What Is This World Coming To???

“What is this world coming to?” is a question we frequently ask ourselves. There are plenty of things that make me wonder if we are going backwards as a society and many of these topics are quite heated. There is one thing, however, that is not too politically charged but which has been appalling me all the same over the last couple of months and that is the eviction of Mrs. Adele Sarno.

Mrs. Sarno is an eighty-five-year-old resident of 185 Grand Street in Little Italy, where she has lived since 1962. A onetime “San Gennaro Queen,” Mrs. Sarno is in an ongoing battle with her landlord, the Italian American Museum, who has been trying to evict her over the past several years (or else force her to pay a $3,500 rent that she clearly cannot afford). Their reasoning? They would like to expand the museum. Normally, a tenant would be protected by rent control but there is some confusion with Mrs. Sarno’s case in that she supposedly lived in an adjoining building for a time while she was married. Either way, she is still 85 years old, and yet Mrs. Adele Sarno has until June 30th to vacate.

You may or may not have viewed a documentary series on PBS this past winter. It was entitled Italian Americans of New York and New Jersey and Dr. Joseph V. Scelsa, founder and director of the Italian American Museum, was interviewed. I, for one, felt so proud watching the show and recalling my own Italian-American roots. Like many parents, regardless of ethnicity, my mother and father always taught me to “do the right thing.” Can Dr. Scelsa possibly think there is anything right or justifiable in evicting an 85-year old woman who has lived in the same apartment for 53 years? According to the museum’s mission statement, they are “dedicated to the struggles of Italian Americans and their achievements and contributions to American culture and society.” Another of their missions is “to gather and preserve memorabilia, reminiscences, oral histories, documents and other appropriate material in an archive and library.” How, then, can they possibly displace a living example of said culture and society?

It’s obviously money and greed that have prompted changes in our old working class neighborhoods. Plenty of people have been priced out of their neighborhoods in recent years but is there no respect for an elder of the community? Mrs. Sarno could be my mother, your mother, or the mother or relative of anyone on the Board of Directors of the Italian American Museum, which oddly removed the names of the entire board after this story was picked up some months ago. One of those board members is the mother of our very own Governor Andrew Cuomo.

A couple of years ago, we had a beloved senior citizen in our own neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, Celia Cacace, who was forced to move from her apartment because the owner was selling the building. Celia was a lifelong resident of Red Hook and Carroll Gardens and a bonafide neighborhood cheerleader. Whether or not you agreed with her all the time, one could never dispute her love and loyalty for the neighborhood. It was bad enough that Celia was forced to move but what’s even sadder is that she was unable to find any affordable apartments in the neighborhood. She had no choice but to move to Wisconsin to live with her son. Coincidentally, Mrs. Sarno may be forced to move to Wisconsin also, to live with her daughter. Perhaps there is a colony of former New Yorkers who’ve been priced out of gentrified neighborhoods living in Wisconsin.

It is downright cruel that an elderly New Yorker who loves her home, her neighborhood, and city can be so easily displaced, forced to leave behind not just her modest home but also her neighbors, place of worship, doctors, and entire way of life and start over somewhere new. I do not know why the Italian American Museum could not work something out and let Mrs. Sarno live out the rest of her days in her home, an apartment that was renovated by her father and kept immaculately clean for over half a century. What I do know, however, is that I will never, ever step foot inside of the Italian American Museum. Whatever their mission statement purports, there is nothing I could learn there that is more important than having basic human respect for our community elders, those who bond us, invaluably, to the past.