by Giuseppe Prezzolini, Head of Casa Italia at Columbia University (original link) 1955
The majority of Italian immigrants who have achieved great success in America have been builders or contractors. This is what I evinced from thousands of obituaries I have been collecting for over fifteen years. These were people, Americans of Italian descent, whose names were sufficiently important at the time of their death to appear in the pages of the New York Times or the Herald Tribune. The data I collected is a very rich source of information that maybe some day will be useful to sociologists interested in a serious analysis of the power, wealth and determination of Italians in America—something more serious than the usual blather that is regularly published.
I got to know only one of these contrattori (the English word is contractor) from up close: Mr. Carlo Paterno.[1] He is the biggest of them all: the biggest by the size of the fortune he made, even in American terms; and the biggest in terms of personality. Whenever I think back about him the first thing I remember are his lively eyes, sparkling with intelligence and energy. They flashed like beams of light and gave his Italian American and Anglo-Italian speech a deeper meaning, enriching his words with nuances and allusions. Under the lower lip there was a birthmark that matched the shape of his face with his curling Spanish-style mustache. I can still see him moving around with flair and a pleasant and willful smile. I always perceived in him a superior form of power that emanated not from money but from a faun-like vitality connected with the eminent functions of life. There was no conversation with him that didn’t leave me with an internal tickle, like an electric charge; and the impulse to take some initiative, to do something. Paterno didn’t trade in high concepts or moral exhortations; nor would he tell particularly compelling stories. It was something that came directly from his own persona. He was short, stocky, a bit plump, and would look at people straight in the eye. He had a slightly hoarse voice, probably his only annoying trait. I met him for business reasons. When I was director of Casa Italiana he donated a library of twenty thousand volumes—a collection that by now has grown to approximately thirty thousand volumes. In addition to the classics, the most important texts of criticism and all the general reference works needed by scholars of Italian; the updated collection contains books and periodicals on modern Italy going back to 1861.
His brothers were also contractors, although they weren’t as smart or as successful as he was. They also gave a great contribution to the library, donating the construction of the physical building; while he, with better insight, took upon himself the onus of financing the library. This, in the end, turned out to be actually less expensive than the contributions by his brothers and brother-in-law, and his name will also live for ever in the collection that was named in his honor. With this initiative he had become the perfect American-style patron of the arts.
I ran into him in several circumstances. He had the same great quality I noticed in most successful business people: he knew his own limits. Thus, for the selection of the books he trusted the advice of a competent person, Doctor Henry Furst[2] (at that time I was still living in Italy,) and never interfered or disagreed with him. He just wanted the budget to come out right with the books properly bound and correctly placed on the shelves. His great satisfaction came from the fact that the library was used by a growing number of grateful scholars. Whenever he came to visit he was always on time, dressed comfortably and appropriately, without ostentation, just as one would expect from a man his age and station. The flower in the lapel wasn’t affectation. He genuinely loved flowers and for his entire life cultivated this passion. Once he had become wealthy, he scratched an itch he had since he was a boy and built for himself a manor on the left bank of the Hudson. This was a dream he had all his life, since the time when, as a young boy, he pushed his little row boat upstream on the Hudson River, the river that Verrazzano thought was a sea channel.
In a castle’s annex he build spacious green houses, each equipped for a specific purpose, with different levels of temperature and humidity for the various types of plants and flowers he was growing. He employed several gardeners who took his orders and recommendations meticulously. He would talk with them for hours about his favorite subject and shared with them ideas about techniques and observations, always respectful of their knowledge and respected by them for his. It was a great pleasure to see him whirl from one plant to the next, from a seed bed to the next, looking around with his sparkly eyes and pointing to the successes and the progresses of this and that flower or plant. He created hybrids and tested grafts of all sorts. All the people who fall in love with nature end up playing with it, trying to compete with it and its creations. And so did he.
Doctor Paterno was born in Castelmezzano in the province of Potenza in 1878 [sic]. By chance events, he was pushed on the road that took him and his family this far. His father, a brick layer and small contractor in Naples, went bankrupt after the earthquake of 1883 and decided at that point to leave the city and emigrate to America. In New York he picked up the old profession but took care to develop a special expertise, as is basically required by the industrial production model of this country. His specialty was erecting foundations for buildings. After he finished building the underground perimeter walls of a building, he would leave the rest of the job to someone else and move on to the next contract. That’s how he was described to me by an architect who got to know him: He was a tough man who used to slap around his children. Like all the old immigrants of that time, he was pressured by the need to earn money as fast as possible and to save every penny he could. He never turned down a job and, even after he could afford it, was never able to fully relax and enjoy life. Whoever will write the history of European immigration to America should bear in mind the pressure they felt and the effects of this mindset, even after they had achieved security and material comfort.
An anecdote of those days tells us about little Carlo on a Sunday, carrying a bunch of newspapers on his back, on his way to sell them. To save the price of the ticket he didn’t use the tramway. At a certain point he stopped to rest on a bench in a park and fell soundly asleep. He was so tired that he didn’t wake up even when someone stole all the newspapers—and even his shoes. When he woke up he was terrified. There was no way he could go home in that state, so he started wandering about. Suddenly in a flower shop he saw a help-wanted sign. He inquired and was hired immediately. As the day-salary could not cover the loss of the stolen newspapers and shoes, he decided to raise the price of each bouquet and pocket the difference. This way he was able to cover his losses.
His ambition was to be a doctor but he didn’t have the money for the tuition. His creativity and business sense came to the rescue. When he was younger he had invented a tool to curve the tip of gas-light burners resulting in brighter light and lower consumption. He had tried without success to show his invention to the chairman of a gas company. One day he read in the newspaper that the company’s chairman had died. He showed up at his office and, with an air of despair, he claimed he had an appointment with him, made by phone. He managed to be received by the vice-chairman who decided to give the invention a try and test it in the stations of a subway line for a month. Paterno was sure his contraption could save at least ten percent. However, to be sure, he had the ingenuity and the patience to go every day to the stations and turn down the valve of each lamp just a tiny bit, and then return in the morning to set them back so that nobody would discover his trick. At the end of the trial period he got a call from the now-chairman who informed him the savings were even higher than predicted and wanted to buy his patent. He received a sum of money (his son told me it was $500) that he used to pay for tuition at Cornell Medical School, one of the best in the country, thus achieving his goal.
Destiny interfered and steered him in the direction of the construction business. He wanted to practice as a doctor, but his father, who in the meantime had become a full-fledged general contractor, died suddenly while in the middle of a major project. Doctor Paterno and his brothers decided to take over and finish the job. At the end he had enough money to finance the construction of a larger building. He soon realized that this activity was more remunerative than being a doctor and decided to invest in this industry and in real estate. In the first two years he was able to set aside $22,000. No doctor at the beginning of the career could ever make that kind of money. He never used his medical degree but he was very proud of it. When World War II started, he was gratified when he received a draft card calling him up to serve as a doctor. He dusted off the briefcase with all the tools and reported to the recruitment center. Here it was discovered that there had been a mistake and that the draft card was destined to a different Doctor Paterno. This was a major disappointment for him.
At first he worked with his brothers. None of them was a creative architect: they didn’t create new forms nor did they think too hard about the ancient ones. In their buildings nothing is reminiscent of Italy. They made American buildings typical of that particular era, which means functional structures with veneer facades slapped onto hard skeletons. They were the first to come up with the idea to build apartment buildings higher than six floors.[3] They were masters at juggling the building code with its more and more stringent regulations concerning elevators, furnaces, water heaters, trash compactors and running water in addition to the technical aspects of materials and building techniques. The times were also very favorable. Banks were eager to lend and the government threaded light on taxes. One of Dr. Paterno’s suppliers, with a mixture of anger and admiration, once told me: “You see, that man can barely sign his own name (he was wrong about this) but if you ask him how much steel; how many miles of tubing; how many thousands of bricks you need to build a forty-two-storey building; he can tell you in a second.” In his office I remember seeing autographed photos of some of America’s most important steel tycoons with notes of friendship and admiration. The signature of this immigrant to them was as good as their own. The Paternos knew how to build, and he knew where to build. As New York kept growing, their imagination expanded ahead of the city. It was actually their imagination that guided the city expansion, along the Hudson River, for instance; where they built the first edifices at 280, 285, 290 Riverside Drive. Their company was called Skybeam Realty Corporation. They were Americanized and left it to Italian wine merchants to use evocative names of Italian cities or past glories. Skybeam, not Roma. They also speculated on land and buildings, and were relentless in their negotiations on the price of construction materials. Doctor Paterno built his castle on a piece of land valued at $200,000. He bought it for $50,000. When he thought that the real estate tax was too high, about $30,000 a year, he razed the castle and on the land built a garden city made of large buildings of various heights. Each apartment had at least one window overlooking the river. He rented them out at reasonable prices and filled them all up quickly, despite the hard times (1939).
The true sign of his personal greatness was his strategic thinking during the economic crisis of 1930. Here, Doctor Paterno rose above the other members of his family as well as the majority of builders and developers in New York. When the crisis hit, every single developer and builder was tangled up in land speculations, with dozens of new projects on the way. In order to sail upwind, he understood that it was necessary to change tack and he turned out to be the only one who knew how to do it. Instead of burning money to finish buildings that were destined to remain vacant, he had the intuition that it was crucial to save cash, as much cash as possible. To restore the confidence of small depositors, President Roosevelt had recently passed a law insuring bank deposits up to $5,000. [4] Paterno told me that he had all his relatives open small accounts in all the insured banks in the city, thus squirreling away the cash he had on hand. Instead of saying “This building is worth two million: I will invest half a million more and save it.” He would sell it and lose money. In some cases he accepted to be foreclosed by his major lender, the Metropolitan Insurance Co. He lost a dozen buildings this way and abandoned several more half way and paid contractual penalties. As he was telling me those stories, his eyes were shining with a certain kind of faun-like and Mephistophelian glee.
In those terrible days of fear and economic distress, our conversations always ended up on the only topic that mattered: the Great Depression and its effects on America. He mentioned he had liquidated loans worth five million at six percent interest for $30,000. He also sold 270 Park Avenue for half a million dollars, the same building he had refused to sell for nine million dollar just a few months earlier. At a certain point, after a moment of silence, he added: “Look, if I can get out of this crisis still standing, I will be much richer than before.” His relatives didn’t take his advice and reacted differently. He had warned them: “Get out of it. Pay the penalties. It doesn’t matter. Don’t stay in. Sell everything.” I still remember the enormity one of them told me while he was sitting, or, better, sinking, in an armchair, almost chocking on his words: “Can you imagine, Dr. Prezzolini? All I have left are two million…” A friend of mine who was also present and I exchanged glances, winking: “Maybe we should lend him a dime to take the subway home…”
I liked the attitude of the risk-taker in Dr. Paterno. He could handle a bad day with the same happy face as a good one. He would talk about liquidations as if he were talking about purchases. And, in fact, in the end, he was still standing and had enough time to build another city before dying. On another occasion he confessed: “I have brick fever. Even when I am in the country relaxing, I can’t stop building walls…” He knew how to gain the affection of people who were working for him. An architect told me that the subcontractors that worked for him knew they could always get a loan without going to the banks. And his suppliers knew that while he wasn’t generous, which would have been foolish, he was intelligent and understood difficult situations. He understood the world and knew how to take advantage of opportunities. Once he told me about a nit-picking inspector whose ruling could cost him several thousands of dollars without any real benefit to anyone. He understood that in order to get rid of him he had to give money to a third party. Unlike the majority of contractors and landlords, he never gave much fodder to lawyers and was never dragged into litigations and scandals by the local press. My relationship with him was cordial without being too close because I was really paranoid that he would think I was eyeing his money. I always treated him with the respect he deserved for the generous gift that is at the heart of Casa Italiana. But I never buttered him up, or, at least not too much. I was invited to his castle once and there I caught an aspect of his personality that I would have never imagined. I knew his love for flowers but I didn’t know about his kindness toward animals. It was winter time and I noticed that in one of the castle’s large, heated rooms, a little window, up high, was left open. He explained that on one occasion when the window was open two pigeons had flown in and nested on a ledge. He gave order to leave it open so that they could go in and out as they wished.
Some time later, spontaneously, he donated to the library of Casa Italiana a sum of money whose interest could be used for maintenance and other basic needs. It was a kind thought. To thank him for the gift we organized a nice ceremony with a speech by Columbia’s president, Nicholas Butler.[5] The Casa that day was filled with rare plants and flowers brought in from his green houses. On that occasion I had a chance to speak with his gardeners. One of them told me: “You probably can’t believe it, but for all his millions he is an unhappy man.” The gardener ignored he was talking to a person who had no problem believing him. Every time I have been able to penetrate the intimate life of someone who appears to be fortunate, I have always discovered unhappiness. I don’t think that even millions of dollars could change this rule. Paterno was a mixture of boldness, spirit of initiative and imagination. In 1922 he started planting one and a half million conifers in a large tract of land in Bedford Hills. He bought the saplings for a penny each and ten years later sold them as Christmas trees for a dollar and a half. Each little tree carried a note that more or less said: “Dear child, I am your Christmas tree. Take care of me because if you do I will grow bigger and stronger, just like you.” After selling thousands of them, many more were left because they were too big. He had the idea to transplant about 200,000 of them along the avenues of Windmill Manor, one of his properties, and a favorite location for horseback riders. He advertised the place exalting the clean air, the absence of mosquitoes, horse flies and gnats, repelled by the resins of the trees. He called it The Sportsmen’s Paradise, with a great golf club, airplane hangars and a lake filled with 50,000 trout. He brought in deer to populate the woods that in winter could be visited on horse-drawn sleighs.
His first wife, Minnie Middaugh, a widow with a child, had died at age 74 in 1943. She was an educated woman, a college graduate, a musician and concert player. A member of the Christian Science sect, she loved horses and horseback riding. In October of the same year he married his second wife, Anna Blome of White Plains. Death took him by surprise on the golf course on May 31, 1946. His son, Carlo M. Paterno, took over his business and in 1947 opened a new garden-city with luxury houses immersed in the woods.
I don’t think he ever participated in political activities, or that he belonged to any political party. I never saw his name in the events of the Italian American community. Fiorello La Guardia was not fond of him. However, being the mayor of New York, he had to be present when he inaugurated Castle City at its opening in 1939.
From the magazine “L’Europeo,” 1955
[1] Charles Paterno (1876-1946). He graduated from Cornell Medical School in 1899 but never practiced medicine. He became a very successful contractor with many large projects to his credit in New York.
[2] Henry Furst (1893-1967). Polyglot and Italophile. He worked as correspondent for the New York Times Book Review.
[3] New York building code required residential buildings over six floors to be equipped with elevators.
[4] Today’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
[5] Nicholas Butler (1862-1947). Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 1931. He was Columbia’s president from 1902 to 1947.
GIUSEPPE PREZZOLINI, 100, AUTHOR AND FACULTY MEMBER AT COLUMBIA By Edwin McDowell July 17, 1982