Archologia di Spaghetti Concreti

This fall I've been charged with answering the question, "Whatever happened to Garlic Gulch?"

Rainier Valley's Italian neighborhood first emerged in the early years of the 20th century. Many of the early Italian immigrants to Seattle were peasants, uneducated but willing to work hard at "pick and shovel" jobs: digging ditches, building railroads, etc. Some became truck farmers -- Joe Desimone famously helped found the Pike Place Market. Mostly, like so many immigrants before and since, they just wanted their kids to have the kind of opportunities unavailable in the villages they came from.

Seattle's Italians lived in Mount Baker, South Park, Georgetown, Beacon Hill and other neighborhoods, but when people say "Garlic Gulch," they're usually talking about the Rainier Valley -- and in particular the stretch of Rainier Avenue between Atlantic Street and McClellan. Here Italian immigrants could find bakeries and butcher shops, grocery stores, a pharmacy, a barbershop, and a social hall -- all owned and operated by their compatriots from the Old Country. 

The residential neighborhood was anchored by Mount Virgin Church on Massachusetts Street. Atlantic Street Center, a settlement house, provided social services such as job training and medical care. The sisters at Mount Virgin School taught the children English, so they could grow up to be Americans -- and (at Father Carmello's insistence) Italian too, so they would remember their heritage. Families were large and close-knit, as was the community. Isernios married Vaccas. Merlinos married Arganos. Fathers played bocce in their yards and made wine in their basements. Mothers stuffed sausages and rolled braciole and made ravioli from scratch. On Sundays everybody went to mass, and then came home and ate spaghetti, while the operatic strains of Nick Paolella's "Italian Hour" on KIRO wafted through the neighborhood. This is what I'm told.

Italians continued to arrive in Seattle in significant numbers well into the 1950s, but in the 1960s the Italian community in Rainier Valley began to disperse, and in 1978, the Seattle Sun declared "Garlic Gulch is dead." This early report of Garlic Gulch's demise may have been exaggerated, but a change was definitely underway in the old neighborhood. By the time Eric Scigliano's (excellent) "Goodbye, Garlic Gulch," appeared in The Weekly in 1991, the transformation felt nearly complete.  When Desimone's fruit stand at 23rd Ave folded up a few years back, the only visible Italian businesses left along Rainier were Borracchini's Bakery and the Oberto Sausage Company. Even Mike Prontera closed his barbershop on McClellan in 2008, after more than six decades of cutting the hair of "anyone with a vowel at the end of his name."

So what happened? Where did the Italian community go? At the City's request, I've been digging around for evidence: descendants, remnants, ruins, memories, accounts of the place and its demise. This quest has taken me from Google searches and cold calls to guys with vowels at the end of their names, to dusty photo files and drawers of grainy microfilm. It's led me to a split-level ranch house on Beacon Hill, into dimly lit restaurants after hours, through waist-high blackberries laced with spider webs, and over a freeway barrier at rush hour. And it's led at last to some semblance of an answer.

Clearly the dissolution of Garlic Gulch was partly due to the aging of the original inhabitants and the assimilation of their offspring into the larger society -- what you might call the natural evolution of any immigrant community. The original "pick and shovel" generation had succeeded in giving their children the freedoms and opportunities America had to offer, and as a result those children didn't need the support of a close-knit Italian community to survive. If they could afford it, many second- and third-generation Italians moved to Bellevue or Kirkland -- or New York or Kentucky, for that matter -- coming back regularly to visit their aging parents (if the parents hadn't moved away too). Even Nick Paolella, voice of the "Italian Hour" and publisher of the community's Italian-language newspaper, moved to Mercer Island in the 1950s.

This natural diaspora of the Italian community's descendants coincided with a fairly dramatic demographic shift in the Rainier Valley, to which the Open Housing ordinance, the Boeing Bust, the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and many other factors also contributed. For a variety of reasons, the area around Mount Virgin Church lost more than half its white population between 1960 and 1980, while the African American population increased five-fold and the Asian population more than doubled. No doubt this contributed to Garlic Gulch's loss of identity.

I've heard some pretty blunt statements from older Italians about how they felt when "the blacks moved in" -- and enough hemming and hawing on the part of their children when the topic of race comes up -- to understand that the increased African America presence made some Italians uncomfortable, and contributed to the decision to move for some of them. To be fair, "white flight" wasn't a uniquely Italian phenomenon by any means: of the 3307 whites who left the neighborhood during this period, only 279 were Italians. But even though some Garlic Gulchers were able to overcome their prejudices (the woman who "cried all night" when an African American family moved in next door told me 35 years later that the lady "has been a very nice neighbor"), "white flight" in the face of demographic change was probably a factor in the dissolution of Garlic Gulch as well.

It's pretty clear to me, however, that what really killed Garlic Gulch was a phenomenon described by Eric Scigliano as "an onslaught of concrete spaghetti." Throughout the second half of the 20th century, a series of ever-widening arterials, freeway overpasses, tunnels, and off-ramps sliced through the neighborhood -- starting with Lake Washington Floating Bridge and Empire Way in the 1940s and '50s, continuing with the threat of the aborted R.H. Thomson Expressway in the 1970s (a freeway doesn't actually have to be built to drive people away, it turns out), and concluding with the I-90 lid and expanded offramps in the 1980s. (And all that was before Light Rail came through!)

Lake Way (with attendant on- and off-ramps) heads east over Rainier Avenue on its way toward the Mount Baker tunnel and the Floating Bridge. This photo was taken in 1955; the road and tunnel were expanded and partially lidded in the 1980s.  
Seattle Municipal Archives Photo #52376

Scigliano says the successive construction of freeways, overpasses, and tunnels "swept out the old community with what seems almost a mischievous malevolence." He quotes Don Vey, whose grandmother's house was torn down in 1938 to make room for the original Floating Bridge: "They moved across the street -- and then the tunnel took that house." A huge overpass crossed Rainier right at Atlantic Street, taking out homes, stores, and other businesses, and dwarfing those that remained. The Atlantic Street Center was left facing a 40-foot concrete barrier instead of the neighborhood it served.

This kind of disruption would be hard for any community to survive. For Garlic Gulch, already weakened by age, assimilation, and previous disruptions, it was disastrous.

My search for remnants of the old neighborhood has turned up a few. Borracchini's Bakery and Oberto's sausages are still around, of course. Cory Pizzuto, whose grandfather arrived in the 1950s and helped dig the I-90 tunnel under his own house near Mount Virgin Church, still owns Pizutto's Italian Cafe, the restaurant his uncle Frank started in Seward Park in 1984. Vince Mottola, Jr. has kept his dad's eponymous restaurant going, and added a new one, Pizzeria Pulcinella, just south of Rainier Beach. Joe Fugere's heritage includes a French-Canadian father and an Irish grandfather, but it's his Italian grandmother's portrait that hangs over the pizza ovens at Tutta Bella. A call to Martin Patricelli of the Patricelli Tile Company confirmed that he is the great-nephew of Leonardo Patricelli, whose immigrant experience and life in Garlic Gulch are lovingly portrayed in Angelo Pellegrini's "The Ditch Digger." "We're still around, some of us," he said.

Back in 2002 Remo Borracchini told me the foundations of his father's original bread ovens could still be found behind the house he was born in, and last week I decided it was time to go looking for them. It turned out the house itself had been torn down in the intervening years -- I'm not sure when or why -- and the site is now part of a several-acre blackberry patch. 




Alas, even in my stoutest Frye boots I couldn't make it far enough into the brambles to confirm or deny the presence of century-old brick ovens, or their foundations. I did find plenty of enormous dew-spangled spider webs -- the kind with those giant juicy-looking striped spiders squatting in the middle of them -- and an old fig stump with three or four saplings growing out of it.

After a quiet moment and a glance at the setting sun, I decided that the handful of ripening figs dangling above my head could reasonably be classified as a trace of the old Italian neighborhood. I clambered back out to the sidewalk and headed for home.