Creole Italian: Sicilian Immigrants and the Shaping of New Orleans Food Culture

CREOLE ITALIAN

CREOLE ITALIAN

Sicilian Immigrants and the Shaping of New Orleans Food Culture

JUSTIN A. NYSTROM

The University of Georgia Press

ATHENS

© 2018 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nystrom, Justin A., 1970– author.

Title: Creole Italian : Sicilian immigrants and the shaping of New Orleans food culture / Justin A. Nystrom.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, 2018. | Series: Southern Foodways Alliance : studies in culture, people, and place | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017058468 | ISBN: 9780820353562 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN: 9780820353555 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN: 9780820353579 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sicilians—Food—Louisiana—New Orleans—History. | Sicilian Americans—Food—Louisiana—New Orleans—History. | Cooking, Italian—Sicilian style. | Cooking, Creole. | Immigrants—Louisiana—New Orleans—History. | New Orleans (La.)—Social life and customs.

Classification: LCC F379.N59 I849 2018 | DDC 641.59763—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058468

For Jess

Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION     Uncovering the Sicilian Past in the Creole City

CHAPTER 1     Sicily Lemons and Sugarcane: The Backstory of Italian New Orleans

CHAPTER 2     A Road Paved with Oyster Shells: Sicilians and the Origins of Restaurant Culture in New Orleans, 1830–1900

CHAPTER 3     Blood and Macaroni: Becoming American in the Sicilian French Quarter

CHAPTER 4     Booze, Red Gravy, and Jazz: The Birth of the New Orleans Italian Restaurant

CHAPTER 5     Italian Heaven: Life in the Sicilian French Quarter before World War II

CHAPTER 6     Making Groceries: The Bloodline of Sicilian New Orleans

CHAPTER 7     Meatballs, Mafia, and Memory: The New Orleans Italian Restaurant in Myth and Reality since 1945

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowlegments

Contemplating the people and moments who propelled me over the last decade to write this book, I’m reminded of a collection of mementos and found objects that somehow made their way into a keepsake box in a sock drawer. Collectively these observations tell the story of how the story got told.

In the beginning there were the conversations with Peter Massony, who I only half-jokingly call my adoptive uncle. His stories of growing up Italian in New Orleans fired my imagination to craft a narrative of a people who contributed so much a place I love. I continued to find myself circling back to place and people with updates on what I’d found and where I planned to head next. The idea of using food as a lens onto this world I owe entirely to the creatively verdant year that I spent at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss. Without running into John T. Edge and his contagious enthusiasm for the Southern Foodways Alliance, this book might never have taken shape. And without the inspiration of filmmaker Joe York, I would not have come to embrace oral history in a way that is now so important to my career.

Launching into the real work brought me into contact with the American Italian Cultural Center and its devoted curator Sal Serio. He introduced me to the vast and largely untapped oral history collection created by the center’s visionary founder Joe Maselli. At the New Orleans city library, my old friend Greg Osborn made it possible to pore through untold criminal court cases, periodically coming over with the ever helpful have you seen this? I find myself indebted to others who made critical oral histories possible, including Elizabeth Williams from the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, who introduced me to Joe Segreto. Becoming friends with Joe, who cared deeply about history, not only enriched my life but also helped me find many other people to talk with about these histories. Likewise, my former student Allegra Tartaglia brought me to see her grandmother, Rose Uddo Testa, and her friend Adele Chopin Uddo, which led to a phenomenal interview and an even better meal of eggplant parmesan. I must also thank archivists Kevin Williams and Sean Benjamin at Tulane and especially Bruce Raeburn, Lynn Abbott, and Alaina Hébert of the Hogan Jazz Archive.

Good folks, most of whom who I’ve never met in person, have been quite generous with images or documents, including Michael Dauenhaer, Sophia Segreto, Colin Hulin, Vincent Mariano, and Ronnie Sciortino.

A true friend is someone who will patiently read a draft of a manuscript, and nobody fits this bill better than my Loyola colleague Mark Fernandez. Others, like Jack Davis and Gene Bourg, offered particularly useful insight into aspects of New Orleans that I had not before considered. Likewise, Jason Berry gave thoughts on style and approach. When it came time to publish, it seemed only fitting that I send it off to John T. Edge again, along with Pat Allen at UGA Press. Locally, our departmental assistant Crystal Ramey kept me on the rails while the team at Georgia, including Rebecca Norton and my gifted and long-suffering copyeditor Ellen Goldlust, and SFA's Sara Camp Arnold made this a much better book than it otherwise might be.

Last but hardly least, throughout all of this my wife Jess put up with this project. I still laugh at us working together in the same room and my interrupting her with did you know . . . ? And she answering, let me guess, this is about lemons. Ten years and two little boys later, our collaboration continues to flourish.

CREOLE ITALIAN

INTRODUCTION

Uncovering the Sicilian Past in the Creole City

When people—especially those of Italian descent—hear the phrase Sicilian New Orleans, they often think of Mosca’s, that Westbank mecca of old-school Italian cuisine; the muffuletta; or perhaps a corner grocery store in Mid City. They also often think of the Mafia. In short, they possess a patchwork of memories rather than a coherent understanding of the city’s Sicilian past. The fact that my parents were born and raised in Chicago, a city that celebrates the ethnic diversity of its immigrant people, doubtlessly attuned me more than others to the Sicilian influence in New Orleans. For me, the city’s European immigrants—German, Irish, and Sicilian, leavened by significant Jewish contributions—gave New Orleans the feel of one of the great urban spaces found in the North. Today I remain awestruck that such a crucial thread of the city’s fabric has received so little systematic exploration. This book tells that dramatic story of the Sicilian experience in New Orleans.

Interpreting Sicilian New Orleans through the business and culture of food evolved organically. Tracing the contrails of cultural lore to their origin almost always led back in some form to the planting, harvesting, transportation, marketing, preparation, and consumption of food. Sicilian immigrants cut sugarcane, sold groceries, ran truck farms, operated bars and restaurants, and manufactured pasta. The more I burrowed into the topic, the clearer it became that Sicilians had much to do with shaping the city’s crucial relationship with food and that food played a pivotal role in the migration and assimilation of the Sicilian people. As a consequence, this project chronicles how the business of food, broadly conceived, dictated the reasoning, means, and outcomes for a large portion of the nearly forty thousand Sicilian immigrants who entered the United States through the Port of New Orleans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how their actions and those of their descendants helped shape the food town we know today.

My journey to make sense of the Sicilian past in New Orleans began in 2010 as a study of corner grocery stores run by Sicilians, a key touchstone of local ethnic memory. I realized that these corner stores could not be explained without winding back the clock to the early nineteenth century and exploring the reasons why Sicilians began leaving the Mediterranean and coming to the Gulf Coast. This led in turn to an exploration of Sicily lemons, transoceanic shipping in the age of sail and steam, the economics of sugar, and the physical and cultural terroir of Sicily itself. My narrative came to encompass global economics, environmental processes, and transformative technologies—and oysters. Only by knitting together these factors could I begin to explain the impact of different food products on the people who harvested, shipped, wholesaled, retailed, prepared, and consumed them, much less the cultures that developed around the various stages in this process. And although there are moments where I discuss Sicilian cuisine, readers hoping for nostalgic prose drowned in red sauce like grandmother made will need to look elsewhere. This book tells the story of how food became the medium through which Sicilians came to New Orleans, shaped the culture that they found, thrived as a people, and became American.

In this work, I dissolve simplistic perceptions of the Sicilian migration as a cultural and economic monolith—the familiar tropes about the Italian American experience constructed by twentieth-century popular culture. Sicilians came from a range of social and economic classes and engaged in a similarly wide array of commercial and cultural activity on this side of the Atlantic. Such diversity translated into a breadth of influence in society, culture, and economics, and the Sicilian migration played a pivotal role in shaping New Orleans culture in both ways that are readily visible and others that require deeper inspection. In short, while we know that Sicilian immigrants made important contributions to the local culinary style, they had a far greater—but less obvious—structural impact. Sicilian importers, wholesalers, farmers, grocers, saloon men, restaurateurs, and nightclub operators quietly capitalized, built, and innovated much of the city’s food apparatus and made it feasible for New Orleans to become the most interesting food city in the nation.

The term Creole Italian (or Italian Creole) was a neologism of pioneering New Orleans food writer and historian Richard Collin, who began using it in the mid-1970s to describe the restaurants of this particular culinary idiom in his insightful and sometimes acerbic reviews. Collin, whose restaurant column and important New Orleans Underground Gourmet drip with perception and understanding of New Orleans demography and history, coined the term to describe a culinary fusion of Italian ingredients and preparations with Creole dishes. Yet I use the phrase here almost entirely in the spirit of irony, a form of resistance to the unimaginative lexicography that finds New Orleanians setting the word Creole as the keystone in an interpretive arch that bridges all that is culturally worthwhile about the city. This practice often stems from the need to market New Orleans’s charms to outsiders, a process that almost always cheapens moments where the term might rightfully apply. Creole is at its best as the agent of cultural nuance; at its worst, it is the leading signifier of New Orleans exceptionalism. The desire to see Creole in all things arguably has long robbed the city of the potential for a richer cultural self-image.

The city’s cultural and historical myopia is not entirely the fault of the current or even several previous generations but has done much over the years to obscure the contributions of the city’s diverse ethnic groups, among them the Sicilians. Creole cultural pervasiveness has colored the city’s perception and historiography since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, taking wing as a defensive impulse against the threat that Anglo-American and immigrant cultures posed to Francophone survival. As a case study for taking an offense-as-the-best-defense strategy in the face of cultural marginalization, the terrain-staking actions of the city’s Creole elite can only be judged as wildly successful. Yet in the historical demography of nineteenth-century New Orleans, Creole as an ethnic category does not even constitute a sort of plurality. In 1850, the first year that the U.S. Census kept track of such things, 42.8 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born. Yet the notion of New Orleans as a Creole city has persisted—indeed, it is the rock on which Irish, German, Anglo-Protestant, and Sicilian cultures have seemingly broken themselves for the past two centuries. In a rite of self-conscious cultural perpetuation, this conception has been the dominant gene in a family tree whose deep-set roots hide its ethnic diversity.¹

In spite of the broad mythic space carved out by the idea of Creole and the rampant perpetuation of the city’s studied Gallic affectations, at its core New Orleans is inevitably an immigrant city shaped by successive waves of outsiders. Indeed, the arrival of thousands of southern Italians between 1835 and 1914, with 90 percent of them coming from Sicily, combined with the steady in-migration of rural African Americans in the century following the Civil War, has probably done more to lend New Orleans its unique flavor in the last four or five generations than any other cultural or demographic trend. Although the city declined in rank relative to the rapidly urbanizing Upper Midwest, the New Orleans population more than doubled between 1860 and 1920, a key fact in evaluating the motivations that gave life to the city’s many declension narratives. Not until 1960 (or as former mayor Maurice Moon Landrieu insists, 1958) did Orleans Parish enter a steady decline in population.²

Second only to Creole exceptionalism in its purposeful shaping of historical memory in the city has been the decades-long conscious construction of the antebellum period as the city’s golden age, an implicit if unwitting celebration of the slaveholder’s perspective so pervasive that even those who might otherwise reject such assumptions fall victim to its illusive power. I was invited to sit on a panel, Before Katrina: The Decline of New Orleans from the Civil War to the Twenty-First Century, at the 2013 annual meeting of the American Historical Association. The panel was predicated on the fallacious notion of New Orleans’s steady decline since the Civil War, an intellectual assumption bound by threads of culture and memory to the subtly powerful ideology of the Lost Cause. This was the first time that I consciously and publicly called this assumption into question, articulating a growing belief in the need to construct a modern narrative that reflects all of New Orleans’s people. A greater openness to the plurality of our shared historical narrative may finally be upon us, however. In 2015, the Historic New Orleans Collection’s Purchased Lives exhibit attracted record numbers of visitors, challenging them to ponder the endemic nature of the internal slave trade’s presence in the city’s urban landscape despite the effects of a sustained program of civic erasure. Another indicator of a spreading reappraisal came with the 2014 opening of a slavery museum at Whitney Plantation. The contentious ongoing debate over the place of Confederate monuments in New Orleans and elsewhere has revealed the brittle edges of change, but it is clear that hoopskirt fantasies are no longer paradigmatic.

The same preservationist impulse that emerged in the 1920s French Quarter and birthed the fabrication of an antebellum architectural fantasy devoid of its slave underpinnings also steadily obliterated traces of the Sicilian immigrants who had taken root there in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Devoid of the imperative to construct a glorious past and to the dismay of nascent preservationists, Sicilian immigrants accelerated the industrialization of the French Quarter, while the poorer among them crowded into the neighborhood’s run-down structures. The studied antebellum illusion in place today, codified by the Vieux Carré Commission, has left little trace of the former Italian Colony that thrived before the era of modern tourism. For this reason, this volume frequently refers to place-names in contemporary New Orleans where Sicilians lived, worked, and built their social and economic networks. Their inclusion has been intended not only to help connect the narrative to physical geography but also so that this study will promote the incipient maturation of the city’s historical consciousness and the ongoing renegotiation of the relationship between place and past.³

A thoughtful investigation of the Sicilian migration and its impact on New Orleans also seems particularly relevant in today’s postdiluvian era, a time of dramatic and fundamental change in the city. The pain of this ongoing transformation has been exacerbated by the historical disconnect represented by the lived experience of those New Orleanians who came of age in the city in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Their youth may have borne witness to a long-deferred black political empowerment, but there is no denying that oil-bust New Orleans, punctuated by the financial disaster of the 1984 World’s Fair, entered a period of long economic stagnation attended by a steady outmigration of jobs and residents. Members of this generation, now entering their sixties and seventies, reflect fondly on the cheap rents and vibrant anachronism-loving local culture that thrived here, skyrocketing crime rates of that era notwithstanding. The 1990s amplified notions of New Orleans exceptionalism and unwittingly reinforced Lost Cause narratives by doubling down on its Paradise Lost trope for reasons that were different yet somehow the same. Living amid such economic stagnation, the city’s residents gazed warily at the hustling metropolises of Charlotte, Atlanta, and Houston, jealous of their wealth but inwardly thankful that New Orleanians possessed too great a cultural sensibility to so unwisely succumb to such terminal sameness. Yet as much as the city’s inhabitants like to tell themselves that their city is not like every other place, it is fundamentally a city like any other in that it is governed by thousands of daily human interactions, with the flow of commerce pulsing through its veins. It deserves a systemic analysis that holds such romanticism at arm’s length.⁴

With every passing day, the pre-Katrina epoch recedes into memory. Crime and studied anachronism may be with us yet, but many of the political and cultural assumptions that governed New Orleans for a generation or more before the storm have dissolved under the implacable pressure of human agency. Such pressures include escalating real estate prices driven by the arrival of moneyed outsiders and Airbnb, tourists crowding the sidewalks of Magazine Street, and hipsters orbiting Sixth Ward second-line parades like a cloud of mosquitoes as well as quieter yet no less profound demographic shifts in ethnicity and class. While upsetting for some, these transformative events are more in step with the historical processes that have characterized development in the city since Bienville first claimed the river’s muddy bank for France. For most of its life, New Orleans has been in ethnic, social, and cultural motion. The story of how Sicilians, an earlier tribe of newcomers, came to the city and left their imprint offers a historical analogy for today.

This project has transformed my understanding and appreciation of New Orleans. The city is most relevant, both in scholarship and in life, where we can describe its past in terms that are universal rather than those that paint it as exceptional. I was unprepared for and shocked by the comparatively threadbare nature of the historiography of twentieth-century New Orleans. Save for a handful of important works and a body of scholarship primarily about music, historians have been intellectually derelict in systematically exploring the city that we know today as opposed to the one that resided in the distant past. Although we cannot blame this omission entirely on the deep-set tendency toward New Orleans exceptionalism, the phenomenon plays an undeniable role. That we enjoy rich scholarship on specific aspects and eras of the city’s past yet know almost nothing at all about others had much to do with my decision to write this narrative.⁵

I am hardly the first historian to observe this intellectual tendency to essentialize among those who write about the city. More than forty years ago, geographer Peirce Lewis observed wryly that for a city of its size, age, and prominence, New Orleans enjoyed an uncommon scarcity of serious scholarly work. More specifically, Lewis contended that historians and literary figures have paid more attention to gumbo and hoopskirts, to scarlet women and duels at dawn, than to the harder realities of economics, geography, political science, or demography. Although a number of important works have appeared since Lewis’s 1976 remarks, New Orleans still lacks a comprehensive study of the port and its commerce despite the fact that it is one of the world’s greatest entrepôts. The single-most-influential migration to the city since 1865—that by Protestant African Americans—has received little exploration beyond the literature about the Robert Charles riot of 1900, impressionistic treatments of Louis Armstrong’s Central City boyhood, and contemporary cultural studies of second lines. There is not even a credible single-volume history of New Orleans, doubtless in part because of the conspicuous lack of twentieth-century monographs on which such a synthesis might rest.⁶

Likewise, the literature on the Sicilian experience in New Orleans has fallen into one of a handful of categories that collectively create an episodic narrative that strangely parallels the topic’s popular imagination. Receiving by far the most attention has been the 1891 lynching that followed the acquittal of the Sicilian defendants accused of murdering New Orleans chief of police David Hennessey. Gunned down near his home on a rainy fall night in 1890, Hennessey was almost certainly killed by men belonging to one of two competing Sicilian longshoreman gangs in whose long-running blood feud he had injudiciously interfered. Reformist mayor Joseph Shakspeare seized on the incident to feed discontent toward immigrant-friendly Democratic Ring political opponents and used the city’s pliant newspapers to incite a mob that ultimately broke into the city jail and murdered eleven of the Sicilians inside. Scholars have explored what we may learn about race, whiteness, and ethnicity from this event, while others have proffered it as evidence of the birth of the American Mafia. Studies of the role of organized crime in twentieth-century New Orleans have consisted almost entirely of grossly unsupported pop conspiracy histories that claim to link Carlos Marcello with the Kennedy assassination.⁷

Other, more sober work, like the remarkable social histories written by Donna Gabaccia and Jean Ann Scarpaci, has endeavored to understand the economic and cultural forces that drove the Sicilian peasantry across the Atlantic, but both Gabaccia and Scarpaci apply a sweeping approach to a narrow moment in time. Likewise, sociologists Anthony Margavio and Jerome Salomone have made a serious bid to document the Italian immigrant experience to Louisiana in broad social and economic contexts, but they examine a narrow chronological band of blue-collar migrants. The musical impact of New Orleans Sicilians has garnered some attention, particularly the important contributions of the controversial Nick LaRocca and the enormously influential Louis Prima, though neither figure has been the subject of a scholarly study truly worthy of his significance. Astonishingly, almost nothing scholarly has been written about jazz legend Sharkey Bonano or other Sicilian musical greats. Like twentieth-century New Orleans itself, the list of unexplored topics in Italian New Orleans is shockingly long.⁸

In the past decade, scholars have increasingly used food as a lens for understanding society, particularly with regard to immigrants’ contributions, and this volume will help further the maturation of this field.⁹ The literature about food and Sicilian New Orleans, however, is even thinner than the already scant bibliography of serious ethnic study in the city. Beyond some fine journalistic treatments of notable restaurants such as Mosca’s, we find largely celebratory and impressionistic cultural pieces on cherished culinary traditions but few works that probe the core historical processes that gave those traditions life. St. Joseph’s altars, though scarcely mentioned here, have enjoyed pictorial treatment and cultural analysis if not scholarly exploration. And then there is the discussion, at turns equally ubiquitous and unproductive, about who invented the muffuletta sandwich.¹⁰

My previous work in tracing the whereabouts of African Americans and other marginalized people in the chaotic decades that followed the Civil War supplied a ready historian’s toolkit for exploring the lives of Sicilian immigrants to New Orleans.¹¹ I gathered a great deal of fragmentary primary source material among government documents such as tax, vital statistics, and census records. Court cases and city directories as well as newspapers—especially advertisements—helped piece together the lived experiences of people who often are underrepresented (or not represented at all) in the traditional bastions of elite white history, the archives. I also consulted personal scrapbooks, menu collections, photographic images, and maps. In a few instances, spatial analysis yielded more clues by aggregating bits of data across the physical landscape.

Other sources came to me whole, living and breathing, to tell their story. All work rests on the shoulders of those who have gone before us, and in this instance no figure was more crucial than a pioneering civic visionary, Joseph Maselli, a New Jersey native who came to New Orleans during World War II, married a local Italian girl, and became fabulously successful as a liquor distributor. Snubbed by the Metairie Country Club, Maselli devoted himself to his adopted community and particularly its Italians, whose significance his outsider status may have enabled him to more readily recognize. Maselli recorded dozens of oral histories between 1975 and 1980, recognizing that the immigrant generation was dying off and using his estimable charm and warm personality to encourage these men and women to open up about their lives. One of my great thrills in conducting research for this project was recording my own oral histories with the descendants of Maselli’s interviewees—or, in a couple of instances, with the interviewees themselves.

My narrative unfolds across seven chapters that explore the mid-1830s through the 1970s. I begin by describing how nineteenth-century transformations in global commodities, transportation technology, and geopolitical realities of labor and economy drove the first wave of Sicilian migrants from the Mediterranean to the Port of New Orleans. Sicilian communities exist where they do in the United States today because of the island’s long-forgotten trade in citrus, particularly lemons. Those Sicilians who came to New Orleans beginning in the 1830s were a maritime people who found success in the city’s bustling steam-driven economy. Diversifying into tropical produce and investing in oceanic steamers in the 1880s ultimately enabled this merchant elite to serve as the padrones (labor agents) for a far more numerous migration of their poorer countrymen. Drawn initially by the false promises of the sugar growers, Sicilian peasants found salvation in storekeeping and saloons as well as the more financially stable world of truck farming, for a time transforming southern Louisiana into the produce hub of the Mississippi River Valley.

The second chapter traces the profound Sicilian imprint on the development of restaurant culture in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Oysters, fish, turtles, and wild game from Louisiana’s aqueous landscape defined the period’s culinary expectations far more than did the Gallic preparations traditionally defined as Creole. The mechanics of this local system of food procurement and consumption found no greater appreciation than among the maritime Sicilian subculture hailing from Ustica, a tiny island sixty kilometers north of Palermo. First through oyster saloons and the once common industry of in-home catering, the usticesi positioned their nascent restaurants within the orbit of entertainment, alcohol, and gambling houses, most notably near hotels and at the lost pleasure zones of West End and Spanish Fort. Wildly successful as a class by the 1890s, the usticesi left a legacy that continues today in familiar landmarks such as Commander’s Palace and Emeril’s Delmonico.

Chapter 3 explores how the tension between Americanized elites and immigrant laborers led to spectacular intracultural violence in the young twentieth century. Mindful that the taint of peasant criminality might harm their fortunes, the prosperous second-generation importers and merchants of the Sicilian French Quarter moved to suppress the schemes of the Black Hand using tactics that deftly blended the Sicilian culture of vendetta with the New Orleans tradition of elite white vigilantism. Even as they wrestled with these threats from below, the members of the Sicilian merchant class invested heavily in the booming macaroni manufacturing business during the 1890s, transforming the Lower French Quarter into a hub of industrial food production and enabling the use of modern pasta factories to project the image of Sicilian immigrants as champions of American capitalistic progress. Meanwhile, the growing popularity of pasta outside the Italian community seemed to presage a broader embrace of its culture among non-Italians.

Much in the way that American diners today discover new ethnic cuisines, the growing popularity of pasta transformed American Italian cooking from the province of simple workingman’s lunch houses in 1900 into some of the hottest fine dining in New Orleans by 1915. Chapter 4 explores how Italian restaurants’ emerging ability to pull Sicilians into the American mainstream collided with the cultural phenomenon of jazz and the national morality crusade against vice. The ingredients of red gravy, jazz, and alcohol, combined with the land-reclamation projects that destroyed the competing pleasure landscapes of West End and Spanish Fort, fueled the rise of what became the entertainment zone of Bourbon Street. This transformation did not come without a cost, however. Between 1900 and 1919, Sicilians in New Orleans had made great progress in putting behind them old and largely unfair associations of Black Hand criminality while enjoying the surging popularity of their cuisine and a respect for their successful embrace of capitalism. Enforcement of the Volstead Act, however, caused Americans to broadly associate Italian immigrants with bootlegging and violent organized crime. The frequent arrest of Sicilian-born restaurateurs reinforced this notion locally. Yet the trauma of Prohibition also paradoxically fostered the economic and cultural maturation of the city’s food and entertainment sector, shaping what became the modern New Orleans restaurant and nightclub scene. Those establishments that emerged in 1934, a time one might associate with the beginning of Bourbon Street’s golden age, were wiser and tougher; most important, they also found ready sources of capital in profits gained through bootlegging.

Chapter 5 reconstructs the French Quarter before World War II as a site of Sicilian memory. This landscape has been largely erased by the Creole and antebellum prerogatives of civic