Phoebe Taylor-Vuolo
IDC 3001H The Peopling of New York City
Assignment 5: Oral History of Bensonhurst
For years, John Savarese greeted storeowners and counted what he delivered to them,
all in Italian. Fast-forward twenty years, and you would have found him doing similar
things, but all in a different language: Korean. “I greeted them in all Korean, and I counted
in Korean, because everything changed, they all became Korean storeowners,” John
explains. “They were all very nice to me, same as the Italians. Although the Italians argued a
little bit more than the Koreans did…” Though not from the neighborhood, because of his
job John has had a very unique perspective of Bensonhurst’s transformation throughout
the thirty years he has known it.
John Savarese grew up in Bay Ridge but worked in Bensonhurst on his route delivering
Wonder Bread for years. He lived in the neighborhood for about a year, on Bay 33rd St. but
moved back to Bay Ridge when he was married. John has a seemingly endless supply of
stories about the neighborhood and the people in it. He tells about the fashion and style of
the time: “Big collared shirts, out to here, and chains—shirts had to be open, chains had to
be out. That was the rule. And you had to have the slicked back hair.” John says he watched
this style become popular, almost overnight, after Saturday Night Fever came out. “Total
culture change when that movie came out. It was like somebody flipped a switch, it was
amazing to me, to be a part of it, to witness it.” Although John says he himself was never a
part of the disco culture, he remembers seeing all the young men and women socializing all
along 86th street, car windows down, playing disco music and honking their horns—which
apparently either played the theme tune of The Godfather or Beegees music. He tells about
the parades that would come down 18th Ave, like the Italian American Parade, and the
Italian food in the area that he loved, like at John’s Deli, which had “the best food there ever
was.” John also says his home neighborhood, Bay Ridge, was different than Bensonhurst in
that it was quieter, and much less predominantly Italian, with Irish, Norwegian, and
German populations as well.
John also tells about another part of Bensonhurst’s culture: the mafia presence. He
seems to be very knowledgeable about the history of the mafia in Bensonhurst, and told me
about John Gotti, former “head of the mafia in New York City”, who he says he actually saw
once at a restaurant on 86th and 17th avenue, and “Sammy the Bull” (Sammy Gravano), the
former underboss who ultimately helped to bring down Gotti himself. John has read
Sammy the Bull’s book, and explained that many mafia members of the time “turned and
wore wires,” because of the changing culture of the mafia and the values of John Gotti
himself. “Because most mafia guys [before] wanted to be quiet, you know, they lived in very
small houses, you never knew who they were, but [Gotti] wanted the fame and the fortune.
And that comes with a price.”
Remembering the mafia’s once significant presence in Bensonhurst, John tells about the
bakery two doors down that was burned down/blown up twice because the owner refused
to pay his “protection money”—“He didn’t pay it again, they blew it up again.” He tells
about another bakery whose owner was told to sell a particular type of Italian bread, and
threatened the if she didn’t have the Italian bread in the store on Monday morning, her
store would be burned down. The storeowner ended up having a “sit-down” with the “local
mafia guys, to work out a negotiation.” They agreed that she would sell both Italian breads
in the store, starting Monday. “And that’s how the whole neighborhood back then was.”
John remembers car bombings in the area, and the “Mafia Wars,” a particularly violent time
in the neighborhood’s history. He remembers one man who, after being shot outside his
friend John’s deli at Bath Avenue and 15th avenue, stumbled into the deli, then crawled out
and died on the sidewalk, on the cellar grating.
John had his own close call once: witnessing a shootout between two cars right in front
of him as he left a store. “I was coming out of the store and a woman was coming out and I
had to grab her and push her, cause she wanted to see what was going on, and I pushed her
back, inside the entryway to the store and we just kind of ducked, trying not to get shot.”
John says that despite all of this, he never felt unsafe in Bensonhurst. As long as he kept his
“nose clean” and his “mouth shut,” making sure to never insult anybody (because, he says,
you never knew who was related to whom) he never felt unsafe. “I had nothing to do with
any of it, and I didn’t want to do with any of it, just stay away. I never felt unsafe. Although,
well, you know, when you’re in the middle of a gunfight, you kind of say ‘hmm, maybe this
neighborhood’s not so safe anymore.’ But, they weren’t shooting me, and I wanted to keep
it that way.”
John makes a point of explaining that the mafia wasn’t all there was to the
neighborhood, but just an interesting part of it. “Those were just the things I saw, that were
interesting, but it wasn’t what the whole neighborhood was about. It was just a lot of nice
people. And I liked them. “ John’s favorite thing about the neighborhood was knowing all
the people who lived in it, who he says were very kind to him, and almost became family to
him. He watched generations of families grow up in the neighborhood, telling about the
daughter of the owner of John’s deli, who he watched grow up and eventually work the
register at the deli, ten or fifteen years later. He says that people in the neighborhood knew
him, nicknaming him “Johnny Wonder.” They would wave at him as he drove through on
his delivery route, knowing who he was by the truck, “and I’d honk the horn, wave to
everybody.” He says everyone knew him and he knew everyone back then—although it
seems as though he still might know his share of people in the neighborhood: he stops to
say hello to people who come into the Dunkin Donuts we’re in several times just during our
interview, “Hey how you doing? How are you? How’s your husband, he’s all right? Good,
good. Tell him John, tell him I said hello, all right?”
While we sit in Dunkin Donuts, John points across the street, explaining how drastically
this block has changed, representative of changes that seem to have occurred all over the
neighborhood. What is now a Chinese supermarket was an Italian furniture store for
decades. Verrazano Fish, down the street, is closing, which he says is because the new
Chinese members of the community tend to only shop at Chinese fish stores, and there
aren’t enough Italians left in the neighborhood to keep the Italian fish store from closing.
He says the block even smells differently than it used to. And John’s Deli, which John says
had the best Italian food, is now a Chinese restaurant instead. Many Italians have left the
neighborhood, moving to New Jersey and Staten Island instead. But he does say that many
Italians return to the neighborhood for holiday shopping. For example, every year
customers leave their homes in New Jersey or sometimes Pennsylvania to travel to
Villabate, an Italian bakery on 18th avenue and 70th St., buying pastries and bread for the
holidays.
When asked whether he thinks the changes in Bensonhurst are for the better or for
the worse, John offers valuable insight: it’s not better or worse, it’s just different. He says
better understood the neighborhood the way that it was before, because he understood the
culture. An example of this is the food: “The food, I knew and I understood. Good food…You
know, you’d go in John’s you’d get baked ziti and lasagna, I knew what that was, I knew it
was the best there was,” he explains. “The chickens in the window might be great food, I
don’t know, I just never had it.” He says that the new, mainly Chinese, community in the
neighborhood, isn’t “bad” in any way, but that he just doesn’t know it the way he knew the
Italian community. If John were still working in the neighborhood, perhaps he would be
going in and out of Chinese supermarkets, and eventually know everything about those
storeowners too. He might even learn a bit of Chinese, the way that he learned Korean
years before when the neighborhood had just started to change. John imagines the future
Bensonhurst being much like Sunset Park, which used to be populated primarily by
Norwegians and Germans, and now is mostly populated by Chinese immigrants. “So
[Bensonhurst will] probably look like that in the future, just a different wave of immigrants
taking over a neighborhood. It’s just, that’s what New York is. A different wave of
immigrants.”
I originally hadn’t even planned on interviewing John Savarese, who is actually Kevin’s
dad, but while we were waiting to conduct another interview, he started talking about the
neighborhood and we realized that, given all the information and stories he has, he would
be a great person to talk to about Bensonhurst. I can’t thank Kevin and John enough,
especially considering it was such a spontaneous decision to do the interview in the first
place. John was friendly and open, and has some great stories as well as some real insight
into the changes that have taken place in the neighborhood he worked in for so long.
Because I hadn’t planned on interviewing John that day, I didn’t have any prepared
questions for him, so perhaps if I were doing it again, I would come with some questions I
had thought about beforehand. At the same time, I think that the spontaneous, informal
nature of the interview made the conversation that much more interesting and meaningful.
The questions were definitely more on the side of open ended, and the interview felt more
like a normal conversation, which I actually liked a lot. Kevin was invaluable, especially
because he already clearly knows a lot about his father’s experiences in the neighborhood
and could ask significant and intelligent follow up questions that I never would have
thought of. In general, it occurred to me that it might have been interesting for us as a
group to interview a member of the Chinese community in Bensonhurst, someone who had
moved to Bensonhurst, either from somewhere like Sunset Park or Chinatown, or from
China, because I think that it might have given us a wider perspective and a better
understanding of the different sides of the changes in the neighborhood. However, it was
fascinating and important to learn about the way that Bensonhurst used to be, and hear
about the transformation the neighborhood has experienced, from a person who has
known it for such an extended amount of time.