San Gennaro

Once a year on September 19th, the usually drowsy Mulberry street fills with thousands of revelers paying homage to the Patron Saint of Naples, San Gennaro.  To the uninformed pedestrian, San Gennaro may look like your weekly street fair – the streets lined with fried dough and giant pina colada stands as kids attempt to win oversized stuffed animals at carnival booths.  To those in the know, however, San Gennaro is one of the last remnants of Little Italy’s rich and colorful history. 

In the early 1900s, hundreds of thousands of Italian immigrants passed through Ellis Island and made their way to Manhattan in hopes of finding a new and better future.  Discovering they were not always welcome in this world, they formed close ties with those from their homelands who shared their culture and traditions.  They created little communities within Manhattan, and those immigrants from Naples chose Mulberry Street for their community. 

The Patron Saint of Naples is San Gennaro, also known at St. Januarius.  San Gennaro was a martyr who was decapitated in 305 A.D. during the Diocletian Persecution, the last and most severe persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire.  It is said the Diocletian Persecution resulted in the torture and deaths of nearly 3,500 Christians.  As a relic, the blood of San Gennaro was placed in two phials and dried up.   It is said the dried blood liquefies three times a year thanks to the devoted prayers said in the saints honor.  One of these “blood miracles” occurs every year on September 19^th during the San Gennaro's feast day.

As one can imagine, with liquefying blood and Christian martyrdom, this feast day was, and still is, quite the ordeal in Naples.  The immigrants on Mulberry Street wanted to keep this tradition and feast day alive.  In 1926  a few shop and café owners built a makeshift chapel to house a statue of San Gennaro.  They encouraged other immigrants to pay homage to San Gennaro and to place money on the red ribbons around the statue.  The thought behind this is that the money would be distributed to the needy and poor in the neighborhood, and that San Gennaro would intervene in an hour of need on behalf of those donating the money. 

This small celebration of their patron saint was a huge success and over time the festival grew from one day to the eleven day extravaganza that it is known as today.  It wasn’t always all sparkles and dew drops.  At one point the mafia had infiltrated  the celebration so deeply that in 1995 New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani threatened to shut down the feast of San Gennaro unless all corrupt elements were removed.  A community group was formed to manage the festival and a professional financial manager named Mort Berkowitz was hired.  Mort Berkowitz, who does not exactly have the most Italian of lineage, truly has been an influential force in making sure Little Italy isn’t entirely engulfed by Chinatown or Starbucks.  You can learn more about him here:  http://nymag.com/nymetro/urban/features/9904/   

The Feast of San Gennaro survived.  It just celebrated it’s 87^th anniversary yesterday as the statue paraded up Mulberry street after a celebratory High Mass at the Most Precious Blood Church.  The Most Precious Blood Church is the national shrine of San Gennaro. In addition to the religious aspect paying homage to the Patron Saint of Naples, the festival also celebrated Italian culture in the United States, even if in a somewhat Disney-fied fashion.

I attended the High Mass at the Most Precious Blood Church and followed the statue down the street with several friends who wanted to see what this feast day was all about.  The mass was beautiful, and the soprano singing, Cristina Fontanelli,  was exquisite.    The Most Precious Blood Church is beautiful and it felt like going back in time to 1926 watching everyone say their prayers and worship.  It was when the statue of San Gennaro left Most Precious Blood Church that the craziness began. 

First of all,  RedMike’s Festival Band  trumpeted the entrance of the statue into the streets.  Red Mike, AKA Michael Acampora, a trumpeter who studied music at San Pietro Maiella Conservatory in Napoles, played his first Feast of San Gennaro in 1929!  His band puts together an authentic musical feel for the revelers and worshippers at San Gennaro.  Red Mike passed away in 2004, but his wife Louise carries the torch and keeps Red Mike’s Festival Band going.  My friends and I are all musicians, so naturally we sought the band members out and talked to them.  They were so filled with joy and excited to be a continuing part of the festival.  The drummer let me play his drum, they asked my violist friend to join them, and Louise herself came over and talked to us, answering all the questions we had about the traditions of San Gennaro.

As the band continued to follow the statue down the street, my friends and I decided to check out the carnival and street that had taken over Mulberry.  Actually, let’s not lie.  We were all starving so we really just wanted to head to the food stands. I had a piece of pizza which was possibly one of the best pieces of pizza I had ever tasted.  I also had beef ravioli in a la vodka sauce which was quite whimsical.  My friends chose to go the sandwich route with chicken parmesan, meatball, sausage, and eggplant sandwiches.  They certainly looked happy eating them.  Say what you will about how inauthentic the restaurants are, Little Italy knows how to do street food.  Then came dessert time.  This is where things began to get weird.  First of all, there was a man dressed as a giant cannoli dancing around and asking for tips telling my guy friend that he better treat me right and get me dessert from the restaurant he was promoting.  Along the streets we found all sorts of delicious desserts, many of them not exactly Italian.  For example, there was a cronut stand!  I later learned there were  cannoli cronuts – cronuts filled with cannoli cream.  There were also deep fried oreos, which we could not resist.  There were cannoli covered in fruity pebbles.  There were numerous stands where you could buy tall liters of frozen margaritas and strawberry daiquiris to drink as you walked down the street.  We found our way to Ferrara’s where we got gelato, cannoli, “lobster tails,” and the winner of the night, strawberries covered in cannoli cream. 

We continued to walk down the street where we saw all sorts of exciting carnival rides including one featuring the Italian hero Superman.  There was a Frank Sinatra impersonator who insisted the girls in our group dance with him.  I found him quite entertaining, but also incredibly odd as he was lip-syncing with a fake microphone over music being played several store fronts down.  He thought I was the greatest dancer ever and called over the press to take photos of him twirling me about.  We found all sorts of hilarious shopping stands where you could buy things like baby outfits that had San Gennaro on them, and t-shirts that said "Vinny’s Nut Shop."  Several people tried to talk to us in fake mobster accents.  Two friends with me were Italian and were pretty mortified by the how their culture was being represented, but ultimately I think even they couldn’t deny that they were having a fun time. 

Many news articles were written this year about how Little Italy hoped that the San Gennaro festival would save it’s continually shrinking neighborhood.  The neighborhood now consists essentially of five blocks surrounded by Chinatown that keeps growing and growing.  The truth is that neighborhoods in New York change constantly.  Little Italy is far from what it was originally.  Italian communities have moved to other neighborhoods of the five boroughs and their members assimilate more and more.  Little Italy remains an important reminder of  the stories of Italian immigrants and is home to the incomparable Italian American Museum.  The Feast of San Gennaro has morphed from a small immigrant community celebrating their Patron Saint into an eleven day street party, but it gets people talking about Italians in America, past present and future.  That’s important.  If they happen to be eating deep fried oreos while having these conversations, well that’s just part of the ever changing times.  

Here is the official website for the Feast of San Gennaro.