article_snippet.sent: Why would you want to throw me out when I lived here all my life?' asked Sarno, a feisty, raspy-voiced woman who proudly tells how An Italian-American grandmother once even served as queen of the annual Feast of San Gennaro, Little Italy's most well-known event. '
article_snippet.sent: This is Manhattan's Little Italy neighborhood.'
article_snippet.sent: The spat is the latest involving the Italian American Museum to cause a commotion in Little Italy, a neighborhood of former tenement buildings and narrow streets in Lower Manhattan that was once a bustling center of Italian immigrant life.
article_snippet.sent: The negative press that this has caused is so detrimental to the spirit of the Italian immigrant,' said Lou Di Palo, whose family has run an Italian specialty foods shop in Little Italy for over a century.
article_snippet.sent: But in recent decades, the character of Little Italy has been transformed by waves of gentrification and wealthy newcomers.
article_snippet.sent: The latest Census data from 2013 shows only 554 out of 7,816 residents, about seven per cent, in the Census tract encompassing Sarno's street identify as having Italian ancestry.
article_snippet.sent: Museum president Joseph Scelsa told The New York Times that even after all Italian-Americans had gone from the area, 'the legacy would still remain because we have an institution that does that.'
article_snippet.sent: Now another piece of Little Italy is gone,' his said.
article_snippet.sent: Truthfully, there's not a lot of Little Italy left, mainly a couple of blocks of Mulberry Street, populated with Italian restaurants and tourist stores featuring trinkets and 'Kiss me, I'm Italian' and 'Fuggedaboutit' T-shirts. '
article_snippet.sent: The sort of everyday lived experience of the place as a residence of Italian Americans for all intents has been over for decades,' said Joseph Sciorra of the Italian-American Institute at Queens College.
article_snippet.sent: But for a museum dedicated to that history, turning Sarno out shows 'a lack of vision,' Joseph Sciorra of the Italian-American Institute at Queens College said, suggesting it could have tapped Sarno as a speaker or in some other capacity.
article_snippet.sent: Sarno, Joseph Sciorra of the Italian-American Institute at Queens College said, 'is literally the living embodiment of the living history of Little Italy.'