Elizabeth Street: Kidnapping Sites

Below the address of the Scimeca Family in the 1910 census. 2 Prince is just west of the Bowery.

Below the locale of Laurie Fabiano's great grandparents and grandmother in the book Elizabeth Street.

Below the 1910 census record of Laurie Fabiano's great uncle Lorenzo Costas' family. The address was 180 Prince Street. That's between Sullivan and Thompson.

On Tuesday Laurie mentioned that it was unusual that her family moved to 202 Elizabeth Street. That block was a Sicilian stronghold. Her family was Calabresi. However, the appeal of bathrooms on the floor at 202 Elizabeth Street instead of outhouses on a Calabresi block won out over klan solidarity.
The Tenement Museum encyclopedia discusses this

Little Italies
But many of them did stay, as the numbers above demonstrate, and settled in New York City and the Lower East Side. Italians tended to follow the Irish who had preceded them in both their residential and occupational patterns. They first settled in neighborhoods with some of the oldest housing stock in the city: the notorious Five Points neighborhood between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges (today's Chinatown) and the Fourteenth Ward west of the Bowery (today's Little Italy). They then moved north into present-day SoHo and Greenwich Village. Before long a sizeable Little Italy sprouted uptown between 110th and 120th Streets, east of Fourth Avenue. Eventually, East Harlem became the largest Little Italy in all of New York. While Italians were never a majority on the Lower East Side (always under 10 % of the population), their presence grew steadily from the turn of the century through the 1930s.
Within their neighborhoods, Italians tended to settle next to people from the same regions of Italy. Neapolitans tended to dominate Mulberry Street, the Calabresi claimed Mott Street, and Sicilians - who dominated the Italian immigration after 1900 - took over Elizabeth Street. In fact, immigrants from individual Sicilian towns tended to congregate together on different stretches of Elizabeth Street.

Elizabeth and Hester Street, 1902

The Run On Pati's Bank: 1908, Part 2

The Run On Pati's Bank: 1908

pati-bank-1908

Martin Scorcese's Elizabeth Street

244 Elizabeth
The above images are from curbed, as is a segment from below

A curious reader recently inquired about the goings-on at 244 Elizabeth Street, a tired old tenement on the eastern edge of Nolita, noting that this one is "a building where the deadbeat tenants would sit around and BBQ and take over the street, but I noticed a roll down gate covering their front door, cinder blocks covering the ground floor windows and wood covering other windows in the building." Deadbeats? Harsh! We dug into our vast archives and found a tale stretching across the past century, with echoes of Scorsese and the Gangs of New York. Given what we discovered, the neighborhood's newly-arrived neighbors might want to brush up on their marinades, because it looks like the old-timers will soon be back.
Mobsters and mayhem, right this way.
244 Elizabeth, currently owned by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, went into foreclosure back in the mid-70's. Now the building is being rehabbed as part of the Tenant Interim Lease Program, a city-sponsored community development initiative that "assists organized tenant associations in City-owned buildings to develop economically self-sufficient low-income cooperatives where tenants purchase their apartments for $250." High-paying neighbors will want to know that the cinder blocks and plywood now filling the facade are merely the interim design elements; they will give way to new windows and a full renovation. And very possibly the return of sidewalk BBQs.
If any nabe newbies are complaining now, imagine what they would have said a hundred years ago when this block was a target of the infamous Black Hand gang. Two doors down at 240 Elizabeth sat Pasquale Pati's Italian Bank; late in the afternoon of January 23, 1908, a bomb was set off in the bank's doorway as a way to extort cash from the banker and terrorize the neighborhood. On duty to combat the insurgents was NYPD's Lt. Joseph Petrosino, who gave his life in the on-going fight and is remembered at Petrosino Square a few blocks away. Forty years later this block was home to director Martin Scorsese, first at 241 Elizabeth and then later in a third-floor apartment facing onto Elizabeth at No. 253. There, from the fire escape where he slept on hot summer nights, Scorsese soaked up the activity on the mean streets below. Deadbeats and BBQs and all.

Martin Scorcese's "The Neighborhood"

a h/t to Cecelia Maruffi for sending this along

A short segment Scorsese directed for the 2001 Concert For New York City. It was introduced by Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. Followed by the short film was a performance by Billy Joel.

His part of Elizabeth Street is in Ward 14. Broome Street is the dividing line between Ward 6 and 14. Here's a previous post with a 1908 view of his block