"Fugedabout it", "catholic school in Brooklyn", playing stickball"? In case you haven't noticed, those days are gone. You can hardly find a traditional old-school New York Italian in the city anymore, outside of Staten Island. All of the former neighborhoods are kaput, either transformed into liberal yuppy millennial havens or taken over by hispanics, chinese or middle easterners.
I don’t know. I still visit my Aunt in Bensonhurst. There are new ethnicites showing up but they still start grocery stores, beauty salons and restaurants, sweep their stoops and have fabulous Christmas light displays. The Hassids are harder to assimilate but gradually the little kindnesses of shoveling someone’s walk, giving complements to children are making bridges. The Italians in many cases have assimilated so they don’t cluster as tightly but I have no trouble finding them.