The Communist Party cracks Little Italy during the Great Depression, and opens the Lower West Side Workers Center on MacDougal St.

‘Penetrating Little Italy’ by Helen Sheridan from the Daily Worker. Vol. 11 No. 69. March 21, 1934.

NEW YORK. In the heart of Greenwich Village, off Washington Square Park, lie a number of squalid, densely populated streets. They constitute the fringe of an Italian ghetto section, known as Little Italy. For years Little Italy had been considered difficult organizationally. Not that these Italian workers had escaped the devastating effects of the crisis, nor that there was any lack of poverty, misery and disease. Only a vague feeling that the men were under the influence of anarchistic and syndicalist notions, or were touched with a patriotic fascism, accentuated by pride in LaGuardia’s ascension to power. And the women, in Latin fashion, clung closely to home, lacking all interest in general problems.

Since January, this picture has suddenly changed. A club, known as the Lower West Side Workers Club, has opened its doors, and in the short space of two months has electrified the neighborhood with its militant activities, centering primarily around the question of unemployment and relief. On Feb. 5 and 15, the members of the club joined the general city-wide demonstrations, and on March 5th, sent a delegation of twenty-two members to the Home Relief Bureau, Spring and Elizabeth Sts., winning recognition of their unemployment committee as well as food and rent  checks for a number of neglected cases. Preceding the visit to the Home Relief Bureau a mass demonstration and open air meeting was held on Sixth Ave. and Bleecker St., and a small delegation was sent to see Colonel DeLaMater to protest the discrimination against Italian workers on C.W.A. jobs.

As a social and cultural center the club is a huge success. In the colorfully painted club-room on 107 MacDougall St., excellent meals are served at proletarian prices, prepared by an unemployed chef member of the club. A dance is held every Saturday night. Lectures on current topics in English and Italian are held on Sunday evenings. Classes in Principles of Communism and in English take place on Thursdays. A sports club for the youth of the neighborhood is in the process of formation, and a Pioneer troupe has already been launched.

All the members of the club are active canvassing among the neighborhood unemployed. Those who live on Thompson St. have organized themselves into a block assembly, and the club as a whole is now engaged in laying plans for the formation of a united front conference of organizations in the Village for the purpose of establishing an Unemployed Council.

Little Italy is waking up and beginning to struggle!

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1934/v11-n069-mar-21-1934-DW-LOC.pdf