Newsboy

The Sherman House.
Photograph: Chicago History Museum

Emiddio helped support the family during the early years in Chicago working as a newsboy. I imagine him living as the hero in Horatio Alger, Jr.’s novel, going each morning to buy the morning papers – the Tribune, the Times, the Herald, the Inter-ocean – then taking them to his spot outside the Sherman House, keeping an eye out for the prosperous, those likely to buy one of his two-cent papers. He would have friends, other boys from the ages of seven to sixteen, who kept all hours here, staying out on the streets despite the weather and the darkness until all their papers were sold. For some, to go home with unsold papers would mean a beating. The boys were different races, different ethnic backgrounds – there were Chicago boys as well as Irish, black boys and other Italians. They worked side-by-side, played pranks on storekeepers, sometimes went too far and had to dodge a policeman or two, and on a good day, sold all their papers early and walked together to the Saratoga on Dearborn Street for a twenty-five cent bowl of oyster stew. The rich stew, made with butter and cream and thickened with flour, was as delicious as it was rare and warmed them as nothing else could on cold, gray winter days.

Arriving the first week of May, the family settled in on the Near North Side in a tenement on Indiana Street – now Grand Avenue – between Orleans and Franklin. Italians crowded into these tenements along the Chicago River – here and on the Near West Side. Others had come before, paesani from Pizzone and San Vincenzo. Just three months earlier, in February, several Di Cristofanos and Foscos had arrived along with Antonio Rossi. At Christmastime, after a frigid crossing, going ashore at Castle Garden on Christmas Eve, other Foscos had arrived ahead of their kinsmen along with Francesco and Nicola Di Vito and Antonio Di Silvio. In May of 1890, Filippo Di Cristofano arrived in the company of Domenico Di Vito, Nicola Gallo, Giuseppe Grimaldi, Domenico Rossi, Antonio Santucci, the fox Antonio Volpe, and, finally, Antonio Di Iorio, a distant relative of Cristina’s mother Felicita Di Iorio. Even earlier, in April of 1888, Pasquale Di Silvio had beat them all through the “Golden Door.”

Antonio Di Julio with one of his
daughters. Photo taken on
Halsted Street in the 1890s.
Photograph from the collection
of the author.

Carmine’s cousin Giovanni had found a place for his family a few houses down Indiana Street from Carmine and Cristina. A cousin to both Carmine and Giovanni, Antonio Di Julio, was also here, along with his wife, Angelamaria Grimaldi, and their two daughters, Santa and Cristina. Angelamaria was six months into another pregnancy that May. She would come to term during Chicago’s hottest months.

The tenements were mostly quickly and shoddily built wooden-frame “cottages” or two- or three-story multi-apartment buildings, often on unpaved, muddy streets, with small, gloomy courtyards crisscrossed with lines hung with washing. Often apartments opened onto garbage-strewn back alleys. Sometimes the courtyards contained a “rear house,” occupied by more tenants. The narrow passages between the structures were dark, often damp, and sometimes impassable due to the accumulated garbage. In winter, the snow would pile up in the passages.

Turn-of-the-century tenement showing
the wooden garbage boxes attached
to the street.
University of Illinois at Chicago photo.
Public Domain.

The children played where they could – in the alleys, on the boards of the wooden sidewalks, or in the streets. Just blocks away, toxic black smoke rose from the smokestacks of factories on the river. The smoke was so thick that sometimes it shaded the sun and left an acrid and unbreatheable haze in the air. The soot settled everywhere, in winter turning the snow into a gray, gritty slush. The apartments themselves were sometimes a single room with a tiny kitchen. A wooden partition or blanket strung across the room provided privacy for the parents. Privies were in the alleys, as were open wooden boxes for the manure collected from the horses on the streets. There were chickens loose in the courtyards and in the streets. In the heat of the summer months, the combined smells were overpowering and unhealthy. Disease coursed through the tenements as more and more immigrants crowded into these neighborhoods. What city services there were could not keep up with the ever-increasing population in the river wards. There were cases of cholera, of dysentery, diphtheria, whooping cough, and typhoid fever. As recently as the early 1880s there had been a typhoid epidemic which killed more than 2,400 people. Smallpox killed 1,500 during the same period. The children, often out on the streets to escape the crowded apartments, were particularly vulnerable.

Children playing in a garbage-strewn alley on the
Near West Side.
University of Illinois at Chicago photo.
Public Domain.

For many of the immigrants from Molise, the green heart of Italy, whose native landscapes and architecture and customs had been shaped through millennia, this was beyond their imaginings. Coming from a land of high mountains and deep forests rich with deer and camosci – the Abruzzo chamois – and boar and wolves, and even a bear related to the American grizzly, many could not take in this urban, frantic world of Chicago – a city which had grown from 4,170 people in 1837 to 1,250,000 in 1891 and which had sprawled from 10.7 square miles to 181.7 square miles in the same period, a city of commerce whose combined transactions totaled nearly 1.4 billion dollars just the year before in 1890. For some, it was too much. There were those who would become virtually unable to leave their apartment, sitting by the window to watch the clouds in a clear patch of sky. There is an account of a sickly Italian boy who in warmer weather kept a vigil over the blooms of a flower box outside the apartment’s single window, sitting all day in his chair, breathing in the caustic air through the open window.

The Rush Street  Bridge, 1890.
Public Domain.

Mornings, Emiddio would escape toward the city center, easily walking the few blocks to the Rush Street bridge. Heavy traffic signaled the start of the day. Amidst the din of horses’ hooves, of the iron-rimmed wheels of wagons and carriages on the wooden planks of the iron bridge, Emiddio crossed carefully, the horses and wagons passing closely enough for him to feel in the cool morning air the heat of the animals. Once across the bridge, he would leave the river with its barges and its smokestacks and its factories and head towards the Loop. He would learn that the financial district on Dearborn and outside the fine hotels and restaurants were the most profitable locations to sell his papers. He would know what times of the day were best for each location. He would learn the routes of the cable cars. He would sometimes take his younger brother, Vincenzo, to get him out from underfoot, and together they would come to know the city and its people – from the street types and tradesmen to the businessmen and to the fashionable ladies shopping with their servants. He would come to know the neighborhoods of Little Hell, of the Near West Side and Maxwell Street with its pushcarts and its market, known pejoratively as “Jew Town,” due to the Eastern European Jews – generically referred to as “Russians” – who had settled there.

The corner of State Street and Madison Avenue, 1897.

Edison Studio. Public Domain.

On August 2nd, Cousin Antonio’s wife gave birth to her baby. She would have been born in the tenement apartment, the air through the open window hot and foul. The women of the family would have been present, including Cristina. A levatrice, a midwife, would have been found. Antonio and Angelamaria would name the child Assunta Maria.

Two weeks later, in Italy, it was the time of Ferragosto, the August festival celebrated since the time of Augustus. There would be festivals in San Vincenzo and Pizzone, in all the villages in the mountains of Molise and in all of Italy. The celebrations would culminate on the 15th and include the Feast of the Assumption commemorating the Virgin Mary’s Heavenly birthday, the day of her bodily ascent into Heaven.

Monte Meta with pilgrims on its slopes, 2013.
Photograph by Alfonso Notardonato.

For the young and for the more robust, following the Assumption, a pilgrimage was made across the Meta massif to the Valle di Canneto and to the Santuario Madonna di Canneto. The appearance here of a shining Lady to a young shepherdess established this valley, already sacred in pagan times, as a holy place. By the year 1475, a document now preserved in the archives of the abbey of Montecassino granted indulgences of one-hundred days to the pilgrims who visited the shrine here. From all directions the pilgrims came. Cristina’s maternal grandparents, married in 1815, perhaps first saw each other here, each having travelled miles of rugged Apennine terrain – her grandfather Pietro Di Iorio from Pizzone to the east of the Canneto Valley, her grandmother Serafina Ferri from San Giuseppe to the south.

The hamlet of San Giuseppe, now a part of the commune of Picinisco.
Photograph by the author.

Madonna di Canneto.
Photograph by Alfonso Notardonato.

The pilgrims visited the shrine, paraded in procession. Some would travel the last distance to the shrine on their knees. Some would walk the distances barefoot. Some, having seen the effigy of the Madonna – made of lime wood and dating possibly to the twelfth century – would walk backwards as they left the santuario, not wanting to turn their backs to Her.

Antonio and Angelamaria’s daughter would live through these days of August. But as autumn began, she would become ill. The particular disease which caused the illness has been lost, but on October 12th the little girl died. The location of her grave and the circumstances of the funeral also have been lost. The family would have been there – Antonio and Angelamaria, Giovanni and his wife Rosa, Carmine and Cristina. Emiddio, too, would have seen Assunta Maria laid into earth, where she would be left to lie alone, the family’s first casualty in the New World. Later, her parents, her siblings would leave America. In a few years, they would make a home in France. Manifest Destiny would continue to remake the American continent, but Antonio and Angelamaria would continue to think of the little girl they lost and left behind on the edge of the American frontier.