Authentic Survivors: Religion and Gentrification in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
By Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada
The 2019 giglio, photo by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada.
Every July in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the Italian American Catholic community celebrates its patron saints in spectacular fashion. During the annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Paolino di Nola, men in the community perform the Dance of the Giglio, a ritual that has been celebrated in Brooklyn since 1903. Hundreds of men lift the seventy-foot-tall, four-ton tower, decorated with baroque angels, saints, and arches, through the streets in honor of Saint Paulinus (San Paolino), the patron saint of Nola, Italy. Men heave, spin, and sway under the giglio, moving the gigantic tower down the street in front of the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (OLMC). The parish priest, secure on a metal platform, rides along with the giglio. With its criss-crossing aluminum beams and its cadre of holy figures, the giglio towers over the surrounding buildings, old-vinyl clad structures, and shiny new developments.
The lifters, 2019, photo by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada.
In the lead-up to Giglio Sunday, children have the opportunity to lift the children’s giglio, a miniature made of wood. They dress up as lifters in matching t-shirts and caps, some with carnations tucked in the brim, and carry the small tower down the street as their parents cheer them on. Little boys especially grit their teeth, square their jaws, and pump their fists to the music, imitating the lifters. Their parents proudly declare that lifting is “in their blood” and “in their DNA” and beam that one day their sons will be running the feast. In 2014 the children received a special blessing from the parish’s pastor; he told them “You’re getting a blessing because what you do for us is give us a promise that this feast has a nice long future, because you could be doing this for another fifty or sixty years, so it is wonderful [that] you are promising us that what we do is important, and that you want to keep it up.”
Children lifting the wooden children’s giglio, 2019, photo by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada.
This statement was not just a sweet message about their potential, but very much reflects OLMC’s concern for the future, especially in a hyper-gentrified Williamsburg.[1] These children represent OLMC’s endurance. As they lift the miniature giglio and learn to love the saints, they show their parents and grandparents that this feast, the devotional and financial engine of this parish, will persist despite broader urban changes. In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, OLMC places its faith in boys and Catholicism as a salve for gentrification and its effacing effects on history and community.
In a neighborhood where Catholic churches have closed, and have even been deconsecrated, sold for millions, and turned into lofts and condominiums for the creative class, OLMC persists.[2] While gentrification started in Williamsburg in the 1980s and 1990s, the church has been increasingly hedged in by new developments since the 2005 rezoning.[3] Under the tenure of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Williamsburg became the site of the largest rezoning plan in the city’s history, encompassing nearly 200 blocks. As a result, the once industrial neighborhood became some of the most sought-after real estate for luxury building.[4] The rezoning hastened gentrification and made Williamsburg synonymous with Brooklyn cool, waterfront condos, coffee shops, and pricey boutiques.[5] It’s now home to Domino Park, an Insta-worthy waterfront park, and is a destination for tourists, the fashion-crowd and foodies looking for brunch spots and curated vintage clothing.
Italian American men who grew up in the tight-knit community on Williamsburg’s Northside before the rezoning and gentrification remember symbolic neighborhood boundaries: streets and sections of the neighborhood marked off as dangerous. One parishioner told me that as kids they were taught to “never go to Wythe or else” and that “there were only four reasons for going [past] Berry Street: hookers, blow, getting rid of a car, [or] getting rid of a body.” Today Wythe Ave is a corridor with exclusive hotels with rooftop bars, music venues, ice cream shops, bakeries, hair salons, and clothing stores. No matter the truth of these childhood stories, the collective memory is important for understanding taboo areas of the neighborhood symbolically and narratively charged as risky, deviant, masculine spaces. The industrial waterfront was thought to be an off-limits place. Today these same streets are destinations for leisure, shopping, and play. The waterfront is more of a coveted backdrop for wedding photos than a site of deviance.
In this transformed neighborhood, the giglio declares an enduring Italian Catholic presence with an exclamation point, its aluminum body like the spine of this religious community. As boys and men gather under the giglio, both miniature and full-size, they are imagined as the hardy protectors of Catholicism and Italian American identity in Williamsburg. They bear the real and metaphorical weight of tradition and parish survival. In their narratives, and with their bodies, men remember Williamsburg’s more gritty, industrial past and Catholic history.[6]
Gentrification might seem to be a secular or secularizing force, hastening parish closures and mergers, and dissolving or displacing aging ethnic communities. But from OLMC we see how religion and ritual offer sites where people can hold on to their neighborhood identities, their churches, and their ethnic identities in spite of and in conversation with larger trends of urban redevelopment and gentrification. Gentrification becomes part of sacred narratives communities tell about themselves, fitting into collective memory. Religious communities re-signify rituals as acts of resistance to broader demographic changes and municipal policies. More, urban development shapes the meaning of devotion. Within discussions of urbanism we need to think less about religion as synonymous with church buildings and what happens behind those walls. Instead, we should explore how religious communities dialogue with development and gentrification.
OLMC’s second church building, completed in 1930 and later torn down to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel 100th Anniversary Book.
The altar of the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel circa 1941. Photo courtesy of OLMC Archives.
On Giglio Sunday 2016, the most important day of the year for OLMC, the parish’s deacon Philip Franco stood at the lectern during Mass. Peering out behind narrow glasses, he looked out at the crowded pews, the church so packed that people had to stand, and he gave a homily about endurance, neighborhood change, and gentrification. Founded in 1887, OLMC was the first Italian parish in Williamsburg. As the Italian population of the neighborhood grew, and communicants swelled to over 15,000 by 1912, the parish needed a new building. The original 1887 building on North Eighth Street and Union Avenue was replaced by a grand Romanesque church. The new church was beloved by parishioners who fundraised for its construction. Completed in 1930, it had a 100-foot-tall campanile, thickly hooded arched windows and stained glass, and could seat more than 1,000 people. Behind the altar was a huge fresco of Our Lady of Mount Carmel bestowing the scapular unto Saint Simon Stock. Lewis Mumford, esteemed architecture critic for the New Yorker, called the design a most “interesting piece of eclectic architecture.”[7] But less than twenty years after it was constructed, the church was demolished to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Robert Moses’s $137 million 11.7-mile highway which bisected Williamsburg.[8] In the collective imagination of parishioners at this church, gentrification was not the first or last battle they would face to maintain this Catholic stronghold in Williamsburg. They had already faced antagonistic planning and policies throughout the 20th century.
The deacon wove this history and warned parishioners never to become “prophets of doom” and never to feel hopeless about the future of the church and feast. Instead, they should hold fast to their presence and history in North Williamsburg. He told them to never say, “The area has changed so much, it will never be the same.” Rather they should think of their ancestors and the many Italians who lived in this corner of Brooklyn before them who brought their patron saints from Italy, who celebrated their devotional traditions, and raised families on these very streets. He declared:
In the 1940s, Robert Moses… built the Brooklyn Queens Expressway right through this neighborhood… and he knocked down the church that our grandparents and our great grandparents built and everyone said 'that's it, it’s over we’re done.’ Even the Bishop at the time, Bishop Molloy, said let the Italians go to [another church], ‘why rebuild Mount Carmel?’ We said no, and we rebuilt the church again. And what was thought to be the end, was just the beginning… We rebuilt and we rang the bells, and we opened the doors of this church.
Today, they’re not knocking down buildings with the BQE, they are putting them up. We’ve got buildings going up all over the place. But they could build condos to the sky, they’ll never be bigger than this feast. They’ll never be bigger than this parish… Together we have survived, and together we will survive. While so many others ran, we stayed, and the bells of this church rang loud and clearly. We knew Williamsburg was an amazing place before the rest of the world figured it out.[9]
Dance of the Giglio, 1954, and the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel’s third church building (right) Photo courtesy of OLMC Archives.
This story of survival and resilience in the face of urban developments like highways and condominiums is a fundamentally religious one, a sacred counter-narrative of Catholic tenacity rather than one of victimization at the hands of policy makers and developers. As James Peacock put it in his study of haunting and gentrification “gentrification is not a simplistic matter of before and afters, of an authentic past supplanted by an inauthentic present. Rather, it is about the interpenetration of competing discourses, a continual dialogue between visions of authenticity rooted in economics and culture.”[10] Religion too is central to visions of authenticity amidst gentrification. The condos “going up to the sky,” the spectral reminder of a beautiful church erased by the highway, and the enduring presence of the parish and its feast assure this community of its resilience. Religious narratives, rituals, and embodied actions allow people to relate to these “absent presences” and remember the Williamsburg of the early 20th century, a triumphant Catholicism of eucharistic parades and perpetual novenas.[11] After the Romanesque church was torn down, the parish relocated to a new practical church building on North 8th and Havemeyer. Their parish cheated death, and they celebrated the feast with five blocks of stands, food and games, a bazaar, and invited a daredevil act where a couple did a “dance of death” atop the “tiny pedestal” of a 125-foot steel pole.[12]
Left: View of the giglio down Havemeyer Street, 1985. Right: View of the giglio down Havemeyer Street, 2014.
Ghosts “mediate relations between the individual, the communities in which the individual participates, and wider history” — for Italian American Catholics in Williamsburg the streets hold the ghosts or palimpsests of two other church buildings, businesses now-gone, and thousands of parishioners who walked the streets with the statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, or hung out of windows to see her pass by.[13] The ghosts are dredged up in Masses, in conversations, and in the stories of those who remember the neighborhood before it became home to Madewell, the Apple Store, Whole Foods, Sephora, and office buildings. In a couple of years a $150 million, eleven story project by The Collective, “the leading global co-living company,” will be opening right across the street from the church at 292 North 8th Street.[14] The Collective will unite residential, retail and social space, and promises an “innovative way of living” offering “one-of-a-kind amenities and ground-breaking experiences.”[15] Interestingly, the church attempted to purchase this property, which was once a metal stamping factory, in 1964. The church hoped to turn it into a religious, social, and athletic hall, but the Bishop of Brooklyn decided that the property was “outlandishly over-priced at $120,000” and did not approve the purchase.[16] The property sold for $41,361,482 in 2019.[17] This development will also hold the ghosts of failed property acquisitions.
At OLMC feast organizers critique newcomers and gentrifiers and simultaneously want to attract them to the festivities as consumers. The feast is the most important fundraiser for the parish, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. So while devotees might come for Masses and processions, visitors also come to drink a beer in the “beer trap,” eat Italian pastries in the café inside the church, or ride one of the carnival rides. Despite their critiques of gentrification, they have a stake in coexisting with and marketing to Williamsburg’s newest residents, especially with appeals to the folk character and historicity of the event. The specters of urban renewal then, and super-gentrification now, while very real and haunting threats to survival, allow the community members at OLMC to imagine themselves as authentic survivors.[18] Their oppositional existence builds communal solidarity and a drive to raise money for the church, recruit more lifters, inspire more children to participate, and build the most beautiful giglio. They imagine that with the might of their bodies, and the strength of their devotion, they can fortify the church against broader urban threats, even as the condos and multi-million dollar developments close in around the building.
Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada is Assistant Professor in the department of religion at Kalamazoo College. She is the author of Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2020).
[1] Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul (New York: HarperCollins, 2017).
[2] C. J. Hughes, “For Churches, a Temptation to Sell,” The New York Times, October 4, 2019, sec. Real Estate, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/realestate/for-churches-a-temptation-to-sell.html; Rick Hampson, “Our Lady of Revenue: NYC Churches Go on the Market, Leaving Parishioners Cynical,” Religion News Service (blog), March 3, 2015, https://religionnews.com/2015/03/03/lady-revenue-nyc-churches-go-market-leaving-parishioners-cynical/.
[3] Sharon Zukin, Valerie Trujillo, Peter Frase, Danielle Jackson, Tim Recuber, and Abraham Walker, “New Retail Capital and Neighborhood Change: Boutiques and Gentrification in New York City,” City and Community 8, no. 1 (2009): 47–64, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6040.2009.01269.x.
[4] Jerome Krase, and Judith DeSena Race, Class, and Gentrification in Brooklyn: A View from the Street (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016); Julian Brash, Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City, (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011). Julian Brash, “The Ghost in the Machine: The Neoliberal Urban Visions of Michael Bloomberg,” Journal of Cultural Geography 29, no. 2 (June 1, 2012): 135–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/08873631.2012.687535. Filip Stabrowski, “New-Build Gentrification and the Everyday Displacement of Polish Immigrant Tenants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn,” Antipode 46, no. 3 (June 1, 2014): 794–815. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12074.
[5] Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
[6] In my book, Lifeblood of the Parish, I explore how masculinity, Catholic identity, the desire for survival are intertwined in Williamsburg. Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada, Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2020).
[7] Lewis Mumford, and Robert Wojtowicz, Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 96.
[8] “Father Giorgio Triangle,” NYC Parks (n.d.), https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/father-giorgio-triangle/history. Nicole P. Marwell, Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 38.
[9] Philip Franco, “Giglio Sunday Homily” (homily, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, July 10, 2016).
[10] James Peacock, “Those the Dead Left Behind: Gentrification and Haunting in Contemporary Brooklyn Fictions,” Studies in American Fiction 46, no. 1 (July 18, 2019): 135, https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2019.0005.
[11] “12,000 Parade in Eucharistic Tribute Here,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 27, 1938; “30,000 March in Catholic’s Parade Today,” New York Herald Tribune, June 26, 1938; Peacock, “Those Dead Left Behind,” 136.
[12] “Daredevil Dancers Face Death High in Sky at Church Fair,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 13, 1954.
[13] Peacock, “Those Dead Left Behind,” 136.
[14] “The Collective Announces Newest Location, 292 North 8th Street, In Williamsburg, Brooklyn | Markets Insider,” markets.businessinsider.com, accessed November 5, 2020, https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/the-collective-announces-newest-location-292-north-8th-street-in-williamsburg-brooklyn-1028766784.
[15] “About Us | Join The Global Living Movement | The Collective,” accessed November 5, 2020, https://www.thecollective.com/about-us.
[16] Bishop of Brooklyn to Reverend Francis J. Varriale, March 18, 1964, Box 9, O.L. of Mt. Carmel-BK, Building and Property Offices Parish Property Files, Diocese of Brooklyn Archives.
[17] “292 N 8th St, Brooklyn - Owner Information, Sales, Taxes,” accessed November 5, 2020, https://www.propertyshark.com/mason/Property/184716/292-N-8-St-Brooklyn-NY-11211/.
[18] On super-gentrification see Judith R. Halasz, “The Super-Gentrification of Park Slope, Brooklyn,” Urban Geography 39, no. 9 (October 21, 2018): 1366–90, https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2018.1453454.