Landscapes of order, landscapes of memory: Italian-American residential landscapes of the New York metropolitan region

In June of 2004, The New York Times reported that the fig trees in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn were dying.1 Accompanying this horticultural death was another transition. Like the fig trees, the elderly Italian-American people who tended them were also gradually disappearing from the neighborhood. The article demonstrated what most residents of the New York tri-state area already knew: The ethnic make-up of a neighborhood often may be "read" through the residential landscape choices of its inhabitants. For people of Italian descent, the fig tree (Ficus carica) is one of many ethnically significant components of the landscape. Throughout the New York City metropolitan region, the residential landscape plays a prominent role in the construction of Italian-American identity. With their symmetrical plans, sheared shrubs, religious statues, and fig trees, Italian-American landscapes proclaim the ethnicity of homeowners and knit neighborhoods together with a shared horticultural and design idiom. Despite the facility with which the denizens of the New York tri-state region discern and describe this "Italian look," no study concerned primarily with the visual analysis and historical precedents of these Italian-American residential landscapes yet exists. Copyright © 2011 Fordham University Press. All rights reserved.

Journal Abbreviation: Ital. Folk: Vernac. Culture in Ital.-Amer. Lives