(lively accordion music) - [Narrator] Searching for San Diego, Little Italy is made possible by the Helen Hawkins Programming Endowment Fund, the California Council For the Humanities, the Samuel H. and Katherine Weaver French Fund, the DeFalco Family Foundation, Solar Turbines, Alitalia Airlines, and these other supporters.

(cars whooshing by) (soft accordion music plays) - Little Italy represents the only functioning historic neighborhood commercial district in all of downtown San Diego.

If you stand at the corner of India and Date Street and you look west, you see the harbor.

You look to the south and you see this Manhattan-like skyline.

You look to the north, and you see the homes of Mission Hills in Middletown.

You look to the east and you see a church.

Most of the Italians grew up here on this street.

After the tuna fleets left and the freeways passed through here, most of it got broken up.

This is their neighborhood, no matter where they've moved to, where they've gone, they still come back to Little Italy.

- Over 50% of the property owners in this neighborhood are families that have owned the property since the turn of the century.

Some of them five generations of families here, and there's certain property rights that are associated with those property owners, and their vision of what this neighborhood was and what they'd like to see it be.

(contemplative music plays) - Our parents and those who came before us to America, migrated from Italy and it was a very decisive thing for them to do because after all, they lived the same way in Italy for a thousand years.

- My father heard all about the United States and its golden streets, you know, everything was paved in gold, they all thought.

And he came to the United States and came to Ellis Island and to New York and traveled across the country.

And then he worked on the railroad and put in railroad ties.

- They just felt that, just like all the immigrants that left their homeland, a better life.

So he settled in San Francisco.

- The immigration to San Diego was not direct Italy, San Diego, but it was by way of other cities in North America.

So 1906 you find there is an initial migration from San Francisco as the San Francisco earthquake.

So finding a safer place to live for one's family.

As the fishing industry developed, that of course also provided another incentive for people to move here.

- Some of the fishermen already had left San Francisco and came to San Diego.

They said, "What are you doing here?

You all come down and let's all go back to San Diego.

It is just like our hometown."

- [Narrator] In 1900, there were 116 Italians living in San Diego.

By 1920, census records show close to 1000 Italians in a small community clustered around the Bay.

Most of the new immigrants were fishermen and came from small towns near Genova in northern Italy such as Riva Trigoso, or from the fishing villages of Porticello or Mazara del Vallo in Sicily.

- They wired my dad and asked him if he wanted to come to San Diego, that they had bought a barbershop for him and told him that the weather here was just like in Sicily.

Beautiful, and had a beautiful bay here and there was fishing here and there's a lot of Italians.

- When he did come to San Diego, he fell in love with the harbor and became a fisherman.

- One of his uncles was around and said, "No, go to the West and you go see, they got a lot of your paisanis and a lot of your friends, and you go over there and they got fishing, that's your job, your life is fishing."

- Most of our dads were commercial fishermen, our grandparents were fishermen, our uncles and cousins and brothers, older brothers, so we all wanted to follow in their footsteps.

- Everybody that you saw, "What are you gonna be?"

"I'm gonna be a fisherman."

- Well, my father and my uncle had their own boat.

The Union Number One, it was a local fishing boat, and he always was the captain of the boat until he retired.

- [Narrator] In the 1930s, the heart of Little Italy was the 1700 to 1800 block section of industry.

There were about 6,000 Italian families living in San Diego and 75% of them were fishermen.

You could tell how business was by the number playing bocce in vacant lots.

Poor fishing meant many players.

- It was tough.

The local fishermen made good money in the summer, but the winters were bad.

My dad, in them days, he'd come home, he'd come from fishing with a boat full of fish and the canneries wouldn't buy it, and they'd donate it to the zoo and he'd be mad.

(laughs) - They had all these local fishermen, they fished right outta San Diego, and it was mackerel and sardines in those days.

- It was quite an industry, you know, especially the tuna.

When the tuna came, it was really quite an industry, everybody was working.

- [Jennie] That's when they started to make and earn a living, when the tuna fishing came in.

- [Narrator] The first tuna cannery opened in San Diego in 1910.

By the early 1930s, other canneries, including Westgate at the foot of Laurel Street and Van Camp Seafood and Pacific along the Embarcadero, packed 90% of the tuna on the West Coast.

Over 200 fishing boats called San Diego their home port.

- At the peak of the tuna fishing industry, it was the largest of the tuna fishing business in the world, and we had several canneries here in San Diego and it was going full bore.

Many thousands of the Italian people were working along in the canneries, it was the livelihood of San Diego.

- Oh, it was an exciting business.

You've seen pictures of having to pull in the fish with your backs and we used a lot of brawn and it was a challenge because you used to fish several types, one pole, two pole, and three pole fish.

And if you were on a one pole one and you got a little bit heavier fish, man, you tried your darndest to get it in because you'd get razzed if you didn't, you know?

- They'd go out on the boats, the larger boats, and they'd go out for maybe a month, two months, three months, four months.

And so when they brought in a good load of fish, they made a better living.

- I must say that I did not like the lifestyle.

Their fathers were gone, their brothers were gone and I was never going to marry a fisherman.

- [Salvadore] You were never going to marry a fishermen?

- I was never going to marry for that reason.

- You're not sorry you married a fisherman, are you sweetheart?

- Not at all.

- When the smoke used to come out of the cannery stack smelled green like money.

It didn't smell like fish.

(laughs) Smelled green like money, good smell, very good smell, money smell.

- Well, the history of industry to our Little Italy is I think indicative of the history of a number of other communities, immigrant communities, that find themselves reaching a new foreign environment and attempting to establish, not lose their culture, establish themselves as a presence, acquire some of the culture of the place so that they can function within it but still maintain their identity.

(lively accordion music) - [Resident] The Indian Street neighborhood was little Italy and we're all grew up being part of that neighborhood.

- Garlic, you could smell garlic, you knew exactly where you were when you came in this neighborhood.

You were in a Italian neighborhood.

- Just growing up there in Little Italy as a family, friends, fish together, school together, and sports, everything about just being, it's a close knit neighborhood and we were Italian descent and we were proud of it.

- And there was a number of families that lived here right where there's houses in these blocks here.

The DeMaria's and the Cresci's and the Giacolone's and the Principatos, they all lived here.

And Mrs. Madeline De Filippis lived here where she died, and the Tarantino family would live right here in this white house.

- All the boys that went to Washington School, you know as they grew up, they'd collect at the drug store.

There was a magnet there on Indian for 'em.

- There'd be always a gang talking or talking about their fishing or whatever, but I'd never see any girls there unless there was no boys on the corner.

Then we'd go to the drug store to get an ice cream cone or something.

- When business was good to my father's barber shop we always had a full house, you might as well say.

People used to come if they wanted a haircut or not, they used to come and hang out in there and they played checkers and oh, we had spittoons on the floor that these guys, what a mess in those days, between talking and the playing checkers and my dad cutting hair and they spitting (laughing).

- [Resident] Say the first generation before us would come here and go in the back and they play this game, toco, they would count out, they had a boss and an under boss and they would drink and they had teams and that was their pastime.

- [Katie] We did everything together.

We'd meet at the church hall, we had a club.

We'd organize what we would call, in those days, weenie roasts.

Today they call it beach party.

- My father would come in from fishing and maybe he had a good catch that day and no one else on the block had a good catch.

So he'd call everybody in the backyard and they'd set up tables and we'd have a big fish fry and feed everybody.

And those days, neighbors and friends and relatives were like family.

- I looked at my neighborhood as part of our culture and didn't realize that it was a certain section of San Diego that could be identified in those days as a ghetto area.

- Even the location of the, you know, they couldn't go any further west, right?

Then there was downtown, so they had no one else to, not socialize, but even to get involved with in any way.

- We didn't associate with the, they used to call 'em the Americans as if we weren't.

We were born here, we were Americans (laughs), and so everybody was brought up the same, so it just didn't- - Well, put it this way, Jennie, it was our way of life.

- [Rosalie] They went to grocery stores where people spoke Italian, run by Italians.

Again, the social life was all family oriented.

- We were in this little small cocoon, I always called it, because I felt like I belonged to them and they belonged to me.

Either I was terribly naive or just didn't realize it.

I didn't think about that there was another world out there other than my own.

- Well, the Italian community today doesn't exist in the way that it did back when it began or even 30 years ago.

What exists is a connection, a psychological connection, a spiritual connection with what was once a community.

- Then when the war broke out, that's when the change all started.

- The war broke out and we were all in our 18, 19s, and 20s and that kind of broke things up.

We all spent at least three or four years in the service, and then when we came back we weren't kids anymore.

We were ready to go to work and start our own families.

- But the war, it changed a lot.

I always felt like it ruined the innocence of our community.

I knew I had to accept the fact that Little Italy was not going to be Little Italy anymore.

- The outbreak of the war.

That's when the government took all the boats, they confiscated all the tuna boats, and what did they use them for?

They used them in the South Pacific.

Then after the war, we's began to have problems with- - Japanese fish came in cheaper and the canners, they wouldn't be taking our fish anymore, and we'd stay alongside the docks two, sometimes three months with a load of fish.

- Our canneries one by one all closed.

There isn't a cannery left in San Diego.

There isn't a tuna boat left in San Diego.

- San Diego lost everything.

It lost all the fishermen, number one, the cannery workers, hardware, groceries drug stores, medicines, you name it, everything.

- [Narrator] In the early 1960s, the city of San Diego began construction on a two-and-a-half mile section of Interstate 5, which cut through the heart of Little Italy from Laurel Street to Market.

- It was very devastating when Highway 5 came through the downtown area.

It took probably close to 30, 35% of the Italian families out of the area.

- There were a series of events that probably resulted in this breakup of the Italian community, per se.

The first thing would, of course, would be the freeway.

That was really a devastating blow to the Italian community in this area.

And then the second thing would be the fishing industry.

There were a lot of Italians involved with the fishing industry.

When that no longer existed, many of those people had to move away, change their lifestyle.

- You lose your point of reference a number of times.

First, you establish roots somewhere.

You move on again, and again, that's taken away in one way or another, and it remains as part of your imagination as to who you are and where you belong, where your culture belongs.

- It's hard to argue that there is a strong Italian community here in what we know is Little Italy.

There's no question that that no longer exists, but we have to go back and ask why.

- The freeway changed everything, everything completely, and it really spoiled the town.

It was never the same.

It's never been the same.

- There was a big family discussion what was gonna happen to my grandparents.

They lived right across the street from Hammond machinery on India Street, so they were right smack dab where the freeway was going to be cutting through, so it was just absolutely miserable for them.

They were completely displaced.

- Most of all that land- - [Jennie] Union Street.

- Union Street and State Street, that all was taken up for the freeway.

And there were many, many families, all fishermen.

- [Jennie] So they had to move out of the neighborhood.

Oh, a lot of the older people were crying because they had to sell their homes, you know, and then they missed the church.

- It became a depressed area, you might say.

The only thing that really held it together was the our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Church.

That is the mainstay of Little Italy at the present time.

- Aside from the establishment of a physical and economic base, the community also felt a need to establish a spiritual point of reference in which they could root themselves in rituals they had known back in Italy.

That developed into our Lady of the Rosary Church on State Street.

- [Katie] This coming Saturday, they're having a spaghetti dinner at our Lady of the Rosary, and you go there and we'll see all of them from far and near will go and support the church, and it's strong, strong roots.

- It's never left me, it's always been with me.

It's just a part of you.

You know, it's like anything that you've been raised with, you never forget it.

The church was so important to me growing up that it's always kept me close and you're just never far from it.

- [Resident] If it wasn't for the church, that still draws people down there, Little Italy would've been gone completely.

♪ Tantum ergo sacramentum ♪ - [Thomas] The church itself plays a role of bringing the Italian families together, socially as well as, let's say, religiously.

If anybody's gonna get buried, they want to be buried from here if they're Italians.

If they want to have their children and grandchildren baptized, they're baptized in this church.

They get married here and they get buried here.

There was a Salesian father that came to town, Italian.

He went around with all the fishermen and Italian families and they started to collect to build this church, and naturally the church was in debt.

- [Resident] They formed a committee to raise money from the fishing boats to help pay the mortgage of the church off.

And they did this by assessing each vessel was about 50 cents a ton for the larger boats.

- So within several years the debt was paid off and the church is clear and has been clear ever since.

The Italian community is very proud of this church.

It brings all the people here together and everybody say it's my church.

- [Katie] And I think that as long as our Lady of the Rosary is there that there will be a very strong Italian community in San Diego.

- [Marie] We are still very old-fashioned.

The values are the same, haven't changed.

Our fiestas at church are the same, and we do try to keep a lot of this alive because it is beautiful.

We want our children to see what it was like like we lived when we were young.

- [Narrator] The Madonna del Lume Festival originates in Porticello, Sicily, and dates back to the rescue of a portrait of this Madonna at the shore of the fishing village.

(men shouting in Italian) - [Thomas] It's part of the old ritual from Italy, the chanting that represents Mother hear us, help us, pray for us.

- [Narrator] Today, the festival is also celebrated each fall in Italian communities abroad for the protection that the Madonna is thought to bring to the fishermen.

- [Thomas] And they have their processions and it goes down to the Embarcadero in the afternoon, that Sunday afternoon.

- [Resident] It was a Madonna that really shed the way and the light for many of them, and it was her hope and inspiration.

- While the gatherings that take place now in and around Little Italy are indicative of that tide that people still feel and they will drive miles and miles to come down here for a meeting or for a spaghetti dinner because it gives 'em a sense of belonging.

- [Resident] That Fish Monger Club was quite a club about 30, 40 years ago, so now we started what we call now the New Fish Mongers Club.

(men singing in Italian) - [Andrea] 10 years ago we all started retiring, so I said, "Why don't we start it again and make it the New Fish Mongers.

Let's get together."

We haven't seen each other for a long time and maybe we will get together and see all of our buddies.

- This is the place right here where all of the guys come and meet, you know, once a month they see somebody they haven't seen like how long haven't I seen you?

What, 40, 50 years I haven't seen you?

- [Friend] At least 40 years.

So that's what you do.

You come to the Fish Mongers and find somebody you haven't seen in 40 years.

- [Narrator] The Fish Mongers Club of America, founded in 1938 in San Diego, California.

Its sole purpose is to bring together for good fellowship those intimately associated with the fishing or harbor or waterfront industries.

- None of us were ever introduced to anybody.

We all grew up and everybody was there.

Right?

- [Friend 1] Right!

- [Friend 2] Right!

- The only guy I was introduced to was my son-in-law by my daughter.

(men laughing) Look, then he didn't like him.

- [Friend 1] I didn't like him!

- [Andrea] Just a graduation of what we were doing when we were the same people, a lot older though, and getting together and just talking about old times, but it means a lot to be gathering.

We meet every month.

- [Friend 1] Catch more fish at these clubs than we did when we were out to sea.

There's a lot of fish on the beach, a lot of the ones that got away.

(laughs) - You have blessed our fleets over the years.

Multiply the fish and the bread tonight may we rejoice together in Christ our Lord.

Amen.

- [Crowd] Amen!

(crowd clapping, shouting in Italian) - The relationship that Italians in San Diego have to Little Italy today, I think is similar to the relationship that the initial immigrants had to Italy.

It is something that is sometimes based in nostalgia, but it also represents an attempt to reclaim an identity that was somehow lost or misplaced.

(bouncy accordion music) - [Thomas] The community itself in Little Italy is coming alive again.

- We see more Italians than we've seen in a long time and they have a place to go to, to meet, to visit and see everybody that they haven't seen in many years.

They're enjoying the businesses again.

It brings back memories and I think they feel proud of it.

- And there's also still a few Italian merchants that are in the area that have been here a number of years.

Mona Lisa certainly has been here a number of years.

Filippi's been here forever.

- The merchants that provide the anchor core of this area are primarily Italian restaurants and Italian food manufacturers, so that's why it's kept through all of this change.

why it's kept the image of Little Italy and the thing to do at this point is to capitalize on that image.

- [Narrator] In the past several years, San Diego's urban redevelopment agency has begun to focus its attention and resources on the renovation of Little Italy, especially on a rundown block at the southern end of the neighborhood.

- This is a map showing the little Italy area.

This is the heart, it's the heart of Little Italy here, and this is our project site, India Street, and this is Cedar Street.

You can see how the project is really a gateway and as you enter little Italy from downtown.

- [Thomas] I feel that the block that my dad had his grocery store building on naturally has come to the point where it needs to be renovated and I feel that it'll be, I hope, the beginning of the reconstruction of Little Italy.

- It was important that this new project, which is the biggest thing to be built in Little Italy, by far, a full city block.

It was critical that we keep that kind of rhythm of little block, little block, little block, little building going right through into this new project and that's what's gonna make it Little Italy.

- [Marco] Most importantly, it will send a symbol, and the symbol is that this area is coming back.

- [Rob] I think the project that we're talking about doing will be that, that last little bit that it needs to kickstart it into something really wonderful.

- Generations grew up on the streets of little Italy relating to the fishing industry and of course all the peripheral industries to that and that's gone.

That's part of history and I think there's a sense now of wanting to go back and reassess that.

What did those Italians contribute to San Diego or is that something that's lost forever?

Do we just start where we are now and go ahead?

Or does that past offer us something?

- [Marco] Against all odds, Little Italy continues to survive.

There is something that transcends just the quantitative economic aspects of this community.

There is a spiritual tie that still draws people down here.

- [Rob] My hope for this community in the future is that it remains and flourishes as a neighborhood.

It's the way that I think communities used to be in the best times of America.

I mean, here in in Little Italy, we are well on our way actually to achieving that dream.

- [Resident] I think it'll always be Little Italy.

I think it's right here in the heart to people, so I think to all of us and hopefully to our kids it will still be Little Italy.

(crowd clapping and cheering) (lively accordion music) (crowd chattering)