Settlement: Part I

Immigrants, especially white Protestants, flocked to the region, bringing their conservative values that often clashed with Southern California’s cosmopolitan culture. Within thirty years, Los Angeles’ population reached 100,000. This growth trend continued with the completion of the Panama Canal in 1913, which made travel to Southern California easier and more economical.

Pictured here: Midwestern settlers in La Puente, a city in Eastern Los Angeles County, circa 1890.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Italy’s economic crisis led to an exodus of the country’s population. Italian enclaves, or “Little Italies,” formed in many parts of the United States, including locally in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Between 1876 and 1914, 14 million people left Italy. This equated to roughly one-third of the country’s population. It is believed that no other nation has experienced a greater exodus of its people during an equal span of time. What led scores of Italians to leave their villages for a place that most had not seen, even in photographs?

After learning about employment opportunities in Southern California, 30-year-old Luigi Perini packed his belongings into this wooden trunk and left his village near Genoa in 1913. Luigi found work as a machinist, and settled in Lincoln Heights. Luigi’s daughter, Mary, kept this trunk as a reminder of her family’s humble beginnings in the United States.

Following the unification of Italy in 1861, economic and political inequities between northern and southern Italy intensified. The new constitution favored the north, and while southerners paid high taxes, little investment was made in the region’s land or infrastructure. Uncultivable soil and primitive farming methods yielded inadequate crops; phylloxera and other parasites decimated harvests.

Many farmers were reduced to mezzadri, or sharecroppers, who were permanently in debt to their landlords. Those lucky enough to find employment received meager wages. In 1902, the average Sicilian braccianti, or day laborer, earned only 25 cents for 12 hours of work. Their wages become more dismal when one considers the surprisingly high cost of living and basic foodstuffs, such as sugar, which cost $.19 a pound. Photographs of peasants reveal the physical manifestations of malnutrition: gaunt bodies, stunted growth, sunken eyes, and shallow faces. The popular greeting “Si mangiato?” (Have you eaten?) illustrates the extent to which hunger was a part of daily life.

Despite the worsening economic outlook, Italy’s population skyrocketed. By 1900, the population teetered at 33 million, and by 1911, it had soared to 35 million, exerting crushing pressure on the already scarce food supply. Weakened by hunger, the populace became more susceptible to illnesses. Pellagra, a vitamin deficiency disease that produces skin lesions, pictured here, afflicted many peasants. Outbreaks of cholera, which was related to poor sanitation, claimed tens of thousands of lives, while the infectious eye disease trachoma left scores of others blind. In areas where malaria was omnipresent, such as Calabria, Basilicata, Sicily, and Sardinia, 20 to 30 percent of the population succumbed to the disease.

Records suggest that 70 percent of Messina’s population of 150,000 perished and 90 percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed.

An estimated 40 percent of Reggio Calabria’s population was killed, and on both sides of the strait, approximately 300 villages simply disappeared.

While emigration presented a variety of risks, it was one of the few ways in which the peasantry could exercise agency over their destiny.

In 1919, 22-year-old Mina Guglielmina left her family home and boarded the SS Canopic at the Port of Genoa. Her destination was Los Angeles, where she would meet Luigi Perini, the man she had agreed to marry, for the first time.

In 1907 alone, 285,000 people left Italy; in 1913, a record 872,598 people emigrated.

Many were "birds of passage," meaning they intended to return to their homeland after earning enough money to improve their family’s standard of living.

Most Italians made the transatlantic journey traveling in steerage, or third class. Located below the ship’s deck, steerage was a crowded, windowless compartment, where hundreds of passengers spent the seven- to seventeen-day trip without adequate ventilation, sanitation, and water.

The Scottini family left Italy in 1881 and first sailed to Mexico before traveling to Texas, and finally to Los Angeles. Of the 13 children born to Cecilia, only seven lived to adulthood. This wool shawl, which Cecilia used as a blanket, coat, and to swaddle her children, was one of the few possessions she brought from her homeland.

As the boats approached land, the immigrants, regardless of ethnicity or religion, gathered on the deck and the ship became electrified with emotion. They kissed and embraced, fell to the floor as an act of homage, or raised their hands to the heavens speaking prayers of gratitude. They danced with joy and raised their voices in unison, "America! America!"

Giulio Bonomi immigrated to the United States in 1911. The U.S. Immigration Service used this inspection card to indicate that immigrants had been vaccinated and disinfected and passed daily health inspections during the voyage. After entering through Ellis Island, Bonomi traveled west to Los Angeles, where he had accepted a job with the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Made possible by a loan from the Bonani-Garia family.

Joining immigrants from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe, including Jews escaping religious persecution, the peak of Italian immigration to the United States coincided with the largest wave of immigration in the country’s history. This influx of peoples would forever transform the face of the nation. Economically, Italian immigrants and their multi-ethnic counterparts filled a significant need for cheap labor in booming American industries.

The birth, and subsequent demise, of the region’s Italian enclaves is inextricably linked to the city’s physical and socio-cultural geography, geopolitics, and to the history of Los Angeles, which is described by some as “the history of forgetting.”

Los Angeles is a city that has long thrived on the promotion and re-creation of a mythic past, while ignoring, obscuring, erasing, and forgetting its “true” history.

Studied by fewer than a handful of historians over the past century, until recently, the region’s Italian legacy was one of many chapters in local history that remained buried in Southern California’s tangled past.

Following in the footsteps of the region’s Italian pioneers, Los Angeles’ second wave of Italian immigrants often settled in the Plaza area (where we are today), and in San Pedro, Los Angeles’ historic waterfront. Upon the completion of the Panama Canal and the transcontinental railroad, which made travel to California easier and less costly, the Italian population of Los Angeles rose steadily, from 2,000 in 1900 to 3,800 in 1910 and 12,700 in 1930.

As the community grew, other vibrant enclaves formed. While less homogenous than the Little Italies elsewhere in the nation, the Italian neighborhoods of Southern California played an important role in the acculturation process, helping immigrants obtain housing, employment, and the information necessary to navigate their new surroundings.

The ethnic neighborhoods also helped immigrants preserve their transplanted culture, forge an emerging Italian American identity, and give birth to a uniquely Italo-Angeleno culture.

Marriage records from Immaculate Conception Church, a Catholic parish located southeast of downtown Los Angeles, illustrate the chain migration of Sicilians from the towns of Piana dei Greci and Bagheria, and their migration from Louisiana and Colorado to Los Angeles.

Not all of the region’s Italians settled in neighborhoods where a significant number of their paesani resided. Some, including the Alfieri family, pictured here, lived in the predominantly Jewish and Japanese community of Boyle Heights. Others chose the multi-ethnic neighborhood of Watts as their home.

Los Angeles place names, such as San Fernando Valley’s Rinaldi Street and Montebello’s Repetto Avenue, testify to when the areas belonged to an Italian citrus grower and rancher, respectively.

Bordering the city’s original Chinatown on the east, the Plaza was widely regarded as a slum, or a neighborhood reserved for immigrants and the impoverished.

Pictured here: North Los Angeles Street where it intersects the Plaza. On the far right is the Cosmopolitan Saloon, which was owned by the Rabaglino family and was located in what had been the city's first firehouse. The building is now the Plaza Firehouse Museum.

Passing trains rattled the ground and belched soot upon the enclave’s crumbling adobes, gambling houses, saloons, and opium dens. Along Alameda Street, courtesans offered their services from the windows of the many bordellos owned by "crib king" Bartolo Ballerino.

Crime was common, and the stench of raw sewage and nearby slaughterhouses filled the air.

By the early 1900s, over twenty different ethnic groups lived in the Plaza, including Chinese, French, German, Filipino, and Slavic, with Italians and Mexicans constituting 75 percent of the population.

Approximately one-third of the Plaza’s businesses were Italian-owned. Luigi Terrile’s Cosmopolitan Bakery on North Spring Street, and Agostino Cerrina’s Cavour Restaurant on Los Angeles Street offered Italian immigrants the foods reminiscent of their homeland.

Today, the former Cavour Restaurant is the Chinese American Museum.

At the Plaza’s photography studios, such as Ricci, Borgia, or Del Beato, immigrants sat for portraits that they would send to loved ones who remained in Italy.

Midwife Domenica Franco assisted with the delivery of a generation of the neighborhood’s children, while doctors Francesco Bonura and Antonio Valla, pictured here, were among the enclave’s most popular doctors.

The Garibaldina Mutual Benefit Society, originally headquartered in the Sepulveda House, pictured here, which was also home to the Spineglio family's sausage factory, provided newcomers with referrals to the numerous boarding houses in the Plaza area that catered to Italian immigrants, including Teresa Turinetto’s Plaza Hotel on North Main Street, Hotel Roma on Alameda, and Hotel d'Italia on San Fernando Street (now North Spring Street.).

The Sepulveda House, as it appears today.

Seeking the familiarities of home, many Italian immigrants lived in boardinghouses or hotels, such as the Hotel d’Italia, owned by the Guerrieri family. Giovanni and Emilia Verna, immigrants from Piedmont, Italy, operated a hotel in Little Italy. From 1904 to 1917, Giovanni recorded the amount boarders paid for lodging, meals, and other services in this ledger. Emilia took primary responsibility for the boarders, who were mostly single men; she served as the hotel’s cook and laundress.

Made possible by a loan from John Lombardo.

Sadly, most of the buildings offering testimony of the enclave’s Italian history, such as the Lanfranco Block, were demolished to build freeways, parking lots, and government buildings, or torn down because of their deteriorated condition. Today, the Italian Hall is the oldest remaining structure from Los Angeles’ Little Italy.

Municipal offices for the City of Los Angeles now occupy the site where the elegant Lanfranco Block once stood.

By 1917, San Pedro, which had become part of the City of Los Angeles less than a decade prior, was home to dozens of canneries, hundreds of fishing boats, and local fishermen ─ Italian, Yugoslavian, Japanese, and Mexican ─ were catching 34 million pounds of albacore and 158 million pounds of sardines annually, making San Pedro the nation's largest fishing port.

The Port of Los Angeles, located in San Pedro and Wilmington, was once home to a large commercial fishing fleet and sixteen canneries, including Chicken of the Sea and StarKist Tuna. Foreign competition, regulations, and dwindling catches led the canneries to relocate. When Chicken of the Sea, the nation’s last full-scale tuna canning plant, closed its doors in 2001, it marked the end of an era. This can was packed at the Terminal Island-San Pedro cannery.

San Pedro’s canneries, including the Italian-owned Star Fisheries, Pacific Sea Products, and Ocean Fish Company, contributed millions of dollars to the state’s economy.

Sisters Rosa Buscaino and Giuseppina D’Asaro left their native Trapetto, Sicily, to work in the canneries of San Pedro. Entering work at 5 a.m. dressed in her white uniform, Pina stood on her feet for eight hours, cleaning fish with this knife. When she returned home in the afternoon, her children would often say, “Mom, you stink! You smell like fish!” Rosa would respond, “That’s the smell of money!”

San Pedro’s Italian neighborhood was divided into three sections: Italians from Genoa lived between 6th and 9th streets from Pacific to Mesa, while the area between 13th and 17th streets was largely a Sicilian enclave. Ischitani, meanwhile, lived between 9th and 12th streets. Many other Italian families lived outside these boundaries. Like most Los Angeles neighborhoods, these enclaves were home to people of diverse ethnic heritage, in addition to Italian Americans.

Pacific Avenue in San Pedro looking toward 7th Street, early 1920s.

Pacific Avenue in San Pedro looking toward 7th Street, as it appears today.

To this day, a portion of San Pedro’s historic Little Italy is known as Vinegar Hill, allegedly because after its residents made wine at home, they discarded the skins and other grape residue into a gully, which produced a vinegary aroma.

The Italians of San Pedro formed a number of mutual aid organizations, such as the Societá di Pescatori (Fisherman’s Association), and the Societá Italiana di Mutual Beneficenza (Italian Mutual Benefit Society).

The Di Carlo family arrived in San Pedro in approximately 1906 with the dream of opening a bakery. With no money in their pockets, the Di Carlo's borrowed the match used to light the fire that baked their first batch of bread. They would later establish the Di Carlo Bakery on 10th and Mesa Street, famous for its hard-crusted Italian bread. The bakery helped San Pedrans survive the Drepression by offering bread on credit.

Today, approximately 20,000 people of Italian heritage live in San Pedro, making it one of the largest Italian communities in Los Angeles. In 2006, the City of Los Angeles became sister cities with Ischia. In this image, members of San Pedro's Italian community celebrate the Feast of San Joseph.

Years later, an Italian American judge, Alfred Paonessa of Los Angeles, would play an instrumental role in restrictive covenants being declared unconstitutional.

To escape the Plaza’s congestion in the late 1800s, Italians began settling in the North Broadway District, then known as Sonoratown, and Chavez Ravine, a rural village overlooking downtown. In these neighborhoods, restrictive covenants did not exclude them, and families purchased homes for as little as $100.

Today this neighborhood comprises the heart of the city's Chinatown, though the largest concentration of Los Angeles County's 380,000 Chinese Americans can be found in the San Gabriel Valley.

By 1910, Italians, such as the Aprato and Giacoletto families, pictured here in front of their boarding house, constituted one-third of the residents of the North Broadway District. The heart of the settlement could be found on Castelar Street (now North Hill Street), near St. Peter’s Italian Church. It extended to Alpine, Ord, San Fernando (present-day North Spring Street), College, and Casanova streets.

Italian men played scopa, briscola, and other card games at the Italian Club on San Fernando Street and collected their mail at Tognetti’s Cigar Factory, where they might steal a glance at Angelina Tognetti, considered the most beautiful woman of the Italian colony.

The neighborhood’s numerous Italian groceries, such as the Peluffo family's market on Ord and New High streets, pictured here, along with its bakeries, churches, clubs, and newspapers, made the North Broadway District Little Italy’s largest commercial hub.

The Peluffo family's former grocery is now a Chinese restaurant.

The Frumento brothers immigrated to Los Angeles in the late 1800s and settled in Little Italy. As a token of appreciation for his customers, produce merchant Giuseppe Frumento produced this decorative calendar plate. The family's market became a deli and, in 1958, relocated to the San Gabriel Valley, which was then home to a large Italian population.

Offering suckling goat and other specialty cuts, the Tunzi family market was one of Little Italy's many butcher shops.

Little Joe's opened in 1895 as a grocery store and became one of the city's oldest restaurants until its closure in 1998. Located on 904 North Broadway, the Victorian-era building was demolished in 2014 to make room for an apartment complex.

The Italian residents of the largely Mexican American Palo Verde, Bishop Canyon, and La Loma, communities collectively known as Chavez Ravine, included the Nese, Lagomarsino, and Garibaldi families, whose farms dotted the hillside.

Early each morning, Louis Nese walked up Adobe Street, then a dusty, unpaved road, to herd his goats.

Late 1940s view of Chavez Ravine.

Following a bitter battle in the early 1950s, the city used eminent domain to purchase the homes of Chavez Ravine residents to build a housing project. Critics later condemned public housing as being part of a "socialist plot” during the McCarthy Red Scare era, and the project never materialized.

Many Chavez Ravine residents refused to leave. As television and newspaper cameras looked on, sheriff's deputies removed Aurora Vargas from her Chavez Ravine home by force.

Dodger Stadium was then constructed and now occupies most of Chavez Ravine.

The Eastside represents one of Southern California’s unique chain-migration movements. Immigrants from the Sicilian villages of Piana dei Greci (renamed Piana degli Albanesi), Contessa Entellina, and Santa Cristina Gela, many of whom had lived in Louisiana previously, created a settlement on Violet, Mateo, Hunter, Enterprise, Lemon, and Wilson streets. They spoke a hybrid of Sicilian and Arbëresh, the language spoken in pre-Ottoman Albania, which they called "Gheg Gheg."

Most lived in hastily constructed shacks or housing courts. Averaging 300 square feet per dwelling, housing courts were groups of three of more homes that shared a common yard and toilet. Few of the homes possessed running water or electricity.

The enclave’s poverty and immigrant population made it a target of social reformers.

In 1905, as a measure “to control juvenile delinquency and provide wholesome and constructive play and recreation for youth,” city officials created Los Angeles’ first playground, the Violet Street Playground, in the Seventh Ward.

A decade later, Methodist pastor Bromley Oxnam, an ardent believer in the Social Gospel doctrine, established the All Nations Church in the Eastside, which became the most effective social welfare organization in Los Angeles. To care for the neighborhood’s children, in 1919, one of Los Angeles first day care centers, the Mother Cabrini Day Home, named after the Italian nun and first American citizen to receive sainthood, was founded on Mateo Street.

Few Italian families remained in this area for more than a generation. As the Sixth and Seventh wards became increasingly industrial, most of the enclave’s Italian residents relocated to Lincoln Heights. The neighborhood is now largely comprised of warehouses and factories.

Early 1900s view of Lincoln Heights.

Many of Lincoln Heights’ 20,000 Italian residents were Sicilians who had previously lived in Pennsylvania and Louisiana. One-quarter of the enclave's Italians, including the Gatto and Cortese families, pictured here, had relocated from Colorado, namely the southern Colorado mining towns of Pueblo and Trinidad.

Using kin- and village-based chain migration networks, the Grafi and Bonura families emigrated from Gibellina and Salaparuta, Sicily, to the plantations of Plaquemine, Louisiana, where they remained for several years before journeying west to Texas. The families continued to migrate as a group, purchasing homes next door to one another in Lincoln Heights. For decades, nearly one hundred family members lived within walking distance of one another in the neighborhood.

The Grafi and Bonura families, like others of the time, transplanted the social structures of their rural Italian villages to create tightly-knit urban villages in their adopted country. The Italians of Lincoln Heights remained loyal to the traditional values of campanilismo, or the tendency to trust members of one’s family and town.

At the Giorgio Castriota Hall, pictured here, which was named after the hero of Albanian independence, the Sicilian community, many of whom spoke the Albanian-Sicilian dialect Gheg Gheg, gathered for social events, including weddings and baptisms.

Selling fruit was an avenue through which even the most impoverished immigrant could improve his or her life. After achieving success as peddlers, some became distributors and dealers, or rented stalls at the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market, pictured here. One such immigrant was Lorenzo Cancellieri, whose immigration journey took him from Sicily to Trinidad, Colorado, and, later, to Lincoln Heights.

Upon his arrival to the United States, Cancellieri became a produce seller, and was among the first to ship California wine grapes across the country via rail. By 1920, Italians figured prominently in Southern California’s produce industry. Italian fruit dealers and commission house owners frequently purchased crops while they were still on the trees, before procuring their own acreage and becoming growers as well as distributors.

Many expanded their holdings to include complementary industries, such as packinghouses, trucking companies, and refrigerated storage facilities. In the 1950s, Cancellieri’s son, Lawrence, established a produce trucking business, and co-founded what became one of the region’s largest potato distribution companies.

Following the death of his father in 1935, Sam Perricone, age 14, pictured second from right, drove his mother and siblings from Pueblo, Colorado, to Los Angeles, and settled in Lincoln Heights.

In the early 1900s, the Umina family opened a humble produce market in East Los Angeles. By 1926, they had saved enough to obtain a space at the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market, where they established a grape and citrus firm.

Within decades, Umina Brothers became a full-line produce house and established an export division. Today, the company boasts sales of over $100 million annually.

A century later, the Cancellieri family has become the largest distributor of melons in the United States, and one of the nation’s largest produce growers, packers, and distributors.

As the Mexican population of Lincoln Heights grew, intermarriage between Mexicans and Italians became increasingly common. During an era when inter-ethnic romantic relations were discouraged, George Carone, who was born in Los Angeles shortly after his parents emigrated from Italy, and Los Angeles-born Gloria Flores, of Mexican heritage, met at a playground in Lincoln Heights. It was love at first sight. George and Gloria kept their relationship a secret for three years before receiving their parents’ blessing; their marriage endured for over fifty years.

This Lincoln High School yearbook illustrates the diversity of the neighborhood known to many as "Little Italy."

In the post-World War II era, many of Lincoln Heights’ Italian residents began moving to the suburbs, including San Marino, Los Feliz, Eagle Rock, and Highland Park, or the San Gabriel Valley neighborhoods of Alhambra, Arcadia, and Monterey Park. The dispersion process accelerated in the 1950s with the construction of the Golden State Freeway, which tore through the middle of the neighborhood, and required the demolition of dozens of homes.

The railroad served as the principal employer of Dogtown’s Mexican and Italian residents, who made their short commute to the rail yard, which is now the Los Angeles State Historic Park, on foot.

Remittance payments─money that immigrants send back to their home countries─are viewed as the most tangible link between migration and development. For over two decades, Los Angeles railroad worker Giulio Bonomi loyally sent money to his wife in Italy, and kept each receipt. The remittances were integral to the family’s support, and served as a powerful tool in the alleviation of poverty.
Made possible by a loan from the Bonani-Garcia family.

Former Dogtown residents recall the comfort and connectivity the enclave provided, where neighbors reported on the whereabouts of each other’s children and gathered in the evenings with their instruments to play music.

Dogtown’s immigrant population also became the focus of social reformers who established a number of settlement houses in the area.

Tracing its history in the United States to Jane Addams’ Hull-House in Chicago, Los Angeles’ settlement house movement was spearheaded by both religious and secular charities.

The institutions serving Dogtown’s residents included the Los Angeles Settlement House, operated by the Rotary Club, and the Brownson House and Santa Rita Settlement House, which were administered by the Bureau of Catholic Charities. In this image, young women display the diplomas they received at Santa Rita Settlement House.

Settlement houses provided medical care, food and clothing for the destitute, educational, vocational, and recreational programs, Americanization classes, and, often, religious instruction.

Pictured here: Children of the Brownson Settlement House in Los Angeles, founded by Mary Julia Workman in 1901, learn basket weaving.

Michael Pagone, pictured left, whose family settled in Dogtown after emigrating from Bari, Italy, cites the neighborhood’s confluence of Italian and Mexican cultures as a principal inspiration for his career as a musician.

To Pagone, the Latin rhythms of his childhood were “infectious,” and he soon became a sought-after percussionist, performing with Cuban bandleaders Rene Touzet and “Mambo King” Perez Prado, whose hit “Mambo No. 5” topped the charts.

In the 1950s, Pagone, pictured left in front of the timbales, and fellow Italian American trumpet player Pete Candoli, were members of Prado’s famed orchestra. They performed regularly at clubs such as the Zenda Ballroom, which catered to Latino youth who were denied entry to other Los Angeles venues.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Dogtown’s Victorian-era residences and humble, clapboard homes were declared “substandard” and demolished.

If the Festa and Emanuelli families, shown here in front of their Dogtown homes celebrating Armistice Day (the end of World War I), were to return to their neighborhood, they would discover that not a single residence remains.

Today, commercial warehouses dominate the area, as well as the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, and the Men’s Central Jail.

Many of Dogtown’s streets have been erased from the map entirely. Bruno and Sotello streets, named after Italian families who lived in the area, are the lone reminders of the enclave’s Italian history.