Chasing the Ghost of the Lung Block: A Documentary Project – Creating, Directing, and Editing a Film about Real and Imagined Remnants of an Italian American Community

At the beginning of the 20th century, a vibrant Italian community populated the area between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges in New York City. Bounded by Cherry, Monroe, Market and Catherine Streets, used to lie the now-forgotten Lung Block—as Ernest Poole labeled it in 1903. An immigrant enclave on the Lower East Side where tuberculosis was thought to thrive, the Lung Block was considered a health and moral threat to the entire city during the Progressive Era. Its infamous reputation carried over three decades, with real consequences on the local community in terms of both ethnic discrimination and public policy until in the early 1930s the block was razed and replaced with housing for the middle class, in a slum-clearance project that would displace the working-class Italian immigrant community. This MA thesis takes the form of a documentary film—Chasing the Ghost of the Lung Block—authored by Stefano Gabbiani and Maria Ilaria Tonelli. The documentary is available at www.lungblock.nyc/documentary. My co-author and I built from Stefano Morello and Kerri Culhane’s research and their 2019 exhibition on the Lung Block to produce a documentary that aims to frame the distinctive historical, social, and cultural traits of the Lung Block’s Italian American communities and their legacies. To do so, we looked at archival materials and we interviewed both descendants of Italian American families that used to live in the area, and scholars whose expertise functioned as frame for the memories and experiences of the descendants. I used my experience as a filmmaker to work on the technical and creative aspects of the project. Conceptually, I mainly focused on Italian festas and race relations. My co-author has, instead, laid out the theoretical framework behind the analysis, as well as the narrative of the project. The first chapter of this white paper provides a brief overview of the history of the Lung Block, introduces the project, and puts it in conversation with Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, and with the fields of Public Digital Humanities. It also frames the film within the historical entanglements of sanitary threats such as Covid-19, the 1918 influenza outbreak, and tuberculosis. The last section offers, instead, a detailed analysis of the many steps undertaken in the production process and the post-editing improvements that will be addressed later on. The second chapter details the different phases of the production process of the documentary. It also provides reflections on some of the theoretical and aesthetic reflections that inform the documentary and its narrative structure. Finally, it focuses on two of the thematic sections of the film (religious life and race relations) on which I focused, to discuss the role they have played in the Lung Block and in shaping the Italian American community’s experience.