The three strikes against Rudy?

..."Some talked about the difficulty of transferring his hard-edged urban personality to a wider stage. Some talked about his personal life. Some echoed Dorothy Kaliades, a retired jewelry designer who was having her nails done in Howard Beach, Queens. She said she had never believed that Mr. Giuliani had a real chance nationally.

'He was too New York, too Italian, and he had too many wives,' she said."

[NYT, "They Kind of Knew It Wouldn’t Work", 31 January 2008]

The boys of Bensonhurst all grown-up

"By 8 o’clock on an evening in early December, the bar at the Hilton Garden Inn in northwestern Staten Island was a scrum of beefy middle-aged men dressed in blazers, fancy dress shirts and loafers. Cheeks glistening in the warmth, they embraced one another noisily, slapping backs, planting kisses on both cheeks and occasionally offering a flurry of mock punches.

Guttural cries filled the room as each newcomer entered and was recognized, his name yelled out in elongated fashion as though being introduced in a boxing ring. 'Toneeeey!' 'Saaaaaal!'”

From today's New York Times, a story called "Johnny Boy's Excellent Adventure" recounts the annual efforts of Bensonhurst boy, John Mazzoni, to put together a reunion of his local pals, inexplicably held in Staten Island. In spite of being full of stereotypes, including the mention of the presumably-tasseled loafer (which only real macho men can get away with) the story offers a kind of sweet look at the nature of Italian-American masculinity.

Race War in High School by Harold Saltzman

Some notes on Harold Saltzman's account of the destruction of Franklin K. Lane High School in Woodhaven-Cyprus Hill-Richmond Hill on the Brooklyn-Queens border. It was one of the schools in the East New York district (the largest in the city) and the first integrated academic high schools. (51, 85)

• ...the seeds for a new generation of racism were being sown. But members of this new generation would have substance enforcing their bigotry, quite different from the know-nothing prejudice of their elders. (48)


• Mutual hostility grew as impoverished blacks and subsistence whites scratched and clawed at each other; the whites struggling to hold onton the little piece they had carved out for themselves...(55)


• While there was a rather complete population change in the core of East New York during the 1960s, the, the immediate neighborhoods of Cypress Hill and Woodhaven remained exclusively white. (88)


• (Woodhaven) parents had developed real prejudices, a reaction which was in direct contradiction to the liberal traditions of their Jewish heritage (94)


• Community associations=white backlash


• ...Cypress Hill was the spawning ground for Vito Battista... (153)

To look up:

• Frank Siracusa


• Joseph Galliani- Cypress Hill


• State Senator John Santucci