LGM Film Club, Part 108: The North End

Tonight’s selection is this 1972 documentary about Boston’s North End, titled Little Italy. I’ve gotten to know the neighborhood a bit over the years living in Providence. But what I most know it for is its role in Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities, where she uses it as the example of the neighborhood that really needs to be saved, despite the vision of urban renewal advocates who wanted to blast it all and pave it over. Of course now, like so many of the older neighborhoods that did survive urban renewal, it’s become incredibly expensive. So unlike the thoughts of the people interviewed here, the neighborhood’s character has changed a lot, even if there’s still a strong patina of Italian-American there. In any case, the documentary itself is not all that great minus the interview with the fishmonger, since the interviewer is amazed someone would eat something like squid, but it was 1972 after all.