Travel & Food
New York’s Other Little Italy
You can shop for beef hearts and tongue, along with the usual olives and sun-dried tomatoes, in this earthy Bronx neighborhood.
stv206@nyu.eduSnow teases the Bronx on an ashy Saturday afternoon. The people on Arthur Avenue knew it was coming. They back under pizzeria canopies and trot across the avenue to complete one last grocery purchase before the storm overtakes their community.
On an average day, nothing overtakes Arthur Avenue but the lyrical medley of Italian and English, the exchange of spirits and laments. The sound provides the humming lifeblood of an Italian neighborhood, this avenue its main artery. Lampposts rise at the sidewalks’ edges with flags announcing the avenue’s legend: “Little Italy in the Bronx.”
The appellation is technically accurate, but visitors won’t spot signs of hoary Mulberry Street — the cultivated storefronts and sidewalk cafes that lure tourists to Manhattan’s guidebook Little Italy. Even in the throes of a blizzard, Arthur Avenue, a 45-minute subway ride to the north, can be warm, earthy and genuinely welcoming.
The avenue has classically Bronx roots, and its surrounding character reflects that. Slums and housing projects encroach from every direction. I see a junkie wandering along a weedy block of vacant lots. Wind carries the smell of gasoline south one block from a service station at the intersection of Arthur and Fordham Road. A rotund Hispanic woman thrusts a handwritten note in front of visitors to the Arthur Avenue Retail Market: “I have 4 babys at home and no money to buy food. Please help. God Bless.”
The market is as good a place as any in the area to pursue charity. Its red façade looms over the avenue like a firehouse, its customers flocking in out of the cold with pockets full of cash for fresh meat, cheese, produce, bread, cookies, even cigars and ceramics. The City of New York has owned the place since 1940, when Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia set up the market to get the growing number of handcart merchants off the avenue.
Few other establishments here have the same community center ethos. Across the avenue, even the famous communal tables at Dominick’s are empty, since the restaurant has closed early in anticipation of the snow. The weather appears to have scared away many regular market-goers, too, as idle merchants joke with each other in Italian, gripe in English or just quietly lean against the wall behind their product cases.
A butcher names Luciano wipes his hands on a towel and paces on the other side of a refrigerated meat case. He runs the “specialty” side of Peter’s Meat Market, the side purveying animals’ spleens, feet, snouts and tongues. He nods toward a sallow pile of beef tongues. “Those are small, you know. Smaller than usual. You can get them…” He raises his hands and holds his palms 15 inches apart, then rotates them 90 degrees to approximate a less precise measurement. He drops his hands and nods again toward the tongues, maybe 10 to 12 inches long by five inches wide. “Those are small.”
What about the beef hearts? They sit still and immense and membranous between pans of kidneys and spleens. He confuses being asked how much a heart costs with how much it weighs. “Oh, I don’t know,” he says, scooping a heart out and lifting it above the others. “Seven pounds, maybe eight.” He moves to his right, pointing out tripe, chicken livers, lamb’s heart, sweetbreads. A bowl full of blood and veal brains sits at the back of the case. Luciano barely looks at it. “Um, about maybe five pounds a day,” he replies when asked how much he sells. Who buys it? “Lots of families. The Italians, the Armenians.” They also buy whole lamb’s heads, he says, usually four or five at a time. The heads come skinned, all tissue and eyes and teeth, wrapped in plastic.
His colleagues staffing the more conventional side of the operation are far busier, making brisk business of pork tenderloin, veal and rabbits that curl embryonically without heads or skin. Down the way, Mike’s Market sells buckets of rich red sun-dried tomatoes by the pound. A row of more buckets comprising nine varieties of olives lines the walkway. Homeless men are known to shuffle along beside the olives and scoop out handfuls that they will jam into their mouths and chase with a piece of French bread from across the way. They do this on the way to the market’s public restroom, up a flight of stairs past the tiny four-table loft where diners eat sandwiches or meat and cheese selections with red wine.
A pair of men navigate around one of many candy machines along the walkway. One says to the other: “I always thought they smelled so good you should be able to eat them.” He is describing the handmade cigars being rolled at the La Casa Grande cigar shop. The tobacco indeed smells sweet, enough to make you consider trying out the hobby, no matter how faded or ostentatious owner Paul DaSilvio’s pictures of himself with the likes of ex-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani or President George Bush might be.
The market is the warmest thing on Arthur Avenue today, though, now that the storm has paved over the sidewalk with an inch of snow. Cars crawl south through a layer of slush, and beyond your breath, the horizon disappears. The neighborhood is quiet, calm and illuminated in white, offering no reason to leave besides looking forward to coming back.
Getting to Arthur Avenue
The Little Italy section of Arthur Avenue is just west of the Bronx Zoo. The Arthur Avenue Retail Market has take-home or eat-in Italian delicacies, the Enrico Fermi Cultural Center features special events, and the Belmont Italian American Playhouse interprets the community experience. The neighborhood also has thriving Latino and Albanian communities.
Directions: By subway, No. 4 or D train to the Fordham Road stop. By Metro North Commuter Rail, to the Fordham Road stop. Then walk or take bus BX12 or BX22 to Arthur Avenue.