The Italian American Museum in Little Italy is trying to evict an Italian-American woman who has lived in her apartment for more than 50 years, in hopes of expanding into her building. Reminder: Little Italy is dying.
The woman in question, 85-year-old Adele Sarno, has lived at 185 Grand Street since 1962, and currently pays $820 per month in rent. The Italian American Museum, which owns a number of apartments in two tenement buildings in the neighborhood, has requested she pay $3,500/month, an amount Sarno, who collects Social Security, cannot afford. If Sarno gets pushed out, she'll likely have to move in with her daughter in Wisconsin. "I don’t want to go there,” she told the Times. “I don’t drive. I’d be stuck in the house 24/7.”
Sarno's apartment is reportedly not rent-controlled, and the museum legally has a right to evict her. But it's hard not to see the irony here: Sarno, who has lived in Little Italy her whole life, has owned shops in the neighborhood, and was once crowned queen of the Feast of San Gennaro, is getting pushed out by a museum whose mission statement purports dedication "to the struggles of Italian-Americans and their achievements and contributions to American culture and society."
The Two Bridges Neighborhood Council has been advocating for her reprieve. " Ms. Sarno’s continued occupancy as one of Little Italy’s oldest residents is also a mission," Victor Papa, the group's president, said in a statement this week. "Many of the circumstances of her case bear too-close-for-comfort characteristics of those that community-based housing organizations readily recognize: vulnerable citizens being ousted by speculative landlords and developers abounding in Little Italy, Chinatown and the greater Lower East Side."
As if the battle over Sarno's apartment wasn't enough, the museum has also evicted Il Palazzo, a 30-year-old Italian restaurant on Mulberry Street, citing a rent lag. "We had a bad winter. We didn't make any money," owner Annette Sabatino told DNAinfo, noting that the museum had initially tried to jack up the rent.
Little Italy's been struggling to live up to its name for years, with high rents and changing demographics pushing out restaurants and residents. Though it seems the Italian American Museum, which has not yet responded to our request for comment, doesn't consider itself part of the problem: "“So the museum should be running a charity or providing residences at discount rates?” Joe Carella, a museum spokesman, told the Times. “That doesn’t match the mission." After all, as Mussolini once said, "The history of saints is mainly the history of insane people."
