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Italian-American history

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 2023.

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The Working Man’s Friend Who Busted the Hartford Newsies Strike

The New York-based newsies strike, immortalized in the Disney film of the same name, succeeded in 1899. The Hartford newsies strike 10 years later did not — and all because of a former newsie.

Hartford Newsies

Hine’s caption: 9:00 P.M. March 4, 1909. Hartford, Conn. Group of newsies still selling although it was bitter cold and blizzardy. Smallest chap was 8 years old. The boys said he has been selling for 3 years. Boy next him (and) has been selling 4 years (called Bologna). Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Early in 1909, social reformer Lewis Hine brought his Graflex camera to Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven to record images of boys and girls on the streets. They worked as newsies, bootblacks and messenger boys.

Social reformers thought children shouldn’t work on the streets, where they learned about gambling, swearing and booze. They went into saloons to sell papers, knowing that drunks made good customers. The kids also worked long hours, sometimes starting out at 5 a.m., and returning home at midnight. They fought over territory, and people sometimes shortchanged the youngest newsboys who didn’t know how to make change.

Others, however, pointed out the children’s families, mostly poor immigrants, needed the pennies they earned to survive. Some young girls, for example, paid for school tuition with their earnings as newsies.

Two newsies about to do business in a saloon. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Herman Kopplemann

Herman Kopplemann had started out as a Hartford newsie in 1888 at the age of eight. He came to Hartford from Russia with his parents when he was two years old. He and his brother eventually formed a partnership to distribute Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers throughout Connecticut. They built it into the largest distributorship in the state.

At 24, Herman Kopplemann ran for city council and won, representing Hartford’s poor East Side. During his five terms in the council he brought improvements to the neighborhood: sewer upgrades, a public bath house and pay hikes for police officers and firefighters.

Toward the children who sold his newspapers, he showed less benevolence.

Hartford Newsies Strike

Hine’s caption: 7 year old twins. Been selling for 1 year. Sell sometimes until 8 P.M., Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

New York papers sold well in Connecticut, especially Joseph Pulitzer’s World and William Randolph Heart’s Evening Journal. The two millionaires battled each other for more circulation and bigger profit.

Typically, newspaper publishers bought back unsold newspapers from their distributors. But in 1909, they refused to do it anymore.

In Connecticut, that meant Herman Kopplemann would be the one to stick the newsies with the papers they couldn’t sell.

The newsies went on strike against Pulitzer and Hearst. According to the Shoeleather History Project, on May 1 newsies from all over the city assembled at a hall at the corner of Winthrop and Pleasant Streets. They formed a parade and marched in the rain behind a drum and bugle corps with a banner that urged people to buy only local newspapers. The next day they formed a union, the Hartford Newsboys’ Association, and elected officers.

At first it went well. Drugstores stopped stocking the Pulitzer and Hearst newspapers, people stopped buying them and supporters contributed to the strike fund. On May 17, the newsies marched through the streets again, wearing white hats and union pins and waving flags.

Scabs

Kopplemann, however, had no intention of backing down. He hired strikebreakers from out of town – at their peril, as it turned out, as the newsies beat them up. He spread rumors the strike had failed. And he enlisted his brother to form a rival ‘union.’

Hearst himself helped out. He sent an employee from New York to break the strike. A Hartford clothing store owner caught him buying a large quantity of boys clothing and shoes. Kopplemann had planned on offering the new clothes to the boys as a bribe to end the strike.

By the end of the third week, dissension spread among the strikers, probably instigated by the Kopplemanns and Hearst. Nineteen days after it began, the newsies voted to end the strike.

Some New Dealer

Herman Kopplemann

Herman Kopplemann then won election to the state Legislature. After lying, bullying and hiring scabs to break a children’s strike, he went on to get himself elected to Congress as a Democrat on a pro-labor ticket.

After serving five terms in Congress, he was defeated in 1946 and died 11 years later. Speaker of the House John McCormack memorialized him as a man who always extended a helping hand.

“There are many thousands of persons who are happier today because of Herman Kopplemann and his consideration of and his kindness to others,” McCormack said.

Tony Zazzaro

Paul and Tony Zazzaro. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Among the Hartford newsies photographed by Lewis Hine were Paul and Tony Zazzaro. Hine’s caption read,

8 A.M. A cold and windy day. Small boy, Paul Zozzaro, 9 years old, begins at 7 A.M. daily. Then goes to school. Sells after school until 6 P.M. and later. Older brother, Tony, gets up at 5 every morning and sells before school. Then after school again.

Historian Joe Manning did some sleuthing about Tony and Paul Zazzaro. The boys’ parents had immigrated from Italy. Their father worked as a street sweeper, their mother took care of seven children. When Paul grew up he started a successful restaurant called The Capitol Grille.

Tony became one of Hartford’s political bosses. For many years he delivered the Italian vote and served for a term on the city council. He also owned parking garages and a brewery. He had two aides who became well-known Connecticut political figures: John Bailey and Abraham Ribicoff.

Robert Chiles, in his book, The Revolution of ’28: Al Smith, American Progressivism, and the Coming of the New Deal, wrote the triumvirate that ruled Hartford in 1928 consisted of Thomas J. Spellacy, Tony Zazzaro and Herman Kopplemann.

With thanks to Shoeleather History and Mornings on Maple Street.

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Little Italy in New England: Some Lost, Some Thriving

Shortly after the American Civil War, a new kind of neighborhood emerged in New England cities: a Little Italy. They were poor, dense, Roman Catholic and very, very family oriented.

The Italians came to escape grinding poverty in Sicily and Southern Italy. They followed the Irish, who came to escape the potato famine and usually moved out when the Italians moved in.

Today, the descendants of Italian immigrants make up more than 10 percent of the population of every New England state except Vermont and Maine. A Little Italy survives in Boston, in New Haven and in Providence, but bulldozers took out the Little Italies of Northern New England to make way for hotels and parking lots.

People flock to the surviving Little Italies for their buoyant street atmospheres, their summer religious festivals and most of all for their food.

Here, then, are six of New England’s Little Italies, both lost and surviving.

Wooster Square

Welcome to New Haven’s Little Italy, Wooster Square

Connecticut is the second most Italian state in the United States, with 18.7 percent of the population claiming Italian ancestry. So you shouldn’t be surprised that roughly half the populations of three New Haven neighborhoods — East Haven, West Haven, and North Haven — are descended from Italian immigrants.

Wooster Square is New Haven’s Little Italy, one of the densest and oldest in the country. It has plenty of Italian pastry shops and restaurants, like Tony & Lucille’s, Da Legna and Consiglio’s. Locals argue about which is better: Frank Pepe’s white clam apizza or Sally’s.

Frank Pepe’s exterior.

The neighborhood was named after Revolutionary War General David Wooster because he owned a warehouse near Water Street. Before the harbor was filled, Wooster Square was close to the waterfront. Ship captains and wholesale grocers built large houses near the port. By the end of the 19th century, factories moved to Wooster Square, making it a less desirable place to live.

Sargent Manufacturing, a hardware maker, moved in to New Haven and brought workers from the Amalfi coast of Italy. More Italians followed, to make corsets at Strouse, Adler, boots at Candee Rubber Co., clocks at the New Haven Clock Company and carriage parts at C. Cowles and other carriage factories. Many families opened small shops out of their homes.

The neighborhood fell into poverty when factories closed during the Great Depression. The city planned to build a highway through Wooster Square during the 1950s and ‘60s, but preservationists rallied. Wooster Square was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.

For 117 years, the Society of St. Andrew has held a festa at the end of June to honor St. Andrew, who saved Amalfi from Turkish invaders.

Portland’s Lost Little Italy

Maine is one of the least Italian states in New England (along with Vermont), but nonetheless 50,000 Italian-Americans live within its borders. They began arriving in large numbers around 1900 and moved to Portland’s Little Italy on India Street. They came to work in Portland as barbers, carpenters, fishermen, longshoremen, railroad workers and masons.

St. Peter’s Parish

Life for Italian immigrants centered on St. Peter’s Parish on Federal Street, built in 1929. Eventually Portland’s Italian-Americans moved to the suburbs, and Portland’s Little Italy is nearly gone. St. Peter’s Parish is still active, and Micucci Grocery Co., Est. 1949., is still open on India Street. Amato’s Italian delicatessen, now a chain, still claims to have originated the Italian sandwich.

The North End of Boston

Boston’s North End

People have lived in Boston’s North End since 1630. Paul Revere lived there in a house built on the site of Increase Mather’s house. The Old North Church still stands; Paul Revere saw lanterns hung from its steeple. Thomas Hutchinson, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, lived in a North End mansion before patriots ransacked it in 1765.

By the late 1840s, the North End developed a red light district and prosperous residents moved away. Irish immigrants moved in to the neighborhood, and moved up in the world. Boston Mayor John ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald and his daughter Rose lived there.

Ann Street in Boston’s North End, 1881

By the time Rose married Joe Kennedy and moved to Brookline, Eastern European Jews started moving in. Then came many, many Italians. At one time 44,000 Italians lived in the North End, more than three times the number of Irish at their peak — 14,000, and more than the 17,000 Jews.

Churches, Feasts, Processions

The Italians took over five Protestant churches and built new Catholic ones, including St. Leonard’s, the first Italian-speaking church in New England. They started the first Italian café, Café Vittoria, in 1929. They ran grocery stores and bakeries. Three Italian immigrants started the Prince pasta company on Prince Street, and the Pastene Corporation started in a North End pushcart.

The North End became the center of world attention during the trial and execution in 1927 of Sacco and Vanzetti. The Patriarca crime family operated out of the North End for a time. So did Charles Ponzi.

Today the narrow dense streets are lined with cafes, pizzerias, small grocery stores and dozens of Italian restaurants, popular among tourists and city dwellers alike. The North End’s religious societies sponsor a dozen feasts and processions during the year. Mass is celebrated, food is served and religious statues covered with dollar bills are paraded through the streets.

The North End of Portsmouth

Daniel Webster’s house. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Portsmouth, N.H., once had a Little Italy that was a tiny version of Boston’s Little Italy. There were 300 homes in 30 acres for about a thousand people. And, as in Boston, Portsmouth’s Little Italy was called the North End.

And if Paul Revere lived in Boston’s North End, Daniel Webster lived in Portsmouth’s.

It was a crowded waterfront neighborhood with narrow, busy streets and dozens of small businesses, restaurants and shops. Families sold beer and lobster rolls from their homes, popcorn and ice cream from pushcarts.

First it was a colonial neighborhood, then Irish. The Irish moved out when a wave of Italians arrived at the beginning of the 20^th century. They worked in the shoe and button factories. Or they worked in the construction trades and later at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.

By 1920, Portsmouth’s Little Italy was 95 percent Italian. There were also Chinese, French, Irish, African-Americans, Russians, Jewish, Polish, Canadians, Greeks, Indians. Some people viewed the neighborhood as a slum.

Urban renewal in the 1950s and ’60s leveled many of the homes, replacing them with a municipal parking lot, the Sheraton Hotel and the old Portsmouth Herald Building. Daniel Webster’s home and the Farragut School next door became an A&P and a parking lot, then a hotel. Only a few of the old buildings survive.

Federal Hill

Providence’s Little Italy.

You can still hear Italian spoken in Providence’s Little Italy, known as Federal Hill. The neighborhood followed the typical trajectory of a Little Italy: A colonial neighborhood became a commercial district. Then Irish immigrants filled its tenements during the famines of the mid-19^th century. The Italians began to arrive in the 1870s.

Today Rhode Island is the most Italian state in the country, just ahead of Connecticut, and the Little Italy of Providence is alive and well.

The arch that welcomes people to Providence’s Little Italy on Federal Hill.

The gateway arch that welcomes visitors to Federal Hill is one of the most recognizable Providence landmarks. The neighborhood includes the Columbus Theater, college housing, a piazza, Italian specialty shops and bakeries and Roman Catholic churches.

Italian flags decorate the main thoroughfare, Atwells Avenue. The Columbus Day parade starts on Federal Hill in the middle of the three-day Columbus Day Festival. On March 19, St. Joseph’s Day, Federal Hill’s Italian bakeries churn out a pastry called zeppole.

More than 20 Italian restaurants such as Angelo’s Civita Farnese and Café Mediterraneo line a quarter-mile of Atwells Avenue. They attract skilled chefs because they’re so near Johnson and Wales University.

In 1954, mob kingpin Ray Patriarca moved from Boston’s North End to the National Cigarette Service Company and Coin-O-Matic Distributors on Atwells Avenue. He died of a heart attack in 1984.

Little Italy, Burlington

The Little Italy in Burlington, Vt., mirrors the history of Portsmouth’s North End. Italians arrived at the turn of the 19th century to work in lumber mills and railroad yards. They created a vibrant little neighborhood along the waterfront east of Battery Street.

Burlington’s Little Italy had 140 homes, social clubs, Catholic schools and churches and small businesses like Izzo’s Market, Merola’s and Bellino’s Grocery.

Outsiders thought they could improve Burlington’s Little Italy with urban renewal. In 1966, the final house was razed to make way for the Champlain Street Project. More than 200 people were scattered after the city bought their houses at unfairly low prices. The old neighborhood fell to parking garages and lots, concrete-and-glass office buildings, a hotel and a windowless shopping mall.

Today three interpretive signs are all that’s left of Burlington’s Little Italy. It is fondly remembered as a place where neighbors shared homemade wine and children ran in and out of their neighbors’ houses, which were never locked.

Now in paperback! To order your copy today, click here.

Images: Gateway Arch over Atwells Avenue, By Zigamorph – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 us, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3996788; Atwells Avenue by Jef Nickerson, Flickr; Boston North End By Ingfbruno – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27355267; Frank Pepe’s By Krista – frank pepe exterior, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38640336. This story was updated in 2024.

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How To Talk Rhode Island

To talk Rhode Island requires more than a passing knowledge of the expression ‘No school Fosta Glosta’ or the difference between a cherrystone and a littleneck.

It’s a hybrid of Northern and Southern New England English, a Boston-meets-Brooklyn sound with a dash of Italian and Portuguese slang mixed in.

Some say you can talk Rhode Island by using a Boston accent mixed with Italian slang. Not quite. ‘Cot’ and ‘caught’ are not pronounced the same way in Rhode Island as in the rest of Eastern New England.

Rhode Islanders, like many New Englanders, do tend to drop their Rs – and then add them to the end of words, such as ‘bananner.’ And like Bostonians they use the same word for a political fundraiser: a ‘time.’

To talk Rhode Island, pronounce it ‘Va-DI-len’

How To Talk Rhode Island

Thom Jones, voice coach at Brown University/Trinity Rep Consortium, says Rhode Islanders’ broad A is less pronounced than in Boston. Rhode Islanders say ‘Pawk the caw,’ whereas Bostonians say ‘Pahk the cah.’ In Boston you ride a hahs, but in Providence, you ride a hawse.

To talk Rhode Island, pronounce the ‘er’ at the end of a word as an ‘eh,’ says audiobooks narrator Matt Haynes. Rhode Islanders drink from a bubbleh. The klenzehs, or cleansers, is the local dry cleaner.

Like the other New England accents, the Rhode Island accent started with the English colonists who first arrived in North America. They brought with them speech patterns from Elizabethan London and rural speech from Yorkshire and Lancashire. In Rhode Island, Italian, Irish and Portuguese immigrants contributed their own pronunciations.

After they arrived, immigrants to Rhode Island learned to look down on Swamp Yankees, or Swampehs. The newcomers viewed swampehs as uneducated rural folk, stubborn, old-fashioned and frugal. Swampehs take only mild offense at their nickname.

Va-Dilen

To talk Rhode Island Italian-American-style, add a V where a V doesn’t belong. ‘Va-DI-len’ is the way to pronounce the name of the state. Antnee, Bvenda, Richit, Shevl are names of children in Italian-American neighborhoods like North Providence and Cranston.

Haynes notes Rhode Islanders turn ‘am’ into ‘e-am’ and ‘an’ into ‘e-an.’ That’s how Cranston, which is about 33 percent Italian-American, comes to be pronounced Cveaanstin. You might drive a Camavo in Cveaanstin.

A Jaguah is more likely to be driven in South County, which is really Washington and Kent counties. South County was so nicknamed during the American Revolution because it sounded better than its real name, King’s County.

You may go to a casino in Rhode Island, but don’t expect to gamble. The U.S. government recognizes the Newport Casino as a National Historic Landmark.The word comes from the Italian, ‘casina,’ which means little house. The big house, the Adult Correctional Institute, is known as the ACI and is located in Cveeanstin, which is north of Wa-wick.

Newport Casino, 1900, where you can talk Rhode Island

Cuisine

To talk Rhode Island, you have to know the nicknames for the state’s cuisine.

If you ask for gravy in Cveaanstin, you will get a red tomato sauce for your paster.

A cabinet is a milkshake, unless it’s an Awful Awful.

Hot dogs and clams inspire especially vivid nicknames.

New York System wieners

A New York system wiener, unknown in New York, consists of a 4-inch pork, beef and veal wiener in a steamed bun with yellow mustard, onions, celery salt and a ground beef sauce. It’s also known as a gagga, a bellybuster, a destroyer or a hot wiener. You might eat it with coffee milk and an order of beef stew – French fries loaded with ketchup and salt.

A saugy is a hot dog with a natural casing that snaps when cut. The Saugy Company has made them since 1869.

Rhode Island’s Portuguese people contributed chorizo or chourico (pronounced shuh-reese), a small, dense, spicy sausage to the state’s cuisine. If you don’t like too much spice, order linguica (leen-gwee-sa) instead.

The strawberry Awful Awful

A stuffie is a stuffed clam, or quahog, harvested with a bullrake. In western Rhode Island, quahog is pronounced kwa-hog; in eastern Rhode Island it’s ko-hog.

A cherrystone is a quahog slightly larger and juicier than a littleneck, which is the smallest clam legal to harvest.

A grinder is another word for a sangwidge, which is a ‘torpedo’ in the Pawtuxet Valley and a ‘dynamite’ in Woonsocket.

Woonsocketisms

Many Franco-American mill workers used to live in Woonsocket, where they developed their own much-made-fun-of patois.

Today it’s a standing, if inaccurate, joke about how they talk in Woonsocket. “Side by each” is the classic example. “Shut the light” is another.

“Puffcorn” is a Woonsocketism for popcorn.

Salty Brine

Other Woonsocketisms include misplaced phrases, such as “throw me down the stairs my hat” and the double pronoun, such as “I’m going to the klenzehs, me.”

For those who didn’t grow up in Rhode Island, “No school Fosta-Glosta” was a catchphrase of radio host Salty Brine. Children eagerly listened to him list school closings on snow days, and Salty Brine lumped Foster and Glocester side by each as “No school, Fosta-Glosta.”

With special thanks to Quahog.org.

Images: Rhode Island sign, By Morrow Long – Pachaug Trail – “Welcome to Rhode Island sign” at Beach Pond, Hope Valley, RI, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16138014.

This story about How To Talk Rhode Island was updated in 2022.

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It’s St. Joseph’s Day, Eat Your Zeppole

Forget the corned beef and cabbage, break out the zeppole! March 19 is St. Joseph’s Day, time to trade in the green for the red and forget about St. Patrick.

Yum!

Italian-Americans throughout New England celebrate St. Joseph’s Day by binging on the luscious pastry known as zeppole, available in most Italian bakeries. Rhode Islanders especially dote on the saintly snack. Nearly one in five Rhode Island residents, 18.9 percent, claim Italian ancestry, making it the most Italian state in the country.

But you don’t have to have an Italian ancestor to love zeppole, also known as St. Joseph’s fritters or bigne de San Giuseppe.

Zeppole Come to America

Zeppole (pronounced ZAY-poe-lay) are loosely defined as baked or fried donuts or fritters with fillings such as cream, custard or jelly and topped with sugar or fruit.

According to food writer Nikki Batsford at Quahog.org, the consensus in Rhode Island is that zeppole are baked rings of pâte à choux (the dough used to make éclairs). Then they’re

filled with flavored pastry cream and garnished with powdered sugar and a maraschino cherry.

They came to New England with waves of Italian immigrants starting in the 1880s. Most came to escape grinding rural poverty in Southern Italy and Sicily.

St. Joseph, or San Giuseppe, is the foster father of Jesus and the patron saint of Sicily. The story goes that a severe drought struck Sicily in the Middle Ages. The people promised St. Joseph they’d cook a big feast for him if he brought rain. He did, and the tradition was born.

St. Joseph by Guido Bruni

From Fava to Zeppola

Pope Gregory XV in 1621 declared March 19 the feast of St. Joseph. The original staple of the St. Joseph’s Day meal was the fava bean, which had saved the Sicilians from starvation.

Eventually the fava bean gave way to dessert. Some credit the convent of Santa Patrizia in Naples with making the first zeppola in the 16^th century. Religious orders in Italy) or what became Italy after unification supported themselves by selling elaborate pastries.

During the 19^th century, a Neapolitan baker named Pasquale Pintauro popularized the treat by selling them from a street cart every March 19. Wearing red also became part of the St. Joseph’s Day tradition.

In Providence, zeppole were long sold by Calise & Sons, a bakery that started on Federal Hill around the turn of the century. By the 1970s, the bakery had to hire a police detail to control the crowds clamoring for zeppole.

Bakeries ramp up production of the sweet pastry in the run-up to St. Joseph’s Day, but you can buy them year round in a couple of Providence shops.

Though associated primarily with Rhode Island, markets and bakeries in Italian-American neighborhoods throughout New England sell zeppole. In Boston, you can get them at Bova’s and Mike’s Pastry, in New Haven at Libby’s and Lucibella’s or Petonito’s in nearby East Haven. Hartford has a couple of old-school bakeries, Modern and Mozzicato Depasquale, where you can buy the sweet treat.

For a zeppole recipe, click here.

* * *

Click here to order your copy.

Image: Zeppola by By News21 – National – Zeppole, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34876662

This story was updated in 2024.

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The Secret History of New England’s Sundown Towns

“Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark” reads the faded road sign, an artifact on display at the Tubman African American Museum in Georgia. The sign was found outside one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

Sundown towns were municipalities that prevented African-Americans or other minorities from lingering after dark.

A sundown town sign found in Connecticut

James Loewen, a sociologist who taught at the University of Vermont, discovered thousands of sundown towns throughout the United States, including New England.

Beginning in the 1890s, New England’s small towns and rural communities drove African-Americans into urban ghettoes, Loewen contends.

Small towns kept out not just black people, but Jews, Catholics, Greeks, Italians, Indians, even trade unionists and gays. They used violence and intimidation and restrictive covenants and mortgage practices

Great Migration

Some New England counties drove out their entire African-American populations. From 1890 to 1940, many African Americans who lived in rural areas of New England had to move to cities.

From 1890 to 1930, the U.S. black population increased 60 percent. Between 1915 and 1930, more than a million African-Americans moved from the South and the Caribbean to the North. And yet entire counties in New England became whiter.

In Maine, for example, only two of the state’s 16 counties had fewer than 10 blacks in 1890. By 1930, Maine had five.

Writes Loewen, in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, 14 Maine counties had at least 18 African Americans. By 1930, only nine did. Five black people lived in Lincoln County in 1930, where 26 had lived in 1890. Hancock County had 30,000 people in 1930, but only three were black. Forty years earlier, there had been 56.

Vermont had no all-white counties until 1930. New Hampshire had no all-white counties in 1890, but two in 1930.

Rise of the Klan

Keeping out African-Americans happened well before the 19th and 20^th century. In 1717, Town Meeting in New London, Conn., voted against free blacks living in the town or owning land anywhere in the colony.

But in the 1890s, racism deepened in the North as memories of the Civil War faded. Waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Canada and southern Europe moved into Yankee mill towns. The influx of immigrants sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan — and created sundown towns.

In the early 1920s, the Klan began to hold regular meetings and cross-burnings in small towns in eastern and central Massachusetts. A Klan rally near Montpelier, Vt., in 1925 drew 10,000.

Klan members march on Washington in 1926

The Klan spread rapidly in Maine, with 15,000 showing up at the state convention in 1923. The KKK held its first daylight parade in the United States in Milo, Maine, in 1923, and others soon followed.

In 1925, The Washington Post estimated New England had more than a half-million Klansmen, with 150,141 in Maine and more than 370,000 across the other New England states.

Though Klan membership fell almost as quickly as it grew in New England, the KKK left a legacy of sundown towns. Their history is rarely told.

Tales of Sundown Towns

Loewen collected anecdotes about places where minorities were afraid to spend the night.

Italian stonecutters who quarried in Portland, Conn., were told to be on the other side of the Connecticut River by sundown. The bridge would then stay open at night so no one could pass over it.
One resident of the Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Mass., remembers an incident from the mid-1950s: “My father, a jazz musician, had some of his musician friends over one night for some jamming. Most of the musicians involved were black. The next day, a delegation of neighbors…came by to register their disapproval that my father had blacks in their neighborhood after dark.”
A similar story was told about Burlington, Conn. An African-American family friend from Waterbury came over to play cards. “He always made a habit of leaving before sunset and if he could not, he would spend the night on the couch. … [In] earlier years, whenever he would drive in or out of town, the police would stop and harass him, detain him for questioning, or pull him over and run his license and plates. Comments were made to the effect that being a black man in Burlington after dark, he couldn’t be up to any good…”

Starting in the 1930s, the Negro Motorist Green Book guided African-American travelers away from sundown towns. Black travelers typically carried blankets, food and cans of gasoline in their cars to avoid embarrassment, or worse.

Restrictive Covenants

In 1905, restrictive covenants began appearing in property deeds. They typically stated, “No portion of these premises shall ever be sold to or occupied by anyone other than members of the white or Caucasian race.” Then they often added, “Nothing in the foregoing shall preclude live-in servants.”

The exception rather than the rule: Jackie Robinson at home in Stamford with his wife Rachel, sons David, Jackie Jr.. and Sharon.

A 1940 deed for a development called High Ledge Homes in West Hartford, Conn., said, “No person of any race except the white race shall use or occupy any building on any lot.” The deed allowed one exception for people of a different race: the owner’s employees.

Similarly, Manchester-By-The-Sea in Massachusetts only allowed blacks and Jews to live within its borders if they were servants.

Government-Supported Sundown Towns

The federal government encouraged sundown towns through discriminatory mortgage practices. Between 1934 and 1968, 98 percent of loans approved by the federal government in Connecticut went to white, non-Hispanic borrowers.

In 1954, baseball great Jackie Robinson bought a house in Stamford, Conn., but only with help from prominent white people. He proved the exception in suburban New England.

In Nahant, Mass., a property deed written in the 1920s contained language forbidding the owner to sell the house to Greeks or Jews. (Nahant, ironically, now has the densest population of Greek descendants in New England.)

Anti-Semitism

A film that exposed Darien as one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

In 1922, the Sharon, Conn., chamber of commerce distributed a leaflet asking homeowners not to sell to Jews. Another realtor in Greenwich, Conn., sent a similar memo. It said, “From this date on, when anyone telephones us in answer to an ad in any newspaper and their name is, or appears to be Jewish, do not meet them anywhere.”

Darien, Conn., did not let Jews spend the night within its borders. The 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement , co-starring Paul Revere’s descendant Anne Revere. exposed the practice. Gregory Peck played a reporter pretending to be Jewish to write a story on anti-Semitism.

The Civil Rights movement then started to change all that with laws against racist policies. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, family status or national origin.

But attitudes didn’t necessarily change.

In 1973, all-white Ashby, Mass., voted at Town Meeting 148 to 79 against inviting people of color into town.

Photos: Darien, Conn., via Wikimedia. This story about sundown towns was updated in 2023. With thanks to Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James Loewen.

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