Everything seemed perfectly ordinary to me. After all, New York City is filled with immigrants from every corner of the world. These communities exist, and mapping them hardly struck me as controversial. In fact, one rarely meets a native-born New Yorker these days, and when you do, the conversation often turns to how dramatically the city has changed over the past twenty-five years or so.
What puzzled many people was the omission of Little Italy. Yet when I first looked at the map, I hardly noticed. I no longer instinctively think of Italians as an immigrant community—nor, for that matter, the other supposedly slighted groups, the Irish, Greeks, and Jews. We have been part of the fabric of New York for generations. I can't speak for the others, but compared with the newer arrivals represented on the map, immigration from Italy is relatively modest today.
If the omission was deliberate, I suspect it had less to do with demographics than politics. Modern identity politics encourages politicians to divide citizens into competing constituencies rather than govern on behalf of everyone. If a community is perceived as politically insignificant or outside a politician’s electoral coalition, it is easily ignored. Whether that was the case here, I cannot say with certainty.
Ironically, if anyone was truly snubbed, it was the corn-bred transplants who voted for the mayor. Despite arriving in impressive numbers over the past decade, they somehow failed to receive an enclave of their own. Where's Little Wisconsin?
Even so, I find it difficult to summon much outrage over this map. There are far more serious problems confronting New Yorkers than whether Little Italy appears on a city graphic. Crime, crushing taxes, declining quality of life, and the steady transformation of neighborhoods concern me infinitely more than a promotional map highlighting enclaves that many lifelong New Yorkers have never even heard of.
The broader reality is that the old ethnic neighborhoods that once defined New York City have largely disappeared. Italian enclaves, in particular, have been shrinking for decades. Those that remain are little more than tourist districts filled with souvenir shops and restaurants rather than the vibrant communities they once were. That is a far greater loss than being omitted from an infographic.
As I write this, I understand the mayor intends to revise the map after complaints from Italian Americans. If so, that is perfectly fine. Little Italy certainly deserves recognition for its historical importance.
But being added to a city map is a symbolic victory at best. It will not restore disappearing neighborhoods, revive the institutions that sustained them, or reverse the forces that have transformed New York. In the end, it changes very little.
The real story was never the map. It was the city that made such a map possible.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, July 11th, Feast of St. Oliver Plunket
