“I was going to begin my tales of this city with a statement about how long I’ve been here, but the phone rang,” the Italian-American photographer Patrick D. Pagnano (1947-2018) wrote in a notebook on April 16, 1974 — just six weeks after he and his new wife, Kari, arrived in New York City for their honeymoon.
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After spending their first week at the Times Square Motor Lodge, Pat and Kari found a cosy apartment on Thompson Street in the heart of Greenwich Village, which was then home to the bustling Italian-American community. “He loved the neighbourhood,” Kari says. “The Italian ladies in our building brought chairs down to sit on the stoop. There were a number of mafia-related characters that we always talked about. There was a guy on the next block, Sullivan Street, always walking up and down the sidewalk in his bathrobe.”
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Pat was in his element. “The building we live in is practically all Italians,” he wrote in his notebook. “On Sunday you can smell the garlic and tomato floating from floor 1 to 6.” Undoubtedly the scent of Italian food evoked memories of home. A second-generation Italian-American, Pat was raised in a multi-generational home in Chicago’s South Side during the 1950s and 60s.
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His family faced the horrors of ‘urban renewal’ twice in Pat’s youth: first when the government seized his father’s store to build the notorious Cabrini-Green housing projects where the movie Candyman was based, and then a second time when the family home was razed to build the University of Illinois in Chicago. These experiences shaped Pat’s outlook, building a firm sense of solidarity with the working class.
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