THE ITALIAN “FESTE”: A CENTURY OF TRADITION
Dr. Paul Loatman, Jr.
Mechanicville City Historian
August 12, 2009
Italian street festivals have all but died out in small communities, surviving in metropolises such as New York City and Boston largely as tourist attractions. But here in Mechanicville, the Feast of the Assumption has been observed for more than a century. Yet, like many “traditions,” this one developed almost by accident.
As Rita Festa Roman’s grandmother related the story years ago, a handful of immigrants from southern Italian villages near Naples decided in August, 1903, to observe August 15th as a feast day in much the same manner they did at home. Although not designated as an official “holy day” in the Roman Catholic calendar until 1950, the Feast of the Assumption had been celebrated by peasants throughout southern Italy for centuries. Within a year of that first local Assumption Day holiday, the local Fraternal Society organized a Feast Committee to perpetuate the celebration. They and their compatriots, often described in the local press as temporary “birds of passage,” returned home annually with their savings to support their families in poverty-stricken Italy. Yet, they continued to observe the customs and mores of their homeland during their temporary sojourns in America. But, it is unlikely that even those who settled here permanently ever anticipated that their children and grandchildren- yes, even their great-grandchildren – would be following in their footsteps in the 21st century.
Italian trackmen linking the Hoosac Tunnel line in Mechanicville with the D&H in Rotterdam Junction first appeared here in 1882. Local newspaper editor, Farrington Mead, whose knowledge of Italy was probably limited to the classical Latin he studied as a schoolboy, found the new visitors romantically exotic. He reported in the weekly MERCURY that these laborers “from the land of Cicero and Caesar” paraded to the local post office “after the style of the noble Roman” in search of letters from home each day. Actually, few were familiar with Cicero and most were Neapolitan rather than Roman, like the vast majority of Italians emigrating to the U.S. between 1880 and 1920. Typically, these trackmen disappeared as quickly as a passing summer shower without a hint that their fellow-countrymen who replaced them would be destined to play a dominant role in the future of our community. Even at this early date, the delight Mead reported the immigrants displaying while sharing news from home with each other during their postal visits demonstrated the strong attachment to family life that characterizes Italian ethnicity.
As immigration increased in the 1890s, the local postmaster began moonlighting as a steamship ticket agent arranging round-trip passages to the southern Italian provinces of Caserta, Benevento, and Campobasso. As “foreign” as such places may have seemed to long-established local residents, small “paesi” like Coreno, Ausonia, San Marco, Cercepicolo, and Cercemaggiore from which the newcomers emigrated resembled Mechanicville in some ways. While the “contadini” were not employed here as farm
laborers as they had been in Italy, digging clay at the Best Brick Co., laying track for the railroads, or tunneling out a new route for the Champlain Canal resembled the work they had performed in Italy: it was grueling and low-paying.
The demand for “pick and shovel” labor in America, unattractive by modern-day standards, nonetheless created opportunities for advancement unavailable in the Old Country. As a result, in 1899, the growing immigrant population here organized a mutual aid society modeled on similar groups then popular in Italy, holding regular meetings in a carriage house on William St. behind the St. Paul’s Church. A few months later, Village Minutes recorded the following note on July 27, 1900: “The Italians of the village asked for permission to raise the Italian flag, and it was granted to them.” The purpose of this flag-raising ceremony is lost to memory, but the growing ethnic community had already attracted the attention of the Italian Consul in Albany who had been making periodic visits to Mechanicville.
Encouraged by the enthusiastic reception of their initial observance of Feast of the Assumption in 1903, the Fratellenza began petitioning the Village Board to conduct a three-day “feste” every August. What had started as a short parade and a brief fire-works display quickly evolved into a triduum that within a few years began attracting as many as 10,000 immigrants from surrounding communities.
Although few people can recall those early days, the Piroli family has been connected with the celebration for close to a century. John (Red) Piroli marched in the August processions for over fifty years beginning in 1919 until he passed away in 1975. His son Leo took up where he had left off, and after more than five decades of parading himself, he passed on the legacy to his children and his son-in-law, Lou Alonzo, the fireworks expert, without whom the celebrations would have been strangely quiet. Louis was continuing a family tradition begun by his father, Julio, and his uncles who exploded “bombs” in front of the homes of immigrants and their children as they led the feast procession through the streets of Mechanicville for many years. Today, Lou’s son, Jeff, continues the tradition by providing the highlight of the annual celebration with “bombs bursting in air.”
For many years, Angelo DeCrescente and his wife “Jake” shared a unique vantage point from which to observe the celebrations while living across the street from the Fraternal Hall on Viall Ave. There, every 14th of August, legions of DeCrescente and Cimino family members congregated in anticipation of the activities that culminated the following day. By the time friends of the two extended families were added to the mix, large numbers of people would be flowing back and forth across the street like the waxing and waning of an ocean tide over the next two days. Today, Angelo and”Jake” are no longer around to serve as hosts, but the staunch support their son Carmie and grandson, C.J., enables the celebration to retain many aspects of its glory days.
Ninety-nine year old Barbara Michele Devito, whose family permanently settled on Saratoga Ave. after emigrating to the U. S. in 1916, recalls the early days when heads of families would bid for the honor of serving as grand marshal of the parade. The highest bidder also assumed responsibility for feeding the marching band that provided the music during the procession around town, an honor the head of the Michele clan earned just once. Family members soon discovered, after spending days preparing enough food to feed a small army, that the appetites of hungry street musicians rivaled those of a plague of locusts mowing its way through an Iowa cornfield. To this day, Barbara still speaks in awe of the musicians’ voracious appetites. Other enduring memories continue to capture the imaginations of successive generations of Micheles and their Saratoga Ave. neighbors who hosted relatives arriving from far and wide to share three-day family reunions every August, capped off with the sights and sounds of explosions up on Marshall Heights atop Viall Avenue.
For many long-time residents, August 15th and “The Hill” are forever linked in memory. However, the Fratellenza did not purchase land there until 1939, the same year it erected the Fraternal Hall at the lower end of Viall Ave. For the next half century, each year’s “feste” culminated with thousands of people climbing “The Hill,” parading past legions of vendors offering candy, food, trinkets, and gee-gaws for sale to the revelers. Actually, the effects of immigrant restriction laws passed by Congress after World War I had so limited the recruitment of new members that the Fratellenza almost disbanded. However, it rejuvenated itself by hitting upon the then-novel idea of enrolling “young American-born Italians” in the Society. The sudden upsurge in membership immediately generated enough resources to perpetuate and expand the celebration.
A unique perspective on the Feast of the Assumption was offered by Mike Sullivan before he passed away recently. Growing up on Chestnut St. in the 1940s, Mike retained vivid memories of the celebrations that he always associated with his grandmother, Mary Jordan. As a youngster, Mike never ceased to be amazed by the fact that his neighbors, the Pirolis and Festas, hired a band with fireworks to celebrate his Grandmother Mary’s birthday every 15th of August. Much later in life, having lost the innocence of youth, his parents finally admitted to Mike that it was a different Mary being honored every year.
Phil DiBello and her sister Catherine fondly recall the tireless energy their father, Peter Clements, displayed while helping to organize celebrations and marching in parades every year until he passed away at age 95 in 1986. Pete, along with other family members, prepared sausage and peppers to be sold all three nights of the triduum each year. Members of the Clements, Festa, Piroli and other families purchased bushels of peppers from local farmers, and then spent days peeling and cooking them with sausage at Perrotta’s store on the West Side in anticipation of feeding each night’s hungry crowd. Today, while the sausage-making is left to others, fourth generation members of these same families continue their participation by providing a small feast for marchers when the parade pauses for refreshment at the family homestead on Round Lake Avenue.
Antoinette Forte has lived for almost ninety years across the street from the Church of the Assumption on William St. where she continued a tradition begun by her mother of providing breakfast for the street band and young girls who carry the Marian banner through the streets following celebration of the annual feast-day Mass. Among her many memories, one of the most enduring is that of “Antonio,” a street vendor from New York City who befriended her while selling Italian candy and cookies here each August 15th. But, the most indelible impression in her mind remains the image of black-clad “Gold Star Mothers” (including her own) processing barefoot on the 15th while reciting the Rosary the day the Japanese surrendered in 1945, thus ending World War II. Coincidentally, fireworks displays that had been put on a five-year hiatus because of wartime “blackouts” were re-instituted that year. Two New Jersey companies competed for a prize given for the best aerial display that year, making up somewhat for their absence during the war years.
Fireworks of another kind might have marked the return of the celebration at war’s end, according to former resident, Anthony Fragomeni, whose father, Antonio, was the long-time president of the Fratellenza in the 1930s and 1940s. Traditionally, the festival parade was led by two flag bearers, one carrying the Stars and Stripes, the other bearing the Italian flag. But, according to the younger Fragomeni, [now living in Timonium, MD], the Mechanicville Mayor asked his father to scuttle the Italian flag for the 1945 celebration. He expressed fears that some local residents, sensitive to the fact that Italy had opposed the Allies before switching sides later in the war, might disrupt the procession by stoning the Italian flag. Discretion being the better part of valor, only the “Red, White and Blue” was flown that year.
In another vein, most local employers granted their Italian workers a holiday in recognition of the Feast’s importance to the immigrant community. But, as the late Mary DiSiena and her children related the story to me some time ago, that tradition developed only after a couple of hurdles had been overcome. When Italian papermakers failed to show up for work one Feast Day in the early 1920s, the manager of the Westvaco mill manager summarily fired them for insubordination. However, their cause was taken up by local Italian banker and former President of the Fratellenza, Joseph dellaVigna. Not satisfied simply protesting the dismissals to the paper mill’s supervisors, he traveled to Albany and camped outside of the office of then-Governor, Al Smith, refusing to leave without being granted an audience with the state’s Chief Executive. Left waiting all day but giving no indication that he was going home anytime soon, dellaVigna’s determination finally earned him a brief interview with Smith. Their conversation has been lost to history, but we may suppose that the Governor was reminded that the Mechanicville workers were much like his own Irish-Catholic family: poor, humble immigrants who took their feast days seriously. The strategy apparently worked, because the men were promptly restored to their positions at the mill. Thereafter, employer recognition of August 15 as a special “Italian holiday” became widely accepted, not only in Mechanicville, but in surrounding communities as well.
Controversy of another sort arose in 1924 when some non-Italians reportedly were “scandalized” by the specter of immigrants carrying a statue of the Virgin through the streets of Mechanicville. The issue came to a head when the privilege of carrying the statue was “auctioned off” to the highest bidder from the steps of the Church of the Assumption by James Parente, an officer of the parish’s Holy Name Society. The fund-raising helped defray the costs of repairing the old St. Paul’s Church building that became the home of the Italian national parish established here in 1919.
Responding to a controversy that also had arisen in other ethnic communities in the Albany Catholic Diocese, Bishop Edmund Gibbons banned the removal of church statuary during the conduct of street festivals. In a letter to the pastor of St. Paul’s (apparently one of those “scandalized” by such behavior), he explained that “the reasons why I prohibit these processions are well-known, especially to Italian priests. They were an occasion of scandal and shock, especially to the non-Catholics who witnessed the extravagant performances of the people who took part in them.”
The Bishop’s sensitivity to non-Catholic criticism may be explained in part by the fact that anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant prejudices were rampant in the U. S. at the time. Xenophobes had recently succeeded in pushing immigrant restriction bills through Congress, supported by increasingly popular fringe groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK, which targeted Italians in particular, had organized a chapter of cross-burners in neighboring Clifton Park. Despite all of this, the local Italian community was not easily discouraged from observing its unique folk-religious customs. It overcame the prohibition against removing the statue, imported from Italy, from the church by substituting a Marian banner during the street procession. This practice has been followed since 1925, with the banner faithfully preserved since then by the Clements family.
While Fr. Serafino Aurigemma, then-pastor of the Church of the Assumption, did comply with the Bishop’s 1924 edict, he also requested that the Prelate likewise ban the May Day ceremonies conducted by St. Paul’s Parish that included a public procession with a statue of Mary. Reluctantly, Bishop Gibbons explained to St. Paul’s pastor that he had to enforce the rule even-handedly to avoid charges of favoritism.
None of these matters, however, could detract from the sense of excitement and anticipation that August 15th observances generated among young children every year. Joe Ruggiero, whose father came to Mechanicville in 1892, recalls his early childhood when the Feast of the Assumption was as much of a holiday as Christmas and Thanksgiving – maybe even more so. Work ceased, out-of-town family members returned home for three days, and everyone marched up Viall Ave. to witness the spectacular fireworks that concluded the three-day celebration.
Joe is the senior member of the Fratellenza, but it will take some doing on his part to match the record established by “Tressie” Mastrianni, the former Hulin St. resident who lived to be 103 years old before passing away a couple of years ago. As she and her daughter, Mickie, pointed out, the Mastrianni family and their neighbors merely had to cross the street to have front-row seats at the conclusion of the festivities taking place on Marshall Heights each year.
A member of a younger generation, Gerri Giambone, whose father Valentino opened one of the first macaroni factories in the Capital District in the 1920s, also vividly recalls the sense of excitement surrounding feast days during her childhood. Because she and her visiting cousins were allowed to stay up much later than usual on the 15th, their parents required them to take an afternoon nap. But no amount of parental wishing could calm them down long enough to fall asleep even briefly on such an important day. Sleep could wait for another day, Gerri remembers.
Today, celebrating the Feast must take into account the fact that no one works in the local rail yards, textile mills, or paper mill anymore. Post-industrial Mechanicville has become a bedroom community whose work force commutes to work each day. Consequently, these activities may not generate the same levels of attention and enthusiasm as they once did. Another reason for a more muted response may rest on the fact that the today’s generation views itself as more sophisticated than the “salt of the earth” peasant folk who established the Feast in the first place. Now, many people regard street processions, the pinning of “la votte” on the streamers, and employing fireworks to celebrate religious feasts as vestiges of an outdated folk religion no longer relevant in our more “enlightened” era. But, before becoming too dismissive about such quaint practices, it is worth recalling the words of the pre-eminent American Scripture scholar, Fr. Raymond Brown. Commenting upon the vitality of folk-religion in early Christianity, Fr. Brown has noted: “Through most centuries, including our own, the ordinary Christian view of [religion] has differed considerably from what was proclaimed from pulpits as based on Scripture. Elements of popular piety and imagination have tended to fill the portrait with a coloring that one could not justify intellectually from the written Gospels, but which in its own way was an extraordinary enrichment.”
August 15, 2009, marks the last time when Mass will be celebrated in the Church of the Assumption where Catholics have gathered for over 150 years. Since 1903, the celebration of the Feast of the Assumption has been an important part of that church’s history. What the future holds for such celebrations remains to be seen. Today, we are continuing to observe the tradition of the “feste” partly because its longevity commands respect in and of itself. But, we also are paying homage to that first group of immigrants who, while sometimes being overwhelmed by the simple need to keep body and soul together, had the tenacity to proclaim and celebrate that which they believed to be true, sacred, and profound. Their traditions have enriched all our lives.