Children in the courtyard of a Lower East Side tenement, early 1900s

An Exhibition by Stefano Morello & Kerri Culhane

The Lung
Block

A New York City Slum & Its Forgotten
Italian Immigrant Community

01

The Exhibition

The Lung Block: A New York City Slum & Its Forgotten Italian Immigrant Community was an exhibition co-curated by Stefano Morello and Kerri Culhane, on view at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Avenue) and New York City Department of Records and Information Services (31 Chambers Street) between April 26 and August, 2019.

A permanent digital exhibition, funded by a Connect New York Grant through the Early Research Initiative and GC Digital Initiatives at The Graduate Center, CUNY, is available online.

The exhibit draws upon recent scholarship on the subject: Stefano Morello's yet unpublished dissertation "The Lung Block, a New York City Slum and Its Forgotten Italian-American Community." Morello's work analyzes the progressive narrative of the Lung Block as the slum-epicenter of disease, contrasting it with the lived experience of the majority Italian immigrant tenement dwellers living in the area, thus redressing a glaring omission in the historical record.

The discourse surrounding the Lung Block illustrates a typical pattern of slum-making and gentrification, and in many ways typified the plight and perceived perils of the Lower East Side immigrant in the popular imagination.

The Lung Block from the Manhattan Bridge, circa 1911
The Lung Block from the Manhattan Bridge, circa 1911

Themes Explored

At this time—when anti-immigrant sentiment has been brought to the fore on the political stage; the very real connection between health and housing continues to be explored; and affordable housing and gentrification remain among the most contentious topics in local debate—the Lung Block story has many parallels in the present:

  • The Lower East Side slum as a historical, social and architectural construct
  • The emergent field of public health and its response to disease
  • The progressive reform movement and its conflicted role in reinforcing and alleviating slum conditions
  • The immigrant experience of the Lung Block, from the personal to the political, including the stories of residents during the early twentieth century, ninety percent of whom were Italian immigrants
  • Architectural and policy responses to poverty, disease, and reform

The exhibition brings to light historical documents, maps, journals, photographs, and other artifacts, supplemented by infographics based on historical statistics that disprove the commonly accepted narrative of the Lung Block as the worst slum in New York. A 3D model of the block illustrated the physical conditions that helped mark this block as the City's most congested.

A series of events, including talks and scholarly panels, accompanied the exhibition. The curators are currently at work on a book.

02

Digital Exhibition

Explore the full digital exhibition as an interactive ArcGIS StoryMap.

Open Digital Exhibition
03

The Curators

Stefano Morello

Stefano Morello is an author, scholar, and educator, currently serving as Assistant Director for Digital Projects at the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, a research center of the City University of New York.

His scholarly work combines digital and traditional methods to investigate the infrastructure and the transnational reverberations of American popular and unpopular culture.

Stefano holds a PhD in English with a certificate in American Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center. He has been honored with fellowships and awards from the New York Public Library, the Wellcome Hub, the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research, the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute, and several research centers across the CUNY system.

He's also a founding editor of JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy), a member of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy editorial collective, and the editor of the Italian American Studies Open Syllabus.

Kerri Culhane

Architectural Historian & Planner whose experience spans twenty years of professional practice, ranging from single site documentation to landscape-scale planning and sustainable development projects. Over the past 15 years, Kerri's work has focused on the past, present, and future of the immigrant neighborhoods of New York City's Lower East Side, Chinatown, Little Italy and the Bowery.

In 2015, she curated the exhibition Chinese Style: Rediscovering the Architecture of Poy Gum Lee, 1900-1968 (Museum of Chinese in America, New York City). Kerri holds an MA in architectural history with a focus on historic preservation & planning from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an MS in ecological planning & design from the Conway School. She is a PhD candidate in architecture at the Bartlett, University College London.

04

Partners

Advisory Board

  • Marcella Bencivenni
    Associate Professor, Hostos Community College (CUNY); Editor: The Italian-American Review
  • Stephen Brier
    Professor, Ph.D. Program in Urban Education, The Graduate Center (CUNY)
  • Nancy Carnevale
    Associate Professor, Department of History, Montclair University
  • Katherine D. LaGuardia, MD, MPH
    Special Advisor at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
  • Stefano Luconi
    Professor of History of North America, University of Genoa
  • David Rosner
    Professor of Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University
  • Joseph Sciorra
    Director for Academic and Cultural Programs, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College (CUNY)
  • Anthony Julian Tamburri
    Dean, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute; Distinguished Professor, Queens College (CUNY)
  • John Kuo Wei Tchen
    Associate Professor, New York University
  • Gerald Markowitz
    Distinguished Professor of History, John Jay College (CUNY)

Institutional Partners

Sponsors

Co-Sponsors

05

Press Coverage