SAVING LITTLE ITALY

THE ICONIC ETHNIC NEIGHBORHOOD HAS OUTLASTED ALL OF BALTIMORE’S OLD-WORLD ENCLAVES. NOW IT FACES ITS GREATEST CHALLENGE IN MORE THAN A CENTURY.

- Ron Cassie

MARIO SCILIPOTI LEFT his newly wed and, unbeknownst to him, pregnant wife behind in their mountainside Sicilian village when he departed for the United States. The 23-year-old did not speak English. He did not have, or need, a visa when his ship, the Patria, sailed past the Statue of Liberty and landed at Ellis Island. He did not have a lucrative job or graduate school admission waiting. Arriving 100 years ago this spring, he only had hopes of a brighter future for his soon-to-be-family and an uncle in Baltimore who was a barber. Following a lengthy apprenticeship, while his still-unmet Bambina spoke her first words back in Sicily, Scilipoti received his own license from the Maryland Board of Barber Examiners on July 24, 1922. Over time, he built a clientele and opened a shop on East Pratt Street. After five years, he returned to Sicily to reunite with his wife, Domenica, and daughter, Josefa, and they later followed him back to Baltimore.

In 1930, Tommaso, the couple’s second child, was born above that rowhouse Pratt Street barbershop. He, too, would earn a barber’s license and place a spinning red, white, and blue pole outside the window of his rowhouse. However, the younger Scilipoti, nicknamed “Mazzi” in the neighborhood, also had his eye on another career, which would prove fortuitous for the section of Southeast Baltimore already known by then as Little Italy.