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This chapter examines the relationship between homophobic municipal and federal legislation in New York in the 1970s and early 1980s and the rapid escalation of the gentrification of downtown Manhattan in the same period. A study of the gentrification of the waterfront in this period provides a vantage point from which to consider the city’s long-standing disinclination to archive itself, evident in its promotion of urban developments that resist the renewal of existing buildings and landmarks, and to explore the commitment of queer writers, artists, and filmmakers to preserving the ruined waterfront. This chapter brings to the fore queer appropriations of the New York waterfront and nearby bars, its identity as a gay men’s cruising space, as a place that facilitated the political organizing of gay men and lesbians, as a site for sex work, and as a home for displaced and at-risk trans people. I examine the civic battleground of the city’s historic waterfront from the perspective of those who were absent from mainstream accounts of its use, exploring histories of activism, preservationism, and protest that have been obscured by the gentrification of both the waterfront and its queer history.

Relations between Italian Americans and African Americans have been often tense, marked by racism, competition on the labor and housing market, and occasional violence. In the 1950s and 1960s Italian Americans in New York and other cities, along with other white ethnics, resisted urban change and supported residential segregation. However, in the field of popular music, the two groups have regularly exchanged mutual appreciation for the talent, style, and authenticity of the other. The chapter focus on Italian American artists’ hegemonic presence in a black musical genre (doo-wop) to show how popular and consumer culture provided the space for otherwise impossible cross-cultural exchanges at the dawn of the civil-rights era.

Guido is a youth subculture originating in New York City’s Italian American neighborhoods. This chapter understands Guido as a collective ethnic subject defined by a signature consumption culture or style. The chapter traces the origin of Guido to the disco movement of the 1970s; an urban Italian American youth subculture specializing in expanded opportunities for leisure-based consumption referenced to the mass media and entertainment industries. Because stylized youth identities were embedded in lived Italian American communities, consumption became an important new site for reworking ethnic cultural differences. Just as Guido symbolizes the incorporation of commodities into a new Italian American cultural identity and status, it has become a commodity that is merchandised to wider markets. Inclusion in the media spectacle—see, in particular, the reality television show Jersey Shore (2009-2012)—brings alignment with core consumption values, although it compromises subcultural boundaries. Guido is seen as part of a larger pattern that constructs Italian American difference in relation to American consumer culture while exposing ideological divisions inside the ethnic boundary.

This chapter introduces the key material features of the ruined waterfront and some of the political and economic circumstances surrounding its abandonment in the 1960s. These histories are connected to broader narratives of preservation and urban renewal in New York throughout the twentieth century. The chapter also introduces the idea of cruising as a queer method for exploring the history of the waterfront and David Wojnarowicz's work in and around in it.

Italian-produced films found a vast audience in New York City theaters, encompassing motives of emotional longing and diasporic nationalism among immigrant spectators well into the 1920s. The essay investigates whether and how 1920s Italian American film culture resonated with assertive transnational connections. In particular, it looks at how the largest Italian American newspaper, Il Progresso Italo Americano, articulated self-assured ideas of cultural dialogue and exchange through film reviews, reports about film reception and stars, and advertisements for new films or talent agencies. The evidence Il Progresso provides reveals a dense circuit of newsmaking and popular response, indeed a culture of film consumption, that positioned Italy and America not as opposed, but in dialogue with one another. For an emigrant community long accustomed to endure racial and cultural prejudice and perceived to be strenuously attached to European customs and lifestyles, the 1920s saw the emergence of a geocultural confidence that impacted ideas and practices of film consumption turning manifest and inescapable affiliation into choice.