Call Spike Lee, gentrification is encroaching on the white folks.
Via The Big Story
A fight in Manhattan’s Little Italy neighborhood between a landlord who wants a tenant out and a tenant who doesn’t want to leave isn’t your run-of-the-mill New York City real estate struggle.
That’s because the landlord is a museum dedicated to the legacy of Italian-Americans, and the tenant is an 85-year-old Italian-American grandmother who has lived there for more than 50 years.
“Why would you want to throw me out when I lived here all my life?” asked Adele Sarno, a feisty, raspy-voiced woman who proudly tells how she once even served as queen of the annual Feast of San Gennaro, Little Italy’s most well-known event. “This is my neighborhood.”
Sarno said the fight over her $820-a-month, two-bedroom apartment above the Italian American Museum began about five years ago. That’s when she received a letter seeking to increase that rent to $3,500 a month, far more than the retired shopkeeper says she can afford.
The spat is the latest involving the 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. An Italian restaurant that had been open for decades closed its doors last week in a separate rent-related dispute.