Once Penniless Immigrant, Paterno Has Become Moving Spirit of Italian Cultural Center in America • Sunday, January 11, 1931 • By Agnes G. Slawson for the Brooklyn Eagle
Joseph Paterno made his debut in the country at the age of two and a half, a small and forlorn Italian immigrant. His father had been ruined by an earthquake’s destruction of a block of houses he had put up near Naples, so he and his family had set out to seek better fortune in the New York of the eighties. They spent thirty-one arduous days on a sailing vessel with nothing more substantial than hope to comfort them.
Hope continued, for some time, to be the chief comforter of the Paterno family. The father did not soon meet with success. Meanwhile, the family grew steadily larger in both size and appetite. Joseph Paterno was, consequently, obliged to start work at an early age. He sold papers on Park Row. Later he helped a dentist make artificial teeth. This work took up so much of his time that he was obliged to leave school. Finally he drifted into the office of a West Side real estate firm and there became office boy for the handsome salary of four dollars a week. After he had been there one week, Mr. Hobbs reproved him for not clearing out the waster paper baskets and was thereupon told that his new office boy had come not to be a porter but to learn the real estate business.
Joseph Paterno soon did gain opportunity to learn both the real estate and the building business. His father had the good fortune to meet at mass a building contractor named John Macintosh. A friendship developed. The two men became partners and erected many West Side apartment houses. No one went up without every detail of its construction having been observed by young Joseph Paterno. When he was only eighteen, he was given opportunity to show what he had learned. His father fell sick and returned to Italy in the vain hope that his native air would revive him. When the senior Paterno died, two flats he had started (507 & 505 West 112th Street) were still incomplete. These his son Joseph managed to finish.
The young builder then began to hunt for someone to back him in his ambitious scheme of building ten, fifteen or even twenty-story apartment houses. This idea was greeted as a bit of youthful fancy. But one real estate man finally consented to back him in erecting a block of six-story apartment houses. Joseph Paterno immediately wired his older brother, Charles, who was just taking his doctor’s degree at Cornell. The two formed a partnership and the Paterno fortunes abruptly began going up.
The new apartment proved a success. The two brothers received backing for more apartment houses in the Columbia University district. By means of the profits they cleared they were able to undertake more and more extensive operations. Dr. Paterno gave up all thought of returning to the medical profession, and for some twelve years the two brothers continued to do important things to the West Side skyline. At the end of that time Dr. Paterno started a building concern of his own and Joseph Paterno went on alone.
His buildings and his fame continued to shoot upward. By 1912, when he was only thirty-one, he had built in the general locality of Columbia University apartment houses assessed at twenty-two million dollars. Until 1926 he continued to dot the West Side with skyscraper apartment houses. He then switched his building operations to the East Side. There by his co-operative apartments he showed himself a leader in creating new housing condition. In 1927, he took an important step in building the first co-operative hotel in New York, a twenty-three-story building.
Quick construction has always been Joseph Paterno’s guiding rule. A man of terrific energy, he is able to oversee a vast amount of detail. He is, besides, extremely shrewd and keen in dealing with men. Never has he permitted opportunity to indulge in any prolonged knocking at his door. When he started building in the late nineties, the rise of population and of land values was forcing people from private homes into tall apartment houses. New York was literally growing upward, and Joseph Paterno saw to it that his career went up with the city.
All the Paternos have achieved amazing success as New York builders, but Joseph Paterno remains the true self-made man of the family. Dr. Charles Paterno was the only member of the family who offered any great educational advantages. The younger brothers had their way blazed for them by the building ventures of Joseph and Dr. Charles Paterno.
Joseph Paterno’s greatest achievement of recent years is the Casa Italiana, Columbia University’s center of Italian culture. Justice John T. Freschi first interested him in the project of providing a gathering place for Columbia’s Italian students. Joseph Paterno immediately enlisted for the plan the support of his brother, Michael E. Paterno, and of his brother-in-law, Anthony Campagna. The project gradually took on vast proportion. Columbia provided a $165,000 plot of land, opposite its chapel at Amsterdam Avenue and 117th Street. Joseph Paterno, Michael E. Paterno and Anthony Campagna underwrote the expenses of erecting a $400,000 building. Dr. Paterno presented a library containing – just as a start – 10,000 volumes. He is still adding to it.
When the plans for Columbia’s Italian House were well under way, Jospeh Paterno, Michael E. Paterno and Anthony Campagna went with Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia, on a trip into Italy. They paid official calls on Mussolini, the King and the Pope. Mussolini received the plans for the Casa Italiana with the greatest enthusiasm and promised to send Senator Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of wireless, to America for the dedication ceremonies. He further showed his approval by giving his American guests an impressive party at the Villa d’Este. All the fountains played, and the gates of the villa were opened for the first time in forty years. To Joseph Paterno, in recognition of his services in helping Italian-American relationships, Mussolini gave the title of “Commandatore.” He also presented him with a photograph, signed not with the usual “Complementi,” but with the very flattering inscription, “A Giuseppe Paterno, della buona razza Italiana” – “To Joseph Paterno, of the best Italian stock.”
When Marconi arrived in America, Joseph Paterno arranged a dinner for him. In order to aid the endowment and building funds of the Italian House, he charged $1,000 a table. The guests were many and distinguished. Through the money collected at this dinner and through the many large gifts of the Paterno family, the Casa Italiana was at last completed. On Aug. 5, 1926, the Italian Ambassador laid the cornerstone, and Joseph Paterno appeared before all New York not only as one of its greatest builders, but also as one of its most important citizens “della Buona razza Italiana.”
Joseph Paterno, although a man who prides himself on always looking forward, does occasionally look back over his career with pardonable satisfaction. Among the mementos he cherishes are signed photographs of Mussolini and Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, the program of Marconi’s dinner and a loving cup present him at an honorary dinner given by his friends and business associates. His other treasured souvenirs include a banquet cloth, which the children of his native town in Italy took twelve years to make for him, and a photograph taken after he had stunned himself, Mr Charles Schwab, and the rest of a foursome by making a hole in one. For the really big mementos of his career, Jospeh Paterno has only to look at the skyline of residential New York.
