You're standing in a triangle. Father Demo Square — a little wedge of park at the intersection of Bleecker Street, Carmine Street, and Sixth Avenue. Across the street, the church with the Italian name — Our Lady of Pompeii. There's a reason you're looking at both.
This block was the heart of the Italian Village — a neighborhood so densely Italian that by the early nineteen hundreds, the church had twenty-five hundred seats and filled them for all six Sunday masses. And the man who made that happen was Father Antonio Demo.
Demo was a Scalabrinian priest — a religious order whose entire mission was helping Italian immigrants in the Americas. He arrived in eighteen ninety-nine, became pastor in nineteen hundred, and for the next thirty-six years he was essentially a one-man social services department. He connected new arrivals with city agencies. He wrote character references for people who didn't speak English. If an employer needed workers, they came to Demo. If a family needed housin
g, they came to Demo. He was a priest, but his actual job was making sure nobody fell through the cracks.
Then, in nineteen twenty-three, he got news that would've broken most people. The city was extending Sixth Avenue south to connect with the Holland Tunnel, and the new road went directly through his church. Not near it. THROUGH it. The building was going to be demolished.
Father Demo didn't
