Tag:

federal hill

24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes on Sale Now!

The latest New England Historical Society book about history, food and recipes is now available on Amazon. 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes: From Ancient Rome to the Great Migration.

But why is the New England Historical Society publishing a cookbook about Italian cookie history? Because when 4 million Italians came to America between 1880 and 1924, many of them came to New England. They settled in every New England state and city, and they started restaurants and bakeries and pasticcerie with foods from home.

Each chapter in this ebook tells a story about the people who made and ate Italian Christmas cookies, and then it gives directions for making each kind in a modern American kitchen. (Click here to buy the book.)

Helping cooks celebrate centuries-old traditions with Italian Christmas cookies

Italian Christmas cookies are more than just cookies. They express the culture, cuisine and history of Italy. Biscotti belong to the stories of Roman legionnaires who ate them on the march to Britain and of immigrants who took them on ocean liners to Providence’s Federal Hill. Cucidati belong to tales of cloistered nuns in medieval Sicily and of the 20^th-century fishing fleet in Massachusetts Bay.

Cook like a Neapolitan Pasticceria — in your own kitchen

In this book you will get step-by-step instructions on how to make 24 different Italian Christmas cookies in a modern American kitchen.

You can choose from a vast variety of ingredients and techniques. Figs, lemons, chocolate, wheat, almonds, pistachios. Stirred nougat, twice-baked biscotti, deep-fried struffoli. There are cookies both gluten-free and dairy-free, the way they’ve been made for centuries.

Each recipe comes with a story about the Italian people. You’ll read about Italians who came to New England before, during and after the Great Migration. You’ll learn some of the history of Christmas and the different regional celebrations that evolved in Italy over the centuries. You’ll find out which Italian Christmas cookies don’t come from the old country – and which famous Americans have ancestors who did.

And you’ll also find Americanized versions – like biscotti with cranberries and butter cookies with jimmies.

If you prefer a print version, it will be coming soon.

About the authors

This book is written by two award-winning journalists, Dan and Leslie Landrigan. As authors of the New England Historical Society website, they’ve written thousands of stories about New England history over the past decade. They’ve had two books published, Bar Harbor Babylon and New England’s Hidden Past, which you can buy online or in electronic form.

Dan and Leslie have written two other e-books about historic foods: 21 Historic Thanksgiving Foods and 29 Historic Apple Recipes: Cooks’ Favorites from 1650 to 1960, both available from Amazon.

Love history?

Then you probably want to join the New England Historical Society community by signing up for our e-newsletter, which comes out once a week. Click here to sign up.

0 comment 1.3k views

A Fake Priest Gets a New England Mob Boss Out of Prison

Ray Patriarca ruled as the New England mob boss for 25 years from his Coin-O-Matic “vending business” on Atwell’s Avenue in Providence. He was a friendly guy but fatal, known for his ruthlessness and his political clout.

He rose to the top of organized crime in New England in the 1950s with the help of Dan Coakley, a Boston politician on the take. Coakley freed Patriarca from prison by inventing an Irish priest who pleaded to let the nice young man go home and take care of his mother.

The New England mob boss on his way up

It’s a classic tale featuring vivid characters: a New England mob boss called El Padrone, a Boston Irish pol named Dapper Dan, a governor nicknamed Chowderhead and a fictional Father Fagin, as in the Dickens character who led children into crime.

The pardon that Dapper Dan Coakley got for Ray Patriarca turned out to be a turning point for both men. It ruined Coakley, and it helped Patriarca’s rise in the mob.

Ray Patriarca, New England Mob Boss

He was born Raymond Loreda Salvatore Patriarca on St. Patrick’s Day, 1908, in Worcester, Mass. His father, Eleuterio, had immigrated from southern Italy; his mother, Mary Jane DeNubile, had Italian ancestry.

Five years later the family moved to Providence, where his father ran a liquor store. Raymond left school at age eight to help support the family, shining shoes and working as a bellhop. Then Eleuterio died when Ray was 17, setting him adrift. He discovered that Prohibition offered upward mobility for a young man on the make—through smuggling, hijacking and armed robbery.

He had a pleasant manner, but he could order a hit on a wayward underling with an abrupt, “Do it.” Stealing, however, was his first love. “The happiest days of my life were when I was on the street clipping,” he once said.

In 1929 the Mafia (called “The Office” by Rhode Island mobsters) inducted him into its ranks. From Rhode Island, he forged ties with the New York Profaci and Genovese families, who began to view him as their “can-do” guy in New England.

Vito Genovese

Caught

As he approached 30 he had a reputation and a rap sheet as a .gunman, gambler, pimp, thief, extortionist, bootlegger, hijacker and murder suspect.

On Feb. 12, 1938, Patriarca and his accomplices held up the Wallbank Jewelry Company in Brookline, stealing $12,000 worth of gold and gems along with an employee’s car. Five nights later, they pulled off another heist at the United Optical Plant in Webster. A barking dog alerted police, who found Patriarca hiding under a bench. They arrested him.

In August he pleaded guilty to the Brookline robbery and, in a separate trial, a jury found him guilty of the United Optical break-in. A judge sentenced him to three to five years in Charlestown State Prison.

Dapper Dan

Dapper Dan Coakley preferred a more genteel form of crime–the graft, blackmail and bribery kind.

Dan Coakley

He was born to Irish immigrant parents in Charlestown, Mass., in 1865. He won acceptance to the bar after studying law at his brother’s law firm. In 1910 he defended Big Bill Kelliher, who’d robbed the National City Bank of Cambridge. Kelliher got 18 years in jail, and from prison he claimed he’d given Coakley $23,000 to bribe the U.S. attorney and the jury.

Coakley’s later attempts to bribe district attorneys succeeded. He became the fixer for anyone who wanted an unpleasant charge of larceny, theft, prostitution or fraud to go away.

Coakley wasn’t above committing the odd crime himself. He once got hold of railroad magnate H.H. Hunnewell’s love letters to his mistress, and charged him $150,000 to get them back.

Fatty Arbuckle

In 1917, the film star Fatty Arbuckle came to Boston for a Copley Plaza dinner held by a group of movie producers. Afterward, they decanted to the Mishawum Manor, a house of ill repute run by one Brownie Kennedy. Brownie’s ladies accommodated the men in what the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court called an orgy of drink and lust… a debauch in a bawdy house … a stench in the nostrils of common decency. A photographer happened to be there, and a few days later Dan Coakley’s then-ally Mayor James Michael Curley called them to say they faced morals charges. It cost them $100,000 to make law enforcement forget the party.

Pardon Me

Coakley’s antics eventually got him disbarred. But in 1936 he won election to the Executive Council, which soon began recommending pardons to juvenile delinquents and notorious criminals. Gov. Charles “Chowderhead” Hurley signed them.

Gov. Charles Hurley

As historian Francis Russell put it, “the quality of Massachusetts mercy grew so strained that more convicts seemed to be leaving prison than entering.”

Most of the pardon petitions came from the hand of Councilor Dapper Dan Coakley.

The Fix Is In

Coakley filled his pardon petition for Ray Patriarca with lies. For starters, he called the future New England mob boss “a virtuous young man eager to be released from prison so that he might go home to his mother.”

A “Father Garneri” of Quincy signed a statement that he was anxious to express his opinion to the governor. Patriarca’s Providence pastor, “Father Fagen,” did the same. So did the Rev. Sixtus Brambilla of East Boston.

The Executive council granted the pardon and Patriarca was out the next day after serving 84 days of a three-to-five year sentence. Though he served for three different crimes, the pardon petition mentioned only one.

Leverett Saltonstall

On Election Day 1938, Massachusetts voters, tired of Chowderhead Hurley’s shenanigans, voted to replace him with a straight-arrow Republican, Leverett Saltonstall. Saltonstall appointed a commission to look into the paroles and pardons granted over the last 10 years.

Ironically, Patriarca’s wife Helen’s sister worked for Saltonstall.

Findings

On Dec. 20, 1938, Joseph Patriarca, Ray’s brother, checked into Boston’s Parker House, saying he wanted a room as near as possible to Dan Coakley’s suite, room 978, the commission found. Joe Patriarca got room 944.

A number of meetings followed between Coakley, Joe Patriarca, witnesses and priests. Money exchanged hands.

The Parker House in 1910

The commission found that Father Garneri of Quincy was actually the Rev. Philip Guarino of Waverly. He didn’t know Ray Patriarca, never discussed his pardon and had never authorized his signature. Father Fagen didn’t exist, except in Dan Coakley’s imagination. Coakley said he couldn’t think of the priest’s name but was thinking of Fagin, the character in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

Father Sixtus Brambilla said he signed the petition as a favor to a donor, who’d told him Patriarca had just committed minor juvenile delinquencies.

The petition also asked to pardon Patriarca for one crime, though he served time concurrently for three.

Coakley also told Governor Hurley that no one had identified Patriarca in the Brookline jewelry theft. They had, but recanted, like many witnesses to Patriarca’s crimes.

The commission recommended Dapper Dan Coakley’s impeachment.

Fagin. He didn’t exist in real life, either

Mud Bath

Reporters dubbed the Senate trial the “Mud Bath.” It took the entire month of September 1941.

During the Mud Bath it came out that Patriarca didn’t even take care of his mother—his brother Joe did.

The trial also exposed Coakley’s Statehouse trickery. One executive councilor had told Coakley he would not vote for Patriarca’s pardon. But during the meeting to issue pardons he left for 15 minutes to take a phone call. The Patriarca pardon passed, and the councilor read about it in the newspaper the next day.

Patriarca even failed to give the customary thanks to the governor for the pardon.

Massachusetts Statehouse

Coakley offered a spirited defense, but the state Senate voted 33-6 to remove him from office.

As the senators filed out of the chamber, Coakley stood in the doorway greeting his supporters and glaring at those who voted against him. “I can say ‘forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do’,” he then said in a statement to the press.

New England Mob Boss

Getting out of prison won Ray Patriarca new respect from the mob because it showed he had political clout.

In 1954, New England mob boss Philip Bruccola returned to Sicily, helped along by an IRS investigation into tax evasion. Patriarca stepped into his Italian footwear and ran the mob for the next 25 years.

Ray Patriarca, R.I. police I.D.

From his Coin-O-Matic building in Providence’s Italian section, Patriarca insisted he ran a legitimate vending machine company. Actually, he ran loan-sharking, gambling and pornography operations from Maine to Connecticut as well as real estate interests from Las Vegas to Florida.

Between 1962 and 1965, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had the Coin-O-Matic bugged without a warrant. FBI agents heard talk of bribes to lawmakers, judges and governors’ appointees in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island. But the FBI couldn’t admit the evidence in court.

Over his lifetime, Ray Patriarca was arrested or indicted 28 times, convicted seven and imprisoned four for 11 years. But he honored the code of silence — omerta –and he never snitched to law enforcement.

He died of a heart attack in 1984 at the age of 76. Dan Coakley died in 1952 at the age of 86. He never finished his autobiography, The Sparkling Past.

Images: Ray Patriarca By Rhode Island State Police – http://www.wrko.com/whitey-watch, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40688140the impeachment]. Massachusetts Statehouse By King of Hearts – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94906441.

With thanks to The Underboss: The Rise and Fall of a Mafia Family by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill and The Knave of Boston by Francis Russell for American Heritage August 1976. This story last updated in 2022.

1 comment 884 views

Italian Thanksgiving, or How One Ethnic Group Resisted American Food

The Italian Thanksgiving in New England was and still is a piece de resistance – a masterpiece of Italian and American cooking. It’s also a result of Italian cooks who successfully resisted do-gooders trying to Americanize their food habits.

An Italian Thanksgiving in the Italian cities like Waterbury, Conn., or Providence, R.I., or Revere, Mass., typically started out with antipasti – thin slices of prosciutto, salami, mortadella along with black olives and crusty bread. Soup followed, maybe escarole or dumpling, and lasagna or ravioli. Then came the turkey, stuffed with Italian sausage, brown gravy, potatoes, squash and cranberry sauce, washed down with homemade wine or soda for the children. And then finally dessert! Pie, torrone, spumoni, panna cotta, candy almonds, hazelnuts – topped off with roasted chestnuts.

That was not what social workers had in mind for the new arrivals from Italy. They wanted to Americanize the Italian immigrants who lived in the crowded North Ends and Little Italys of New England. And they took special aim at their dietary preferences – without much success.

“The reformers could not budge Italians on culinary matters,” wrote Harvey Levenstein.

Fortunately.

Boston’s North End today

Lacking Nutrition

Between 1880 and 1920, four million Italian immigrants came to the United States, more than any other ethnic group. Many settled in New England, still the most Italian region in the country.

Most came from Southern Italy to escape extortionate taxes, disease, failed crops and the ravages of the Messina earthquake, which killed 10,000 Sicilians. They were often unskilled, illiterate and dirt poor. When they arrived in the United States, they crowded into tenement slums where tuberculosis ran rampant.

Reformers in the 1890s believed they could help the immigrants living in slums by teaching them sanitation, personal hygiene and household economics.

And they blamed Italian food, in part, for Italian troubles.

“They easily fall victim to tuberculosis, they crowd together in unhygienic tenements, and the food to which they are accustomed seems to lack nutrition sufficient to enable them to fight with vigor the difficulties besetting them,” according to an 1899 report of the Family Welfare Society of Boston.

Robert Woods, who ran the South End House in Boston, attributed an increase in death rates among Italian immigrants in 1904 to crowded tenements and ‘their over-stimulating and innutritious diet.’

new-haven-garment-workers-wooster-square

Welcome to New Haven’s Little Italy, Wooster Square

Poison Tomatoes

Throughout the 19^th century, Americans viewed the tomato, a staple of Sicilian cuisine, as dangerous. In 1880 the tomato’s reputation fell even further when scientific research revealed they caused cancer. Though that finding was quickly disproven, many continued to believe the tomato safe only in very small quantities.

Experts also tried to discourage the Italian love of fruits and vegetables. They didn’t know vitamins were a thing, and believed produce mostly consisted of water and cost too much. Good Housekeeping declared pork, a key ingredient in Italian sausage meat, as unhygienic. Spicy foods damaged the stomach, had no nutritional value and led to the excessive consumption of alcohol they thought. And garlic – Oh! The horror!

Reformers of the era believed food was more nutritious when cooked separately. A pamphlet for Italian immigrants warned that ‘it wasn’t right’ to cook meat, cheese, beans and macaroni together. Some people referred to their soups and stews as ‘pig wash.’

Pasta alla norma, a traditional Sicilian dish. Hardly pig wash.

The Local Store

The reformers were no match for the tidal wave of Italian immigrants and the food they brought with with them.

In Boston’s North End, Italian food became available by 1874, when Pietro Pastene opened a grocery store at 229 Hanover Street. Another Italian immigrant, Alessandro Badaracco, had moved to Boston before the Civil War and ran the biggest fruit business in the city. John Ponte started the Boston Macaroni Co. in 1890, and Prince followed soon after.

Reformers figured they could change Italian cooking habits by changing their shopping habits.

In 1911, Eva White, the head of Peabody House in Boston, complained about Italians shopping in such shops. “No matter what inducements the larger stores of the city offer they will trade with none but their own people.”

Shopping local in Boston’s North End, 1909, by Lewis Wickes Hine. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

No Takers for Cooking Schools

Settlement houses held cooking classes for immigrants to teach them economy and proper food preparation. In the 1890s, the Denison House cooking school was popular among the Irish residents of Boston’s South End. But then when the Italians moved in and the Irish moved out, the cooking school attracted few students. The same thing happened with the Bennet Street settlement house in the North End. Irish immigrants flocked to its cooking school, but when the Italians moved in the cooking school had to close for lack of interest.

One despairing social worker commented in a report, “Not yet Americanized; still eating Italian food.”

U pizz’ di creanze

For their part, Italian immigrants viewed American food as disgusting. Doctors complained about Italians who refused admittance to hospitals because they thought the food unfit to eat.

Italians also attached great importance to the family rituals associated with eating Italian food.

Joanna Clapps Herman, who grew up in an Italian family in Waterbury, Conn., described one ritual: u pizz’ di creanze, the piece of politeness.

“If the last piece of anything is eaten, all the customs of politeness have been violated,” she wrote in The Anarchist Bastard: Growing Up Italian in America. “It means that the host hasn’t provided enough for all their guests to have as much as they wanted,” she explained. “It means that the guest is demonstrating this fact publicly. No matter how much the host presses her guests, no one is to take it.”

Instead of abandoning Italian food, Italian Americans simply added American ingredients to a traditional Thanksgiving for a belly-busting feast.

An Italian Thanksgiving

Ed Iannuccilli described his grandparents’ Italian Thanksgiving in their second-story tenement in Providence. They had come to the city from Italy in 1910.

“They may have been comforted when they learned that they shared something with those early settlers who long ago also arrived with fear, expectation and hope,” Iannuccilli wrote in the Providence Journal.

Their Italian Thanksgiving began after a thankful prayer. Then antipasto, hot dumpling soup and lasagna before Grandfather proudly carried in the turkey. And then a couple of fruit pies, torrone, nuts and chestnuts for dessert.

The feast may have been Italianized, wrote Iannuccilli. “But it was now clearly American.”

Here is a menu the DeFinis and Diioria families from Norwalk, Conn., still serve (thanks to Brooke Dojny):
Cold Antipasti
Ravioli Soup
Home-Style Lasagne
Roast Turkey with Bread Stuffing and Homemade Gravy
Mashed Potatoes
Candied Sweets
Boiled Diced Turnips
Green Beans Almondine
Steamed Broccoli
Sausage-Stuffed Mushrooms
Date-Nut Bread
Italian Bread
Green Salad
Chocolate Cream Pie
Apple Pie
Pumpkin Pie

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

Old school Italian Thanksgiving by Paul Altobelli, creative commons license. Boston North End By Ingfbruno – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27355267; Pasta alla Norma By Paoletta S. – Pasta alla Norma, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4992962.

With thanks to The American Response to Italian Food, 1880-1930, by Harvey Levenstein in the Food in the USA reader. This story last updated in 2022.

8 comments 714 views

How Armenians Came to America, and What They’ll Never Forget

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, most Armenians immigrated to New England for one horrific reason: genocide. It’s something the U.S. government didn’t recognize until April 24, 2021.

Long a persecuted Christian minority in a crumbling Islamic empire, Armenians suffered three spasms of ethnic cleansing by the Ottomans. Most didn’t survive.

Many of those who did came to America. They worked hard, and they influenced our music, our art and our politics. An Armenian American ran Brown University, another ran California. One rose to the top of the tennis world and another to the top of the pop music industry.

Once they arrived, they tended to hang onto their Armenian identity. Today, Armenian communities in Boston, in Portland, in Providence and most of all in Watertown, Mass., support many Armenian institutions. There are Armenian newspapers, schools, summer festivals, sporting events and dinner dances.

But beneath the dancing and the music and the food lies a deadly serious purpose: to force the U.S. government to officially acknowledge the mass murder of their people. It’s something that Turkey denies even today.

Armenian Heritage Park in Boston

Armenians in New England have not forgotten. Every year they celebrate April 24 as a day of remembrance with solemn prayers and speeches.

But they’ve gone even further than that. In the 1920s, Armenians who survived the Ottoman violence hatched a plot to avenge their people – from Watertown, Mass. Only in the past few years have details about the conspiracy come to light.

Armenia

Armenia, a mountainous country wedged between Turkey, Iran and Georgia, goes back to antiquity. Its most notable geographic feature is Mount Ararat. The country adopted Christianity as its official religion sometime in the third or fourth century, even before Rome did.

Mount Ararat and the skyline of Yereven

The state religion is the Armenian Apostolic Church. (For an explanation of its relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, click here.)

In the 1860s, Protestant missionaries in the region persuaded a handful of young Armenian men to come to Massachusetts to study for the clergy at the Andover Theological Seminary in Newton. Others came as servants to the missionaries, but then found better work elsewhere.

Armenians Immigrate En Masse

In the 19^th century, the Ottoman Empire (or Turkish Empire) controlled much of Armenia and persecuted the minority Armenians. The Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid believed the Christian Armenians threatened the Islamic character of the empire, if not the empire itself.

And so the first wave of Armenian genocide began with the Hamidian massacres of 1894-1896. The Ottomans killed somewhere between 80,000 and 300,000 Armenians.

By then, several thousand Armenians, mostly young males, already lived in Providence, Worcester and New York City. But the Hamidian massacres sent 12,000 Armenians from the Ottoman Empire to those cities as well as Boston throughout the 1890s. Christian missionaries in Asia helped them get here.

An Armenian family in Boston, 1908

Then in 1909, Ottomans massacred another 20,000 to 30,000 Armenian Christians in the Adana Province. Violence continued with the Balkan Wars in 1912. Armenians who either fled the Ottoman Empire or were deported swelled the U.S. Armenian population to 60,000 before World War I. They chose Massachusetts and Rhode Island as their second and third favorite destinations.

Armenian Genocide

The expression ‘Young Turks’ first referred to a new generation of Turkish leaders who decided to kill all 2 million Armenians inside the empire. On April 24, 1915, the Young Turks had 200 Armenian intellectuals arrested and then murdered. And so today, April 24 stands for all the violence committed against Armenians.

For seven years after the 1915 violence, the Turkish military slaughtered thousands of able-bodied men. They also enslaved children and sent everyone else on death marches to concentration camps in the Syrian desert. Soldiers raped, starved and murdered their Armenian victims. Estimates of the death toll range from 600,000 to 1.5 million.

“Genocide” wasn’t even a word then. Turkey still denies it ever happened.

Armenians on a death march to prison

Armenians in New England

Many genocide survivors came to the United States, lured by their Armenian relatives who already lived here. By the end of World War I, about 78,000 Armenians lived in the United States. Another 10,000 arrived in 1920, and more than 20,000 from 1921 through 1924. Then the U.S. government pretty much shut the door on Armenians by instituting a quota system for immigrants.

Before World War I, most Armenian immigrants were young unmarried men. After the war, traumatized widows and orphaned children arrived as refugees. “Eat your vegetables, remember the starving Armenians,” became a catchphrase at many an American dinner table.

In Boston, at first, Armenians settled in South Cove, what is now known as Boston’s Chinatown, along with Syrians, Greeks and Chinese. Moses Gulesian, an Armenian businessman, put many of the refugees up in his cornice factory in the city’s South End. (The now-trendy South End has an Armenian restaurant called Anoush-ella, which serves up fast-casual food.)

Church of Our Savior, Worcester

They also settled in Worcester, where they built the first Armenian church in America in 1890, Church of Our Savior. They also built the first Armenian Protestant Church, the Armenian Church of the Martyrs.

Armenians found homes in Providence and Portland, Maine, as well. As a whole they worked hard, sent their children to school and went to church on the Sabbath. And they may have been starving, but all but 2 percent of them could read.

Watertown

Watertown, Mass., easily ranks as the largest Armenian community in New England. It’s also the third largest in the United States behind the California cities of Glendale and Fresno.

Armenians first moved to East Watertown, known as Little Armenia, because of jobs. They worked at the Walker & Pratt Stove Co., the Aetna Mills and the stockyard. Many opened bakeries, grocery stores and photography studios. Stephen Mugar, who immigrated to Boston from Armenia with his parents in 1906, started a shop called Star Market, now part of a large supermarket chain.

St. Stephen’s in Watertown

The most desirable company to work for was the Hood Rubber Co. In 1896, Hood Rubber opened a 67,000-square-foot rubber footwear factory and began hiring Armenians from Chinatown. The company paid relatively well, sponsored English lessons and ran a medical clinic. Hood’s rubber shoes began carrying names that reflected its workers’ ethnicity: Adana, Aleppo and Smyrna. By 1920, 500 Armenians worked at Hood Rubber alongside other immigrants from Asia.

Untitled8 by Arshile Gorky

The Abstract Expressionist painter Arshile Gorky escaped the 1915 genocide as a boy, joined his family in Watertown, and got a job at Hood Rubber. He escaped to the factory roof to draw with chalk, which eventually cost him his job. He later took courses and taught part-time at the New School of Design (later the New England School of Design) in Boston, then on to lasting fame in New York City.

Armenian Identity

By 1930, Watertown had 3,500 Armenians. That number grew to about a quarter of Watertown’s population in 2000, somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000. According to the 2013 American Community Survey, 12,000 Armenians live in Middlesex County (which includes Watertown).

Armenian identity remains strong in Greater Boston through continual revival. Armenian-Americans publish two newspapers in Watertown, the Armenian Weekly and the Armenian Mirror-Spectator. They also run the Armenian Museum of America and St. Stephen’s Armenian Elementary School. Moreover, St. James Armenian Apostolic Church in Watertown holds an annual Armenian festival featuring Armenian losh kebab and live music. And between festivals, you can still get your Armenian food fix at shops like Sevan, Arax, and Massis on Mount Auburn Street.

Nearby Belmont is home to the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research.

Armeian folk dancers during the 1976 Bicentennial celebration in New York City

Providence

Violence in Armenia separated Arshile Gorky and his father for 12 years, but they reunited in Providence, where Gorky’s father worked at the Iron Winding Company in nearby Cranston. Gorky had no interest in following his father into foundry work, and returned to Watertown.

Gorky’s father had come to Providence with the biggest wave of Armenian immigrants who escaped the 1915 genocide. They settled on Smith Hill, Olneyville, the North End and Federal Hill. Jobs could be had in the Locomotive Works, the Rhode Island Tool Works and the Corliss Engine factory. Many saved enough to start small businesses such as tailoring shops, grocery stores, butcher shops and candy companies.

Between 1898 and 1932, 6,375 Armenians came to Rhode Island, where they raised their families. Harry Kizirian, the Providence-born son of Armenian immigrants, became Providence postmaster after heroic action in World War II. He oversaw the creation of the first automated post office. Several buildings in Providence, federal and municipal, now bear his name.

Vartan Gregorian, an Armenian born in Iran, came to the U.S. as a student at Stanford in 1956. Later in life, he served as president of Brown University for nine years.

In 1997, the Armenian Historical Association of Rhode Island formed to tell the story of Armenian immigrants in the state.

Portland Armenians

Garabed Yeghoian and his small family began the Armenian settlement in Portland after barely escaping the Hamidian Massacre in 1896. They fled from Istanbul to Marseille, France, with other Armenian refugees.

It so happened that Frances Willard, president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), was traveling in France with a British temperance activist, Lady Somerset. The ladies then decided to take charge of resettling the starving Armenians. Willard arranged for the Yeghoians to travel to Portland, where local WCTU chapters helped them start new lives. Yeghoian built a small grocery store at 166 Lancaster Street and turned a profit in his first year.

By 1908, 25 Armenian families joined them and eventually ran 27 grocery stores and 24 barber shops. They also worked in local factories like Winslow Pottery, Portland Stove Foundry and Portland Leather Tannery. They formed political, religious and cultural organizations, including the Armenian Cultural Association of Maine in 2003. The ACAM since built a monument to the Armenian genocide victims in the heart of Portland’s old Armenian neighborhood, the corner of Cumberland and Franklin streets.

Prominent Armenian Americans from Maine include Apple Computer executive Avedis Tevanian, actress Andrea Martin and Augustus Barber, founder of Barber Foods.

Worcester

Worcester, one of the first New England destinations for Armenians, once meant ‘America’ to many Armenians. Most who worked had jobs at the Washburn & Moen Manufacturing Co., the largest wire manufacturer in the world. The city still has a significant Armenian population of about 1,300.

About 25,000 Armenian Americans now live in Massachusetts, making it the second most Armenian state in the country.

Eric Bogosian

Not forgetting the Armenian genocide is a big part of being Armenian in America. Eric Bogosian grew up in Massachusetts, and his grandfather told him stories of the Turkish atrocities.

Eric Bogosian

Bogosian is probably best known as Capt. Danny Stone on the Law and Order television series, or as Barry Champlain in the 1988 film Talk Radio. But he’s also an author who researched an Armenian plot to kill the Turkish masterminds of the 1915 genocide.

He learned the Armenians called it Operation Nemesis, and they ran it out of Watertown. Shahan Natali, a former newspaper editor who called himself John Mahy, took charge of the operation.

Bogosian described how, on March 15, 1921, Soghomon Tehlirian walked past Turkey’s former interior minister on a quiet street in Berlin, Germany. Then he shot him in the nape of the neck. Police quickly arrested him and Tehlirian went to trial. But a jury acquitted him, and the sensational trial made people aware of the Armenian genocide.

The Nemesis operatives – who included an accountant, a life insurance salesman and an engineering student – killed five other Turkish leaders. Then they vanished.

Perpetrating Denial

Bogosian assembled little-known facts about the assassination plot. Then he wrote Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide and published in 2015.

Writing the book changed his mind about the way the U.S. government should treat Turkey, he said. He believes the United States should officially acknowledge the Turkish atrocities – something it has yet to do.

“By perpetuating the denial, this is the last stage of genocide,” Bogosian told Asbarez in 2015.

In October 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 405-11 to approve a resolution that acknowledged Turkey’s systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians.

Then on Thursday, Dec. 12, 2019, the U.S. Senate unanimously voted to recognize the Armenian genocide. President Trump, however, did not support the resolution.

But on April 24, 2021, President Joe Biden announced the United States viewed Turkey’s killing of Armenians as genocide. “The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today,” Biden said in a statement.

Prominent Armenian-Americans

Armenians who rose to prominence in Massachusetts include:

Fred Jaffarian, the first Armenian-American born in Haverhill, Mass. He started the huge Jaffarian Volvo-Toyota car dealership in that city with his wife Alice in 1938.
Peter Koutoujian, Middlesex County sheriff.
Rachel Kaprielian, former state secretary of Labor and Worforce Development.
Peter Torigian, mayor of Peabody for 23 years.

And nationally famous Armenian Americans include:

George Deukmejian, two-term governor of California.
William Saroyan, novelist and playwright.
Andre Agassiz, eight-time Grand Slam tennis champion.
Cherilyn Sarkisian, also known as Cher, actress, recording artist and fashion icon.

Cher

Images: Mount Ararat By Սէրուժ Ուրիշեան (Serouj Ourishian) – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51469965. Armenian St. Stephen’s Church By Tandreasian – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45630323. Cher By Raph_PH – CherO2201019-32, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83795981. Eric Bogosian By David Shankbone – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2000713. Armenian folk dancers By en:Nick DeWolf – https://www.flickr.com/photos/dboo/7257620044/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22984216. And Armenians Heritage Park By Yerevanci – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20744910.

With thanks to Anny Bakalian, Armenian-Americans From Being to Feeling American. This story was updated in 2022.

1 comment 1.1k views