Mamdani’s Big Trouble at Little Italy

When New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, famously omitted Little Italy from a map of the city’s immigrant enclaves, he unwittingly gifted Italian Americans with an opportunity to reestablish themselves as the “OGs” of immigrant New Yorkers. Leading that charge is the recently revived Italian American Civil Rights League, an advocacy group founded in 1970 by the then-head of the Colombo crime family, Joseph Colombo Sr. His grandson chairs the board of the revived organization today.In a post on X, the IACRL accused Mr. Mamdani of wanting to “ERASE Italian Americans,” adding in a harsh jab at Mr. Mamdani’s birthplace, “Italian Americans BUILT NEW YORK CITY. Not third world Ugandans.”Mr. Mamdani has said his map of “New York City Immigrant Enclaves” was intended simply to update a 2023 “Neighborhood Passport” designed by his predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, in preparation for the 2026 World Cup. But the map had a distinct Mamdanian feel to it. It preserved longtime cultural hubs like Chinatown in Lower Manhattan and Little Odessa in Brighton Beach. It also added newer enclaves like Little Palestine, Little Senegal, and Little Yemen.But missing were the predominantly Irish neighborhood of Woodlawn at the Bronx and, perhaps most egregiously, the city’s most famous immigrant neighborhood hub: Little Italy. The Little Italy of today is a pale shadow of the 1900s neighborhood that housed 10,000 Italian immigrants in cramped tenements across a 2-square-mile area. By 2010, no Italian-born residents lived in the neighborhood, which had lost ground to neighboring Chinatown and has now been reduced to just three blocks of Mulberry Street.Nevertheless, Mr. Mamdani told reporters on July 10 that he had added some neighborhoods to the map and would be making more changes, including adding Little Italy.But his explanations have done little to assuage the city’s Italian-American community. The administration had already denied the IACRL a permit for its Unity Day 2026 event, citing security concerns during the FIFA World Cup. And when a 2020 video of Mr. Mamdani giving the middle finger to the Christopher Columbus statue at Columbus Circle resurfaced, a conservative commentator, Christopher Rufo, said the mayor’s actions confirmed for him that “Mamdani has always had a seething hatred for Italians.” The IACRL president, Mike Crispi, said Little Italy’s omission was “cultural erasure.”“Little Italy is sacred ground,” he added. The IACRL board chairman, attorney Anthony Colombo Jr., tells The New York Sun that he sees Mr. Mamdani’s claim that his map was based on Mr. Adams’ original as an “excuse.”“He understood that it was an oversight,” Mr. Colombo adds. And despite Mr. Mamdani’s assurance that he will add Little Italy to his Immigrant Enclave map, the IACRL has yet to receive a call from City Hall. “In terms of an official response from the mayor’s office, no,” Mr. Colombo tells the Sun. It was Mr. Colombo’s grandfather, Joseph Colombo, who founded the IACRL as a counter to both negative stereotypes of Italian Americans in the media and to what Mr. Colombo considered rampant harassment by the FBI and Justice Department. The IACRL wanted to “eradicate the words ‘Mafia’ and ‘Cosa Nostra’ from the news media’s vocabulary and abolish what it contends are society’s ingrained racist attitudes,” the New York Times reported in 1971. By that year, one year after its founding, the IACRL had grown its membership to 45,000 in the United States. The group also helped run drug treatment programs and after-school programs and would grow to “50 or so” chapters — all within the span of 18 months,” Mr. Colombo says.“They had a tremendous amount of success,” Mr. Colombo tells the Sun. “But all of that came to an abrupt end when my grandfather was shot.”On June 28, 1971, Colombo was shot three times at point-blank range during the IACRL’s Italian Unity Day rally at Columbus Circle. Despite being struck in the head and neck, Colombo survived but was remained paralyzed until his death from cardiac arrest in 1978.“His voice was silenced, and really, the movement was silenced,” Mr. Colombo says.The IACRL was largely inactive until Mr. Colombo was approached by Italian Americans looking to revive the cause and preserve their heritage in cities where they saw recent actions as cultural and historical revisionism. In 2020, more than 30 statues of Christopher Columbus were removed by local officials or defaced by protesters; one was beheaded in Boston, while another statue was dumped in a lake at Richmond, Virginia. The IACRL has also engaged in quieter work, like sponsoring a youth basketball league at Hollywood and supplying back-to-school supplies and backpacks to a charter school at the Bronx. Mr. Colombo says he is “thankful” that Mr. Mamdani has pledged to reverse course, but remains suspicious of the mayor’s motive for leaving other European enclaves and predominantly Jewish enclaves at Borough Park out of his revised map.“We can celebrate new ethnic enclaves and new immigrants in the communities in New York without erasing the old,” Mr. Colombo says. “It’s still called Little Italy. It’s probably one of the most recognizable ethnic neighborhoods in the United States.”And it was Mr. Mamdani whose admitted slight helped put the neighborhood back on the map in more ways than one.

Mamdani’s Big Trouble at Little Italy

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