Per Niente: Preserving Buffalo’s Sicilian-American Heritage

There are many story collectors among us, a passionate and plentiful crew. We are motivated by the belief that by sharing, collecting and  preserving stories and memories about places—the streets and neighborhoods of our past--we create a web of shared experiences  that bind us to those places and to each other.  The story collectors among us recognize  that somehow, somewhere stored in our stories are seeds of truth and sparks of wisdom that offer us not only sweet reminders of a more gentle past but, as significantly, provide the foundation for the future.  The story collectors among us know that stories and memories are powerful place-making tools. We know too that  above and beyond the nostalgia that they offer an older generation,  the highest value of the stories that we collect and the  memories that we preserve are the source of wisdom for the next generation. Among the best of the story tellers and collectors  among us is a group of Sicilian-Americans  who collectively call themselves “The Per Niente.” (Derived from the Sicilian expression “non per niente” roughly understood to mean that “what we do we do for nothing)  The Per Niente boys were all products of Buffalo’s old Italian neighborhoods---the Hooks, the Terrace, the West Side and St. Lucy’s Parish on the East Side. They are proud and deeply committed custodians of  their  unique heritage and take seriously what they regard as their responsibility to pass it onto the next generation. With that in mind in 2005 two of these gentlemen, Joe DiLeo and Joe Giambra, both first generation descendants of Sicilians, founded a magazine that bore the name of their group, Per Niente. 

I’d been drawn to the culture of Italian-Americans since as a kid my sister had taken me to the San Gennaro Festival in Little Italy. It was love at first sight. At college, in Boston, I could not wait to explore the packed and tiny streets of the North End and then, back in New York,  on those eye-opening walking tours led by Professor Bayard Still, I explored still further the fantastic history and culture of what were still, in the mid-1960s, the  richly textured Italian neighborhoods of Little Italy.

When I came to Buffalo in 1967 there was, despite the hideously heavy hand of urban renewal,  a still lingering Sicilian presence on the Lower West Side. Niagara Street in particular retained a handful of Sicilian-owned businesses: bakeries and pastry shops like  Muscarella’s  and Blue Bird,  Balistreri’s and Christiano’s. There was even a remnant of the old  chicken market and the Columbia Market which, whose  outdoor stands  gave  the place the look and feel of an old Italian neighborhood. 

It was too late however for “The Hooks”, that old waterfront neighborhood that had grown up around the terminus of the Erie Canal at The Commercial Slip. Made up of tiny streets with names like “Fly” and “leCouteleux, “Maiden Lane” and Peacock, “the Hooks” had by the 1920s  become Buffalo’s largest first generation Sicilian neighborhood. The local press had been fascinated with the Sicilians in “the Hooks” and there are countless articles and photographs on the neighborhood in the amazing scrapbook collection  housed in the Grosvenor Collection at the Central Library. While I have reported these discoveries in City on The Edge there is still so much that any one of us, on your own, can learn from these scrapbooks . I implore you to visit the collection. It was here that I came across one of my all-time favorite Buffalo stories, that of Sal Rizzo the puppeteer. I have revisited this story several times, first in City on the Edge then later in a performance piece  that I devised and presented at The Ruins at Canalside.

By 1967 there was nothing left of Sal Rizzo’s Hooks and nothing left of the neighboring Sicilian neighborhood on “The Terrace” where Joe DiLeo grew up.  “Na-ting”, “Niente.”  The Hooks had been replaced by the Marine Drive Apartments and DiLeo’s Terrace was cleared and replaced by a  hotel, a tv studio and acres  of parking lots. Gone was Mt. Carmel Church and the schools, #2 and the school at St. Anthony of Padua.  Gone too was the playground and baseball diamond, the clam stands  and a fabulous old Italian restaurant, Andy’s, known to generations of Buffalonians, on W. Genesee, above which the DiLeos, the Licatas and the Sciandras lived  for so many years. And gone too was Sal Rizzo’s teatrino.

Saddened, if not sickened by the loss of the neighborhoods of his childhood, Joe DiLeo decided that the stories and memories of these places needed to be preserved.  “We are the last generation.  We have to preserve these memories. For the kids’ sake. How are they, living in their big houses with their six bedrooms, gonna possibly visualize what our lives were like.  It’s up to us to preserve these stories.”  In the meantime, Joe DiLeo was hatching his plans for  Per Niente, a magazine that would memorialize the old Italian West Side that he and his friends talked so much about.  While it started as a group of pals from the old neighborhood who met for coffee and weekly rounds of golf, DiLeo, the  ambitious and imaginative custodian of memories, quickly transformed his  social  get-togethers into something more. 

  Joe believed that Buffalo old  Italian neighborhoods--the Hooks, the Terrace and the Lower West Side on the West Side, St. Lucy’s, Lovejoy and Edison Street on the East Side-- were sacred and that it was his  mission, through Per Niente, to connect a new generation of Sicilian-Americans to that special  time and special place. At first a one page broadside, Per Niente quickly became a full magazine. Published quarterly today,  Per Niente is a marvelous, perhaps unique journal of urban folklore, an extraordinary treasure trove  of memory, a  repository for all the stories, all the photographs, all the recipes that fill the hearts and minds of so many of  Buffalo’s Sicilian-Americans who still call these neighborhoods  home.

The pages of Per Niente are a sensory guide to a long lost world. In it are stories  and dozens of extraordinary photographs of growing up on The Terrace, of dances at Holy Cross, of countless parties at the Town Casino, of baseball games in the sandlot behind St. Anthony’s. There  are profiles of the people in the neighborhoods: of Joe Caci (“Joe the Fish”) the fisherman from Porto Empedocles in Sicily; of Joe Sebastian (“Joey Nerves”) who owned Scotty’s Clam Bar; of Tony Maggio from the 4 Aces, of Peter Capitano who traveled from the coal mines of Pittston, Pennsylvania to Buffalo in the 1930s.    There are articles about Sicilian history written by Angelo Coniglio and Frank Giocobbe; profiles of the old towns and villages: Valledolmo, Montedoro, Aliminuso, San Fele and all the rest. And  there are recipes, dozens of them from Sam Arena, Russell Salvatore, Joey Giambra, Sal Maggiore and all the others for whom the sights and smells of those long-lost Sicilian kitchens are the foundational stuff of which so many of these memories are made.  And there are recollections that fill the pages of the magazine, memories of specific nooks and crannies, like this one about life on the corner of Busti and Hudson written by a woman whose father  Sal Butera, had a barbershop there:

Most of my childhood memories were of this corner. Fond memories of my uncle, Mimi Polito going off to war and returning to work in the family grocery store. My grandfather made Italian ice and sold it at the front of the store while my grandmother sat in front carefully manning the fruits and vegetables. Church bells ringing at Holy Cross on Sunday morning, smells of crabs and clams from the clam stand in front of Nick’s Tavern, roosters waking up the neighbors from the chicken market, the smells from Luigi’s Bakery. So filled with life and fun.. The merry-go-round man, the knife sharpener, the fish monger, the peanut and popcorn man, the waffle man… 

 Best of all, though, are the photographs. The memories of the members of the  Per Niente group are filled with thoughts and images of places destroyed long ago, of streets and neighborhoods abandoned, demolished and covered over. While there are no traces, no remnants or ruins, not even plaques that indicate that “here”, under the foundations of the Marine Drive apartments, of the Adams Mark Hotel and of the Virginia Street entrance to the New York State Thruway, lie the remains of  Joe Giambra’s Hooks, of Joe DiLeo’s Terrace and  of Karima Bondi’s 7^th street, the memories of these places are preserved in the pages of  Per Niente.  For what Per Niente is, above all, is a family album, of not one but many families from all of Buffalo’s old Italian neighborhoods.Unlike the “family album” created by the Farm Security Administration during the New Deal  or the misery-filled faces of Milton Rogovin’s  photographs  of the Lower West Side, the photos that fill the pages of Per Niente reveal  the raucous, often joy and fun-filled daily life of the first and second generation Sicilian American families who lived in these fantastic, lost-forever places. 

There was no more avid contributor to Per Niente than Joe Giambra. A former cop, a one-time candidate for mayor, a leading jazz trumpeter and as a poet, playwright and novelist, an inveterate, tireless chronicler of Buffalo’s Sicilian American story, Joey came into my life in the early 1990s and stayed there until his untimely death in the Spring of 2020 from complications related to Covid-19. Following his death I was asked to write a tribute to Joey which, at the suggestion of Elena Cala, I  called “Cheap trumpet, lottsa brass:  A day in the life of Joey Giambra.” Mine is just one of the many lives touched by Joey Giambra and I am proud that he and I worked as colleagues on more than one project. I have reprinted the tribute below: 

Sometime in early winter  1996 I got a call from Joey Giambra. I’d seen Joey perform many times, most memorably and powerfully in local productions of Mamet’s American Buffalo and Miller’s View from the Bridge.  I’d heard him play his music too, in fabulous ensembles that often included “Red” Menza, Lou Merino, Richie Merla and Sam Noto. Years before, when I was teaching at UB’s College of Urban Studies, people were talking about an instructor there, an ex-cop named Joe Giambra, who was teaching a course on crime in Buffalo. “You gotta sit in”, I was told and sure enough I did: up close and personal with “Professor” Giambra, as he reminisced about “the wise guys” he’d busted in nooks and crannies all over the city.

“I got an idea for you, kid,” a gravelly voice on the line said. “A good one. You’re gonna like it.” I knew already that I would and we agreed to meet down the street at Spot Coffee.  “Spot Coffee…What?” he shot back. “That’s Holzman’s Pharmacy. You wanna meet at the counter at Holzman’s?” After explaining that Holzman’s, that iconic drug store with its long-winding lunch counter and endless supplies of theatrical accoutrements, was no more and that it had  been transformed into  “Spot,”  Joey reluctantly agreed. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll meet you at Holzman’s… I mean Spot. What the hell kind of name is that for a coffee joint, anyway?”, he muttered under his breath.

 I was waiting outside on that cold, snowy afternoon when trudging down Chippewa, his head bent slightly forward,  I saw coming towards me--Joey Giambra--shoes covered in snow.  In one hand he carried a trumpet case and in the other a briefcase. Nodding at each other at the door, Joey  triumphantly held up the trumpet  in the air. Before as much as a hello he said “I just bought this trumpet for eighty bucks, ain’it.  It’s a friggin’ beauty!”  Then, looking around, he said “What the hell happened to Holtzman’s? You shudda seen that store. It catered to all the theaters in downtown Buffalo. You could buy all kindsa theatrical make-up. Costumes too. What a place! The lunch counter. Where the hell did it go?”  All the actors used to meet there for lunch. Oh, well….Let’s have a cawfee….  Waddaya want? I’m gonna have a muffin an’cawfee. It’s on me.” I took the same: two muffins, two cups of “cawfee.”  “What”? Joey exclaimed in mock outrage when the waitress told him the price. “Twelve dollars? What did I do?  Break a frikkin’  window!”  And so I was introduced to Joey Giambra.

As if we’d known each other for years, Joey took hold of my elbow and led me over to a table. “I heard about you, kid. You helped the O’Neills set up the Irish Classical Theater Company. I got a play for you. I may not be Irish but, it’s classical, that’s for sure. You’re gonna love it! Sit down I gonna read  some of it to you, he commanded. It’s called Bread and Onions.”

“It’s based on my youth—the people I knew, the things we did--on the Lower West Side.” Putting the trumpet down he opened his briefcase and took out a sheaf of pages filled with text, some typed, some scrawled by hand. “Listen to this.” Joe began reading intently, losing   himself instantly into the world of his transcendent Lower West Side.

He read: “Andrews Hall; a hot summer’s day…may it never end. A wedding at Bronzino’s. Sam Scamacca, “Jabber” Calabrese, a four-piece band, an abundance of rhythm; the windows dressed in black. Draft beer in glasses;  pop, Queeno, Oscar’s, Nehi. Ham sandwiches in wax paper wrapped, cold pizza, homemade cookies. Who could ask for anything more. Agnes Alessandra, their sons and Luisa lived upstairs. In front of the store children wait religiously to board Mikes carousel: miniature horses, colorful moments of happy, galloping abandonment, innocent faces, thrilled, turning, always turning clockwise.”

I couldn’t resist: the language, the rhythm of his writing, the characters he had created and the passionate energy of his involvement with the material.  I was enthralled.  “Are you kidding,” I exclaimed. “Put this on? You bet we’re gonna put this on. Its fantastic. We’re gonna kill it!”

We left Spot  and walked down Chippewa towards The Calumet. “I shined shoes on Chippewa  as a kid you know. We lived right around the corner on Georgia Street. I walked over here every afternoon with my shoe box. Made a good buck doin’ it. Wish I had that shoe box now. I could use the extra dough.”

We came to an instant agreement: we would  present Bread and Onions for two  Sunday evenings, see how it went and then go from there. As much as Joey loved to write, to act and to play music he, as we all know, loved to cook. “I’ll tell you what,” he said,  “I’ll make dinner—bread and onions, pasta and meatballs—for everyone, we’ll serve it before the show and then…boom….Bread and Onions.”  Now talk about an offer I wouldn’t refuse. What could be better than an evening like that, a whole event dripping in the red sauce Italianness of  Joey Giambra’s  Lower West Side?

The show  was fantastic. Six actors, each reading different parts, punctuated by the plaintiff wails of Joey’s recently acquired and prized $80 trumpet. The colorful characters who peopled Joey’s script jumped off the pages: Johnny Dit-em, Frank the Clam, Jebber Calabrese and the others. The audience, alternatingly laughing and nodding familiarly, loved it.  The two Sundays quickly became four, which became eight as dozens of people, many of them Joey’s old West Side friends and neighbors and many other curious Buffalonians of all stripes who knew a good thing when they heard about it. They all flocked to the Calumet week after week to immerse themselves in the irresistibly colorful world of Joey Giambra. It was at The Calumet in 1996, that I was invited into that world-a world that I joyfully inhabited until the very last days of his life.

Joe’s countless contributions to  Per Niente have helped to keep  the memories of these long-lost neighborhoods alive. By doing so, Joe Giambra and Joe Dileo have  helped to shape the “collective unconscious ” of  Buffalo’s Sicilian-American community, imbuing  the words ``The Hooks,” “The Terrace”, “the Lower West Side,” “St. Lucy’s Parish” and the others with a magical meaning.   Tied to each other through their shared past, the Sicilian-Americans of Per Niente remain connected today.  Indeed, so many of the faces that appear in the photos published in Per Niente------the young boys playing baseball in the sandlot behind St. Anthony’s and basketball at the Butler-Mitchell club on Massachusetts; the girls, posing in their dresses on a Myrtle Avenue porch and in their bathing suits on the beach at Crystal Beach—can be found today, having coffee at Bagel Jays, having dinner at Marco’s on Niagara Street, celebrating St. Joseph’s Day at Rocco Termini’s “table” at Tappo and dancing at the Per Niente Christmas dinner dance held annually at Salvatore’s Italian Gardens. While the places that they have made sacred no longer exist,  memories of them most certainly do. By keeping them alive and by consciously passing them on to the next generation, the creators of Per Niente, the club and the magazine,  are performing a service to their community that, though hard to quantify, is  incalculable and invaluable. With their roots in the old West Side, via Sicily, these second and third generation Italian Americans are working diligently and successfully to maintain their traditions. In the process they are tightening the bonds that tie them, their children and grandchildren to the home that adopted them, Buffalo, New York..

The members of Per Niente, many of whom were baptized at St. Anthony’s Church on Court street and still attend a weekly Italian mass there, are committed to the future of their old neighborhood as much as they are to its past. Concerned about the spiritual needs of the growing number of Italian immigrants in  America, Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, the Bishop of Piaenza, found the Scalabrini Brothers in 1887. Within a few years they were in Buffalo and it was here in 1891 that they founded St. Anthony of Padua Church on Court Street whose mission was “to maintain the Catholic faith and practice among the Italian emigrants in Buffalo. (St. Anthony’s maintains a small, marvelous museum in the basement, a testimony to the congregation’s commitment to heritage, that tells this most interesting story.)

The men and women of Per Niente who grew up as beneficiaries of the Scalabrini fathers are dedicated to perpetuating the Church’s original mission and have created a Christmas Fund which, with money raised from the members (close to $40,000 in 2020) they use to “clothe, feed, provide cheer and assistance to the new settlers among us in need.”  The pages of the Per Niente, (and indeed, even the Buffalo News which during the Christmas season of 2017  and 2018 did several articles about their work) are filled with stories and photographs that describe and depict the generosity of the members of Per Niente.  Sometimes it's food and clothing for refugees and victims of Hurricane Marias; sometimes it's help  with tuition; sometimes it's furniture and help with the rent.  The Sicilian-Americans of Per Niente, who have never forgotten who they are or where they came from, are building the future as well as conserving the past. I am proud to be one of them, their one and only Jewish member!