The Salvinos: A Taylor Street Odyssey  

Prologue

The Salvino liquor store stood as a beacon guiding residents and visitors alike to the fabled corner of Taylor and Halsted streets.   It anchored the major shopping district for the Italian American enclave that occupied the central portion of the near west side community that Jane Addams had labeled, “The Hull House Neighborhood.”  

INSERT: PICTURE OF SALVINO LIQUORS BUILDING, NE CORNER   TAYLOR & HALSTED.

The original turn-of-the century community, a slum by anyone’s definition, served as the port of call for the eastern and southern European immigrants.  Those immigrants served as the fuel that fed America’s industrial revolution.  It wasn’t until 1923 that the Federal Government, not needing any further fodder to fuel the industrial revolution, turned off the spigot that allowed Eastern and Southern Europeans into the country.  

TURN OF THE CENTURY PROGRESSIVES: Polluting the American Gene Pool.

The turn of the century progressives were technocrats who liberal reformer, Thomas Leonard, observes “agreed that expert public administrators do not merely serve the common good, they also identify the common good.” Schools of public administration, including the one that since 1948 has borne Woodrow Wilson’s name, still enshrine that conviction.

Leonard also brings to light an embarrassing truth: In the early 20th century, the progressive definition of the common good was thoroughly infused with scientific racism. Harvard economist William Z. Ripley, for example, was a recognized expert on both railroad regulation and the classification of European races by coloring, stature and "cephalic index," or head shape. At the University of Wisconsin, the red-hot center of progressive thought, leading social scientists turned out economic-reform proposals along with works parsing the racial characteristics -- and supposed natural inferiority -- of blacks, Chinese, and non-Teutonic European immigrants.

In following the irrefutable science of that era day, it was concluded, with the precision of geometric logic, that the American gene pool was being polluted by people from the Mediterranean region. The polluters included those whose ancestries gave us the “cradle of civilization” and  the Golden Age of Greece.  Dominant in that mix of Leonard’s gene polluters were the Italians who nourished and passed on to us all that we now enjoy as western civilization and the Renaissance.  The people whose ancestors discovered, explored, and named  this great country by being the first to sail across the great ocean in search of a way to circumvent the dominance of the Muslim world over Europe were proven, by the science of that day, to be polluting the gene pool of the settlers whose pedigree stems from the barbaric horde that produce the dark ages from which we emerged via the Italian led Renaissance. 

 America, specifically the state of California, which spearheaded the eugenics program during the early part of the 20th century, exported and, in some cases financed, the eugenics program which found its way across the seas to the political platforms of foreign governments. 

The defense attorneys at the Nuremberg War Trials subpoenaed the documents of American Scientists, politicians, academicians, etc. in support of following the alleged science of the day, regardless of where it led us.  

The Salvino’s are one of the allegedly inferior Southern Italian families who found their way to America and became part of the Taylor Street legacy known as Chicago’s Little Italy.  Their Odyssey, spearheaded by the matriarch of the family, began in Calabria, a province in southern Italy.  Their exodus to the Tuscany region of northern Italy with its cultural legacy apparently had its impact.  Their vision of America, as the land of opportunity and their successes in pursuit of the Dream, are chronicled here in their story.

INSERT: PICTURE OF URBINO OR CALABRIA

 The Greeks and Jews moved out of the near west side community beginning with the Prohibition Era of the 20’s.  Only their businesses remained, e.g., Greek Town and Jew Town (Maxwell Street). The Italians remained as the only viable community beyond the prohibition days, the great depression, WWII, the disruption by the 2 major expressways that ripped away the eastern and southern segments of what was now known as “Little Italy,” and the usurping of the neighborhood with the construction of the UIC campus.  (Aside: While many blamed Mayor Daly and the West-Side mob for dismembering the neighborhood, Florence Scala pointed her finger at “The Hull House mob.”)  

Jane Addams, the co-founder of the Hull House Settlement House (1889), became the premier social theorist of her day.  The immigrant community became the laboratory upon which she applied her sociological theories (symbolic interactionism) and based her protests to the establishment.  

She recognized the neglect of the neighborhood by the establishment (both physical and otherwise) would result in a great majority of them remaining servants to, rather than participants in, the Dream, for generations to come. Some of those early immigrants, not many, but some, defied our sociological soothsayers. They, along with their first generation offspring, did not remain servants to the Dream.  Some pursued and captured the Dream because of their entrepreneurial spirit.  Others, despite their agrarian beginnings, climbed the educational ladder in pursuit of the Dream. The Salvinos, right out of the chute, apparently, did both.   

 INSERT: PICTURE OF RAT’S ALLEY WHERE THE DEAD MEN LOST THEIR BONES.

Supporting the profound failure prediction of our sociological soothsayers, for the Italian segment of the near west side slums, was a 1970s federal study.  Italian Americans were at the bottom rung of the educational ladder for all Europeans, as identified as enrollment in college.   

The Odyssey

To begin at the beginning, the Salvino odyssey began in Calabria, one of the southern provinces that participated in the mass exodus from southern Italy at the turn of the 20th century.  It was there that Secondo Salvino, in 18___, made the decision to move his family to Urbino, a city in the northern province of Tuscany.  Urbino, at that time, was noted for having more Jewish residents than any other city in Europe.  The lure for Secondo Salvino was the promise of a job as a mailman.  Anna, Secondo’s wife, had always been impressed with the fact that a government job was noteworthy in that it provided security.