Stanger-Ross, Jordan. Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. 208. Illustrations, photographs, maps

Jordan Stanger-Ross’s insightful (and thoroughly and creatively researched) book, comparing the experiences and practices of Italians in two South Philadelphia parishes, and in Toronto’s Little Italy neighbourhood, in the period after World War II, prompts the question of what it means to be Italian in large North American cities, and what that Italian identity can tell us about the nature and structure of those cities. His central thesis is that South Philadelphia’s Italians both confronted and constructed greater neighbourhood constraints than the Italians of Toronto. That is, the South Philadelphians were far less likely than the Torontonians to sell their houses and move out of their neighbourhood; Catholic carnivals and processions in South Philadelphia were hosted, and attended, almost exclusively by parish residents, whereas celebrations in the St. Agnes/St. Francis Parish of Little Italy were attended by Italians (and others) from throughout the Toronto region. And finally, since World War II, South Philadelphia Italian couples lived closer to one another at the time of their marriage than couples in Little Italy. In fact, “By 1990, the couples married in Toronto’s Little Italy were separated by almost twice the distance of their South Philadelphia peers.” (p. 105) Stanger-Ross provides a careful accounting of the local, regional, and national forces and structures that might account for at least some of the differences between South Philadelphia and Toronto’s Little Italy, his purpose evidently being to provide a context for his more fine-grained comparisons in later chapters, and not to identify specific causal mechanisms, which remain unclear. In the period after World War II, Philadelphia, like almost every other American Rustbelt city, faced a steady loss of businesses and middle- and upper-income families to the surrounding suburbs and elsewhere. At the same time, African Americans moving up from the South were perceived to threaten property values, arguably a self-fulfilling prophecy. The influx of new residents, the outflux of businesses and more affluent taxpayers, and the overall net population loss, all combined to keep city services poor and property values stagnant, thus creating a sense of insularity and “defensive localism” in the Italian parishes. Stagnant property values provided little incentive to sell homes and move, whereas Italians in Toronto could realize a healthy profit by selling their homes, as many of them did, thus accounting for their greater likelihood to leave their neighbourhood. Defensive localism in Philadelphia was supported by parochial schools that were controlled by the parishes, whereas Toronto’s parochial schools were administered by the metropolitan government, and they thus never developed the same local attachments as in Philadelphia. Toronto’s metropolitan government also redistributed taxes between the city and suburbs, with the result that Toronto did not suffer the same decline in city services as did Philadelphia. And though Toronto was a more popular destination for immigrants than Philadelphia (and Canada as a whole let in relatively more immigrants than the United States), these new arrivals did not find themselves enmeshed in a spatialized racial conflict, as did black arrivals to Philadelphia, who were welcome in only a few neighbourhoods. By contrast, the Italians who were still arriving by the tens of thousands to Toronto after World War II settled throughout the city, thus expanding their ethnic social networks beyond the confines of Little Italy. Despite the fact that they were and are both Italian enclaves, it does seem a bit like comparing apples and oranges for Stanger-Ross to compare a vibrant commercial and entertainment district in Toronto to largely residential communities in Philadelphia. Yet the differences between the neighbourhoods are illuminating. There is some small irony in the fact that, in the years …