Word: italian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...towers of the Triborough Bridge now float in the sky just beyond their chimneys, and a snare-drum roll of traffic drifts up from the modern East River Drive. Negroes and Puerto Ricans choke the slums to west and north. But the old neighborhood is still Italian. Its sidewalk garbage cans (each with its cover chained to prevent theft), its great, voracious rats, its smells, its endless noise, are the same...
Then, as now, East 108th Street was a hard place to live. It was harder to leave. The palaces of Manhattan's power and wealth rose up only a few blocks to the south, but to the poor of Italian Harlem, they were as remote and incredible as the palaces of India. Frank Costello escaped to live in them by a process as devious and dangerous as an escape from Devil's Island. He became a rumrunner, a slot-machine king, a gambler and intimate of killers, a political fixer-and a man of riches and influence...
...court records describe the dark little drama-how the defendant ran from two suspicious policemen and threw his pistol into a lot, how he was caught, dragged back, and how the weapon was found. They tell of his pleas for mercy, made at first in Italian through a court interpreter, and finally in English, and they repeat the words of a forgotten judge...
...slots, calculated at $600 per machine a year, brought in an annual profit of $3,000,000. But in 1934. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia ordered the machines seized, personally banged up dozens of them with a sledge hammer while photographers recorded his prowess. He also called fellow Italian and longtime admirer Frank Costello a bum, a tinhorn gambler, and a punk. That was the end of Tru-Mint and of Costello's regard for the Little Flower...
Technically, Grosz ranges widely. Some of his early works show the influence of the first Italian abstractionists; others, like his "The Horseman is Here Again" and "Christ in a Gas Mask," have much of the quality of Durer's woodcuts. Later watercolors, however, are pure reflections of his own creativeness. These paintings, dating from 1946 to the present, repeatedly picture a twisted, angular, skeleton-like creature whom Grosz calls "the Gray Man." Other recurring symbols are an artist's canvas with a hole torn in its center, and a rainbow-colored flag torn from its staff. The series of water...