From projo.com
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Rhode Island news
4.29.2001 00:05
With a new wave of immigrants , a storied neighborhood evolves
BY ARIEL SABAR and SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writers
PROVIDENCE -- Arriving from the countryside
near Naples, Italy, 29 years ago, Antonio Fezzuoglio settled in one of Rhode Island's
Italian-American strongholds: the Providence neighborhood of Silver Lake.
Fezzuoglio, a barber, and his wife, Maria, raised nine children in the house at Laurel Hill Avenue and Roosevelt Street. Retired now, Fezzuoglio grows San Marzano tomatoes in the backyard greenhouse. He says he's still perfecting his puttanesca sauce.
"A lot of Italians -- a lot of nice people," he says of his neighborhood. His voice has the lilt of his homeland, an accent that for much of the last century would attract little notice here.
But the place Fezzuoglio describes is now largely one of memory. According to the 2000 census, no neighborhood in Rhode Island saw more racial and ethnic change in the 1990s than Fezzuoglio's section of Silver Lake.
In a decade, a neighborhood with one of the city's smallest concentrations of minorities now has one of the biggest. The proportion of non-Hispanic-white residents -- mostly Italian-American -- has dropped from 86 percent to 34 percent. At the same time, the proportion of Hispanic residents has shot from 9 percent to 48 percent, and the proportion of non-Hispanic blacks, from 2.4 percent to 9.3 percent.
These changes have rippled throughout the neighborhood's schools and churches, its community centers and businesses, its political landscape and Little League fields.
Last summer, St. Bartholomew's Church, founded by Italian immigrants, appointed its first Spanish-speaking priest. Its Spanish-language Mass now draws six times as many worshipers as its Italian-language Mass.
A decade ago, the Webster Avenue Elementary School had the city's highest proportion of non-Hispanic-white pupils; officials talked of busing out some of the children, to comply with desegregation laws. Now, half of the pupils are Hispanic.
Markets and used-car lots once owned by Italian-Americans now have such names as Villa Jaragua Market and Centro Auto Sales.
At City Hall and the State House, Italian-Americans still represent Silver Lake. Nowadays, though, they print their campaign pamphlets in both English and Spanish, and state Sen. David Igliozzi has signed up for Spanish lessons. "You want to make sure you can communicate with your constituents," he says.
The neighborhood today seems to juggle cultural contradictions. "The Senator Igliozzi's" is the name of a Little League team, few of whose current members share their sponsor's Italian heritage.
The Guatemala Bakery sells both conchas and cannoli. "There are some Italians in the neighborhood," says Carlos Gomez, 34, standing behind his brand-new counter. "We're here to make money."
SILVER LAKE is changing faster than any other Rhode Island neighborhood, but there is nothing novel about the trend.
The entire state's Hispanic population has doubled since 1990, from about 45,000 to 90,000 -- making up 9 percent of the total population. Indeed, the Hispanic population's growth represents the biggest change in the state's ethnic mix since 1900, when European immigrants began to compete in numbers with the Irish-Americans and the Yankees.
Owing largely to this growth, Rhode Island now -- for the first time in history -- has two cities where minorities together outnumber the non-Hispanic whites: Providence and Central Falls.
Ten years ago, minority groups made up the majority of residents in only one sliver of Rhode Island: the South Side of Providence. But by 2000, they had also become the majority in parts of the city's Silver Lake, Federal Hill, Hartford, Valley, and Mount Pleasant neighborhoods, as well parts of Pawtucket and all of Central Falls.
Because Silver Lake's Webster Avenue section has altered faster than any other census tract in Rhode Island, it offers a glimpse at how sudden demographic change forces a neighborhood to reconfigure itself.
At times, the wheels of change have spun smoothly. At other times, they have creaked.
THE WIND KICKS up the dust in the infield at Neutaconkanut Park. Fanning out over the field on this chilly spring day are The Senator Igliozzi's -- the Little League team made up mostly of Hispanic, African-American, and Asian children.
Coach Dave Marshall is yelling out instructions. "Get the bat off your shoulder, step in, and take a swing!"
One boy, Jesus Fana, throws a letter-high pitch. Thwack! The batter cranks a fly into the outfield.
The rhythms of the American game are eternal. But here in this changing neighborhood, some new tactics are called for.
When Coach Marshall telephones to schedule a practice, the parent answering the phone may not speak English. So Marshall asks for the young player, who then translates for the grownups.
Another complication is that the families of some of the new players cannot afford the $30 Little League registration fee, or even the basic equipment. "I see more and more of that now," says Marshall. "Kids come to the baseball field and want to play, but they don't have a glove."
A few blocks away, the halls of Webster Avenue Elementary bustle with little Valentinas, Jaimes, and Luises. In one of the school's several English-as-a-Second-Language classrooms, essays displayed on the wall, under OUR SPECIAL MEMORIES, describe life in Guatemala, Bolivia, and El Salvador.
One Webster Avenue first grader, Alexa Calligano, comes from a long-time Silver Lake family. Her mother, Monica Calligano, 40, grew up here, on the second floor of the Deborah Street house owned by her Italian-American grandparents. Calligano returned to the neighborhood a few years ago, after marrying a man who had never left.
"I wasn't too happy," she says of Silver Lake's changes. "It's not as neighborly as it was years ago, where you go for a cup of coffee and you talk to people hanging clothes out the window."
Calligano says that at first she and her husband debated whether to send their daughter to a school that looked so different from the ones they had attended. "I didn't think she'd be able to function with the different races," says Calligano -- "the different ways, the different upbringing of the children."
But she says that her 6-year-old has taught her something. She mentions a picture taped to her refrigerator: five children at a school Christmas party, with Alexa's face the only white one. "My little one, she doesn't say anything about the color. She don't say a word -- she don't see it."
Now, Calligano's commitment to Silver Lake is such that she heads the Webster Avenue Parent-Teacher Organization and has brought in a Spanish interpreter for its meetings.
STILL, MANY of Silver Lake's Italian-Americans are leaving -- mainly the older ones. They speak of problems that they attribute to their new neighbors: noisy music, "drag racing," absentee landlords' poorly kept houses, unfamiliar faces.
"Too much trouble down here," says Antonio Fezzuoglio, the retired barber who cultivates tomatoes. He's standing not far from the Sale Pending sign in his front yard, on Laurel Hill Avenue. "Every day, the beer, the soda, a lot of noise at night . . ."
He and his wife have bought a house in Wakefield, where Fezzuoglio says he looks forward to quiet days fishing for trout.
The buyer of the Fezzuoglios' Silver Lake house is Hortencia Zabala, a schoolteacher who in 1996 immigrated from Bolivia. She now teaches math at the Gilbert Stuart Middle School; her husband works in the jewelry business and her daughter is an industrial engineer.
"The first time I saw it," says Zabala of her new house, "I knew this was the house for me."
A couple of blocks away, Catherine DeSimone's face reddens as she speaks of the desecration of a place where people once left their doors unlocked and looked after one another.
"When you said you lived in Silver Lake, you were proud of your neighborhood," says DeSimone, a cook who has raised three children here. "It's not that way today."
Her words sharpen: "We welcome everybody in the neighborhood as long as you abide by the rules. What the hell -- go back to your home country if you can't take it."
In the 1990s, the neighborhood lost 2,500 non-Hispanic whites and gained 3,100 Hispanics.
SILVER LAKE sits west of Route 10 and south of Route 6, stretching west and south toward Johnston and Cranston. Low chain-link fences hem the triple-deckers and single-family houses that stand side by side on the grid of narrow streets. Webster and Pocasset Avenues support the area's small markets, used-car lots, pubs, florists, and funeral parlors.
It is down Sophia Street, in a bunker-like red-brick building, that the neighborhood's past lives on.
Founded by Italian immigrants in 1903, the St. Bart's Club looked two Saturdays ago much the way it must have at any time during the last century.
You walk down the stairs to find several elderly men bent over a corner table, playing gin rummy, swapping stories, and sipping wine. Around other tables, other silver-haired men eat pasta, sausage, and steaming plates of spezzatini di vitello con funghi e piselli .
At the bar, a younger man pours red wine and speaks Italian with the elderly patrons. "The same people come week after week," he says, in English. His name is Rino Maselli and he's the club's manager.
"In here, we don't change."
Back in 1882, soon after the trolley had turned Silver Lake from farmland into suburb, Italian immigrants poured in -- soon making it the well-known Italian-American enclave that it was into the 1990s.
In the '30s, the nation's first Italian-American U.S. senator, John Pastore, launched his political career from here. Forty years later, Vincent A. Cianci Jr. became Providence's first Italian-American mayor; his father, a doctor, had his office at 54 Pocasset Ave. Other Rhode Islanders with Silver Lake roots include former Gov. Christopher Del Sesto and current state Supreme Court Justice Victoria Santopietro Lederberg -- as well as business magnate Ralph Papitto and onetime Rhode Island Chief Justice Joseph Bevilacqua.
Anchoring Silver Lake for nearly a century has been St. Bartholomew's Church, named for an Italian patron saint. Italian-Americans founded it in 1907, in response to the cold reception they met at the Irish-American Catholic churches.
Over the years, as St. Bartholomew's congregants became Americans, English gradually became the church's language; in the 1990s even the monthly Italian-language Mass was dropped. No one complained until 1999, when the church started celebrating a weekly Spanish-language Mass.
"They were a little perturbed that here the parish was established as an Italian-language parish, and then here's a Spanish Mass," says the pastor, the Rev. Joseph Pranzo. "It wasn't that they were against the Spanish -- it was 'So what about us?' "
So this past January, Father Pranzo brought back the Italian Mass.
At 10:15 last Sunday morning, a total of 44 people, mostly old, sat in the sunlit pews; they listened to a service conducted in Italian. Three hours later, 240 people sat there and listened to the words in Spanish. Adults cradled infants or watched over numerous children. Babies' cries punctuated the sermon.
A decade ago, the annual Feast of St. Bartholomew drew hundreds to the neighborhood's streets. But the crowds have since dwindled, and two years ago the church started a second feast -- one for the Blessed Mother, a patron saint of Bolivia.
Father Pranzo has at times had to counsel a few of his elderly flock about the new parishioners. "Some have said, 'They should go back where they came from.' I guess they have short memories. I tell them, 'We should be the first community to welcome these people.
" 'This parish existed because your ancestors were not treated equally in their own churches. Our congregation was founded to take care of people who immigrate, and this is the new group that's immigrating.' " Above the entrance to the church, Pranzo has placed a sign: There are no strangers here, only friends we have not met.
MANY OF Silver Lake's new Hispanic residents have moved from poorer Providence neighborhoods, such as South Providence, Elmwood, and the West End. They are buying their first houses, working two jobs to pay mortgages, and sending their children to schools that they consider safe. Although some own businesses and commercial real estate, many hold factory jobs, drive trucks, and work as janitors.
To most of these newcomers, Silver Lake represents the same thing it did to the Italian newcomers, a century ago: a step up to the middle class. Yet in interviews around the neighborhood, it is sometimes hard to believe that the Hispanics and the Italian-Americans are describing the same place.
Seven years ago, Oscar Vargas, a Guatemalan immigrant, left a rented apartment in the West End, because of the poor upkeep of the houses and the music blaring from the car radios. Moving to Silver Lake, he bought his first house.
"This neighborhood's clean -- everything's neat," says Vargas, 30. "The people try to keep up their property. You don't see much traffic -- you don't see the stereos blasting in the windows."
Vargas and his wife, Claudia, are raising their 15-month-old daughter, Stephany, in their small two-story house off Webster Avenue. He owns a jewelry-setting business, sells a line of vitamins, and has gotten his bartending license, in the hopes that a job with bar tips will allow him to work fewer hours for more money.
Vargas says he is friendly with his Italian-American neighbors. But he also tells of an Italian-American middle-school teacher who said to him at a neighborhood meeting: "All I have is Spanish kids -- they don't know anything."
Vargas says he responded by urging patience, pointing out that many of the woman's students were probably grappling with a new language.
In general Vargas says he tries to reason, rather than argue, with people. The attitudes of some of the Italian-American residents, he says, stem not so much from bigotry as from their age:
"A lot of people are still living in the past. They don't want to buy a color TV -- they just want to watch black-and-white."
Zoraida Ramirez, 34, a Dominican-born computer specialist at Lifespan, recalls feeling watched by her neighbors after she bought a house in Silver Lake, in 1992. At that time, Hispanic residents were in the minority.
"It was nothing rude, by no means," she says of her treatment by her Italian-American neighbors. "But definitely, they let you know: 'Hi -- this is who we are.' You felt it was the old guard."
Since then, however, most of Ramirez's neighbors have moved away -- or died -- and been replaced by Latinos.
COUNCILWOMAN Josephine DiRuzzo starts a white Cadillac De Ville and begins a tour of the Silver Lake neighborhood that she has represented since 1982.
"It's like a new neighborhood," she says. "Believe you me, I get a lot of complaints about the change."
As DiRuzzo turns off Webster Avenue, For Sale signs hang from at least one house on each block. The prices range from $74,000 to $155,000. Of the 42 single-family houses now for sale in Silver Lake, 37 are in this fast-changing Webster Avenue census tract.
DiRuzzo slows down and, as with X-ray vision, takes a quick census of the houses: "Italian, Italian, Spanish, Spanish, Spanish, Italian, Irish, Italian here, Spanish here."
She deplores the increase in absentee landlords, on whom she blames the poor maintenance of houses, driveways crammed with old cars, and mounting trash. But she accepts that Hispanics are her new constituents, and sees common cause with many of them.
"A lot of Hispanic families are looking for the same thing we are: a nice neighborhood, a clean neighborhood, a good school, a nice church to praise God in."
The last time DiRuzzo had any real competition for her City Council seat was in 1986. "Will I have competition this time?" she says. "I would say, with the change, I probably will."
ON DORA STREET, from Oscar Vargas's front porch, a large American flag flutters in a light breeze. The Guatemalan-born Vargas came to the United States 13 years ago, speaking no English. When he bought this house, seven years ago, he slipped the flag into its holder.
"I have what I have because this country gave it to me," he says. "This country gave me an education, wealth, property -- my wife, my daughter."
He has joined the 15th Ward Democratic Association, which has ties to Councilwoman DiRuzzo, and he is gathering signatures for a project to plant trees along Webster Avenue. He wants to beautify the area.
And he is working to keep it pleasant and safe. Like other Silver Lake residents, he has called the police about late-night loud music and apparent drug dealing.
In Vargas's small living room, all over the wood-veneer walls and shelves, are photographs of Vargas's baby daughter, Stephany.
"I want to raise her here," he says, running his finger across one picture. "That's why I want to keep the neighborhood the way it is."
-- With reports from staff writers David Herzog and Marion Davis.
With a new wave of immigrants , a storied neighborhood evolves
BY ARIEL SABAR and SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writers
Fezzuoglio, a barber, and his wife, Maria, raised nine children in the house at Laurel Hill Avenue and Roosevelt Street. Retired now, Fezzuoglio grows San Marzano tomatoes in the backyard greenhouse. He says he's still perfecting his puttanesca sauce.
"A lot of Italians -- a lot of nice people," he says of his neighborhood. His voice has the lilt of his homeland, an accent that for much of the last century would attract little notice here.
But the place Fezzuoglio describes is now largely one of memory. According to the 2000 census, no neighborhood in Rhode Island saw more racial and ethnic change in the 1990s than Fezzuoglio's section of Silver Lake.
In a decade, a neighborhood with one of the city's smallest concentrations of minorities now has one of the biggest. The proportion of non-Hispanic-white residents -- mostly Italian-American -- has dropped from 86 percent to 34 percent. At the same time, the proportion of Hispanic residents has shot from 9 percent to 48 percent, and the proportion of non-Hispanic blacks, from 2.4 percent to 9.3 percent.
These changes have rippled throughout the neighborhood's schools and churches, its community centers and businesses, its political landscape and Little League fields.
Last summer, St. Bartholomew's Church, founded by Italian immigrants, appointed its first Spanish-speaking priest. Its Spanish-language Mass now draws six times as many worshipers as its Italian-language Mass.
A decade ago, the Webster Avenue Elementary School had the city's highest proportion of non-Hispanic-white pupils; officials talked of busing out some of the children, to comply with desegregation laws. Now, half of the pupils are Hispanic.
Markets and used-car lots once owned by Italian-Americans now have such names as Villa Jaragua Market and Centro Auto Sales.
At City Hall and the State House, Italian-Americans still represent Silver Lake. Nowadays, though, they print their campaign pamphlets in both English and Spanish, and state Sen. David Igliozzi has signed up for Spanish lessons. "You want to make sure you can communicate with your constituents," he says.
The neighborhood today seems to juggle cultural contradictions. "The Senator Igliozzi's" is the name of a Little League team, few of whose current members share their sponsor's Italian heritage.
The Guatemala Bakery sells both conchas and cannoli. "There are some Italians in the neighborhood," says Carlos Gomez, 34, standing behind his brand-new counter. "We're here to make money."
SILVER LAKE is changing faster than any other Rhode Island neighborhood, but there is nothing novel about the trend.
The entire state's Hispanic population has doubled since 1990, from about 45,000 to 90,000 -- making up 9 percent of the total population. Indeed, the Hispanic population's growth represents the biggest change in the state's ethnic mix since 1900, when European immigrants began to compete in numbers with the Irish-Americans and the Yankees.
Owing largely to this growth, Rhode Island now -- for the first time in history -- has two cities where minorities together outnumber the non-Hispanic whites: Providence and Central Falls.
Ten years ago, minority groups made up the majority of residents in only one sliver of Rhode Island: the South Side of Providence. But by 2000, they had also become the majority in parts of the city's Silver Lake, Federal Hill, Hartford, Valley, and Mount Pleasant neighborhoods, as well parts of Pawtucket and all of Central Falls.
Because Silver Lake's Webster Avenue section has altered faster than any other census tract in Rhode Island, it offers a glimpse at how sudden demographic change forces a neighborhood to reconfigure itself.
At times, the wheels of change have spun smoothly. At other times, they have creaked.
THE WIND KICKS up the dust in the infield at Neutaconkanut Park. Fanning out over the field on this chilly spring day are The Senator Igliozzi's -- the Little League team made up mostly of Hispanic, African-American, and Asian children.
Coach Dave Marshall is yelling out instructions. "Get the bat off your shoulder, step in, and take a swing!"
One boy, Jesus Fana, throws a letter-high pitch. Thwack! The batter cranks a fly into the outfield.
The rhythms of the American game are eternal. But here in this changing neighborhood, some new tactics are called for.
When Coach Marshall telephones to schedule a practice, the parent answering the phone may not speak English. So Marshall asks for the young player, who then translates for the grownups.
Another complication is that the families of some of the new players cannot afford the $30 Little League registration fee, or even the basic equipment. "I see more and more of that now," says Marshall. "Kids come to the baseball field and want to play, but they don't have a glove."
A few blocks away, the halls of Webster Avenue Elementary bustle with little Valentinas, Jaimes, and Luises. In one of the school's several English-as-a-Second-Language classrooms, essays displayed on the wall, under OUR SPECIAL MEMORIES, describe life in Guatemala, Bolivia, and El Salvador.
One Webster Avenue first grader, Alexa Calligano, comes from a long-time Silver Lake family. Her mother, Monica Calligano, 40, grew up here, on the second floor of the Deborah Street house owned by her Italian-American grandparents. Calligano returned to the neighborhood a few years ago, after marrying a man who had never left.
"I wasn't too happy," she says of Silver Lake's changes. "It's not as neighborly as it was years ago, where you go for a cup of coffee and you talk to people hanging clothes out the window."
Calligano says that at first she and her husband debated whether to send their daughter to a school that looked so different from the ones they had attended. "I didn't think she'd be able to function with the different races," says Calligano -- "the different ways, the different upbringing of the children."
But she says that her 6-year-old has taught her something. She mentions a picture taped to her refrigerator: five children at a school Christmas party, with Alexa's face the only white one. "My little one, she doesn't say anything about the color. She don't say a word -- she don't see it."
Now, Calligano's commitment to Silver Lake is such that she heads the Webster Avenue Parent-Teacher Organization and has brought in a Spanish interpreter for its meetings.
STILL, MANY of Silver Lake's Italian-Americans are leaving -- mainly the older ones. They speak of problems that they attribute to their new neighbors: noisy music, "drag racing," absentee landlords' poorly kept houses, unfamiliar faces.
"Too much trouble down here," says Antonio Fezzuoglio, the retired barber who cultivates tomatoes. He's standing not far from the Sale Pending sign in his front yard, on Laurel Hill Avenue. "Every day, the beer, the soda, a lot of noise at night . . ."
He and his wife have bought a house in Wakefield, where Fezzuoglio says he looks forward to quiet days fishing for trout.
The buyer of the Fezzuoglios' Silver Lake house is Hortencia Zabala, a schoolteacher who in 1996 immigrated from Bolivia. She now teaches math at the Gilbert Stuart Middle School; her husband works in the jewelry business and her daughter is an industrial engineer.
"The first time I saw it," says Zabala of her new house, "I knew this was the house for me."
A couple of blocks away, Catherine DeSimone's face reddens as she speaks of the desecration of a place where people once left their doors unlocked and looked after one another.
"When you said you lived in Silver Lake, you were proud of your neighborhood," says DeSimone, a cook who has raised three children here. "It's not that way today."
Her words sharpen: "We welcome everybody in the neighborhood as long as you abide by the rules. What the hell -- go back to your home country if you can't take it."
In the 1990s, the neighborhood lost 2,500 non-Hispanic whites and gained 3,100 Hispanics.
SILVER LAKE sits west of Route 10 and south of Route 6, stretching west and south toward Johnston and Cranston. Low chain-link fences hem the triple-deckers and single-family houses that stand side by side on the grid of narrow streets. Webster and Pocasset Avenues support the area's small markets, used-car lots, pubs, florists, and funeral parlors.
It is down Sophia Street, in a bunker-like red-brick building, that the neighborhood's past lives on.
Founded by Italian immigrants in 1903, the St. Bart's Club looked two Saturdays ago much the way it must have at any time during the last century.
You walk down the stairs to find several elderly men bent over a corner table, playing gin rummy, swapping stories, and sipping wine. Around other tables, other silver-haired men eat pasta, sausage, and steaming plates of spezzatini di vitello con funghi e piselli .
At the bar, a younger man pours red wine and speaks Italian with the elderly patrons. "The same people come week after week," he says, in English. His name is Rino Maselli and he's the club's manager.
"In here, we don't change."
Back in 1882, soon after the trolley had turned Silver Lake from farmland into suburb, Italian immigrants poured in -- soon making it the well-known Italian-American enclave that it was into the 1990s.
In the '30s, the nation's first Italian-American U.S. senator, John Pastore, launched his political career from here. Forty years later, Vincent A. Cianci Jr. became Providence's first Italian-American mayor; his father, a doctor, had his office at 54 Pocasset Ave. Other Rhode Islanders with Silver Lake roots include former Gov. Christopher Del Sesto and current state Supreme Court Justice Victoria Santopietro Lederberg -- as well as business magnate Ralph Papitto and onetime Rhode Island Chief Justice Joseph Bevilacqua.
Anchoring Silver Lake for nearly a century has been St. Bartholomew's Church, named for an Italian patron saint. Italian-Americans founded it in 1907, in response to the cold reception they met at the Irish-American Catholic churches.
Over the years, as St. Bartholomew's congregants became Americans, English gradually became the church's language; in the 1990s even the monthly Italian-language Mass was dropped. No one complained until 1999, when the church started celebrating a weekly Spanish-language Mass.
"They were a little perturbed that here the parish was established as an Italian-language parish, and then here's a Spanish Mass," says the pastor, the Rev. Joseph Pranzo. "It wasn't that they were against the Spanish -- it was 'So what about us?' "
So this past January, Father Pranzo brought back the Italian Mass.
At 10:15 last Sunday morning, a total of 44 people, mostly old, sat in the sunlit pews; they listened to a service conducted in Italian. Three hours later, 240 people sat there and listened to the words in Spanish. Adults cradled infants or watched over numerous children. Babies' cries punctuated the sermon.
A decade ago, the annual Feast of St. Bartholomew drew hundreds to the neighborhood's streets. But the crowds have since dwindled, and two years ago the church started a second feast -- one for the Blessed Mother, a patron saint of Bolivia.
Father Pranzo has at times had to counsel a few of his elderly flock about the new parishioners. "Some have said, 'They should go back where they came from.' I guess they have short memories. I tell them, 'We should be the first community to welcome these people.
" 'This parish existed because your ancestors were not treated equally in their own churches. Our congregation was founded to take care of people who immigrate, and this is the new group that's immigrating.' " Above the entrance to the church, Pranzo has placed a sign: There are no strangers here, only friends we have not met.
MANY OF Silver Lake's new Hispanic residents have moved from poorer Providence neighborhoods, such as South Providence, Elmwood, and the West End. They are buying their first houses, working two jobs to pay mortgages, and sending their children to schools that they consider safe. Although some own businesses and commercial real estate, many hold factory jobs, drive trucks, and work as janitors.
To most of these newcomers, Silver Lake represents the same thing it did to the Italian newcomers, a century ago: a step up to the middle class. Yet in interviews around the neighborhood, it is sometimes hard to believe that the Hispanics and the Italian-Americans are describing the same place.
Seven years ago, Oscar Vargas, a Guatemalan immigrant, left a rented apartment in the West End, because of the poor upkeep of the houses and the music blaring from the car radios. Moving to Silver Lake, he bought his first house.
"This neighborhood's clean -- everything's neat," says Vargas, 30. "The people try to keep up their property. You don't see much traffic -- you don't see the stereos blasting in the windows."
Vargas and his wife, Claudia, are raising their 15-month-old daughter, Stephany, in their small two-story house off Webster Avenue. He owns a jewelry-setting business, sells a line of vitamins, and has gotten his bartending license, in the hopes that a job with bar tips will allow him to work fewer hours for more money.
Vargas says he is friendly with his Italian-American neighbors. But he also tells of an Italian-American middle-school teacher who said to him at a neighborhood meeting: "All I have is Spanish kids -- they don't know anything."
Vargas says he responded by urging patience, pointing out that many of the woman's students were probably grappling with a new language.
In general Vargas says he tries to reason, rather than argue, with people. The attitudes of some of the Italian-American residents, he says, stem not so much from bigotry as from their age:
"A lot of people are still living in the past. They don't want to buy a color TV -- they just want to watch black-and-white."
Zoraida Ramirez, 34, a Dominican-born computer specialist at Lifespan, recalls feeling watched by her neighbors after she bought a house in Silver Lake, in 1992. At that time, Hispanic residents were in the minority.
"It was nothing rude, by no means," she says of her treatment by her Italian-American neighbors. "But definitely, they let you know: 'Hi -- this is who we are.' You felt it was the old guard."
Since then, however, most of Ramirez's neighbors have moved away -- or died -- and been replaced by Latinos.
COUNCILWOMAN Josephine DiRuzzo starts a white Cadillac De Ville and begins a tour of the Silver Lake neighborhood that she has represented since 1982.
"It's like a new neighborhood," she says. "Believe you me, I get a lot of complaints about the change."
As DiRuzzo turns off Webster Avenue, For Sale signs hang from at least one house on each block. The prices range from $74,000 to $155,000. Of the 42 single-family houses now for sale in Silver Lake, 37 are in this fast-changing Webster Avenue census tract.
DiRuzzo slows down and, as with X-ray vision, takes a quick census of the houses: "Italian, Italian, Spanish, Spanish, Spanish, Italian, Irish, Italian here, Spanish here."
She deplores the increase in absentee landlords, on whom she blames the poor maintenance of houses, driveways crammed with old cars, and mounting trash. But she accepts that Hispanics are her new constituents, and sees common cause with many of them.
"A lot of Hispanic families are looking for the same thing we are: a nice neighborhood, a clean neighborhood, a good school, a nice church to praise God in."
The last time DiRuzzo had any real competition for her City Council seat was in 1986. "Will I have competition this time?" she says. "I would say, with the change, I probably will."
ON DORA STREET, from Oscar Vargas's front porch, a large American flag flutters in a light breeze. The Guatemalan-born Vargas came to the United States 13 years ago, speaking no English. When he bought this house, seven years ago, he slipped the flag into its holder.
"I have what I have because this country gave it to me," he says. "This country gave me an education, wealth, property -- my wife, my daughter."
He has joined the 15th Ward Democratic Association, which has ties to Councilwoman DiRuzzo, and he is gathering signatures for a project to plant trees along Webster Avenue. He wants to beautify the area.
And he is working to keep it pleasant and safe. Like other Silver Lake residents, he has called the police about late-night loud music and apparent drug dealing.
In Vargas's small living room, all over the wood-veneer walls and shelves, are photographs of Vargas's baby daughter, Stephany.
"I want to raise her here," he says, running his finger across one picture. "That's why I want to keep the neighborhood the way it is."
-- With reports from staff writers David Herzog and Marion Davis.
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