar part of Chicago’s food landscape and helped introduce Italian cooking to the wider city. The scent of cannoli frying in hot oil, the gleam of polished espresso machines, the soft thud of dough being kneaded—these became part of the neighborhood’s everyday music.
The Italian population on Taylor Street reached its height in the 1950s and early 1960s. After the University of Illinois decided to locate a campus in the neighborhood in 1963, the residential community began to shrink. Blocks that had once held dense rows of flats and storefronts gave way to new institutional buildings, and many families dispersed. A number of long-standing Italian restaurants and shops still line the corridor today, carrying the memory of what was once a denser, louder, more tightly knit world.
I never lived on Taylor Street or in the surrounding Tri-Taylor, University Village, or Maxwell Street areas. My grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and a few cousins did, so I claim a connection through family. The stories I grew up hearing mixed hardship with warmth: the Spanish Influenza, the Depression, scarce jobs, many mouths to feed, two World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. Yet they also spoke of closeness among relatives and neighbors—of kitchens that always seemed full, of the comfort of hearing the same dialect on every corner, of pride in the community and in Italian heritage. Those feelings still surface whenever those who were there share their memories. Not a bad thing.
What’s in a street name? Sometimes an entire beginning. Sometimes the only home a family would know for a generation. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, a handful of stories that still carry the smell of sauce and the sound of laughter long after the tenements are gone.
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| Grandma Poppa and Family on DeKalb Street - July 15, 1951 |
Citations for direct quotes and specific facts
- Jacob Riis quotation (“the foul core of New York’s slums”): from his writings on Mulberry Bend, commonly referenced in historical accounts of the neighborhood (including How the Other Half Lives and later summaries).
- Former boundaries of Manhattan’s Little Italy and the reduction to roughly three blocks: standard historical description drawn from accounts of the neighborhood’s extent.
- Castle Garden (19th century) and Ellis Island (1892–1954) as the main processing centers: widely documented immigration history.
- Chicago Italian population figures (1,357 in 1880; approx. 16,000 foreign-born in 1900; peak of nearly 74,000 in 1930): from historical demographic records summarized in sources such as the Encyclopedia of Chicago and related scholarship.
- 1927 business counts (hundreds of Italian-owned grocery stores, restaurants, and pastry shops): drawn from period economic surveys of Italian neighborhoods in Chicago.
- Peak Italian population on Taylor Street in the 1950s–early 1960s and the impact of the 1963 University of Illinois campus decision: standard local historical narrative.
- 2010 National Register listing of the Chinatown and Little Italy historic district: official designation.
