Giuseppe Amendola (1876 - 1959)

Born 17 Jul 1876 in Sarno, Italy

Ancestors

Husband of Giuseppa Grazia Nobila (Picarella) Amendola — married 30 Apr 1905 in Manhattan, NY

Descendants

Died 23 Jul 1959 at age 83 in Mount Vernon, Westchester County, New York

Problems/Questions Profile manager: Steven Amendola [send private message]

Biography

Giuseppi Amendola was born in Sarno, Italy. He was a master carpenter by the age of 24 when, the story goes, he made an elaborate set of doors for an Italian peer of some kind, and didn't get paid. Frustrated, he asked his mother for money to move to the United States. He arrived in New York City in 1900 on Norddeutscher Lloyd's SS Kaiser Wilhelm II, which was later renamed SS Hohenzollern. The ship's manifest says he was going to stay with his cousin Alberto. I don't know who this is.

Having arrived already as a skilled carpenter, he did well financially right away. His first job in New York was to create the wooden glass frames of the taxidermy exhibit at the Natural History Museum, which remain there to this day.

In New York he met his future wife Giuseppa, who was from Mercato San Severino, not far from Sarno. They were married in 1905. It wasn't long before they had a brownstone house together at 209 E 115th Street in Harlem, which the whole family remembers well. There was a full kitchen with tile up to the cieling in the basement, and they also made wine there, which they would trade with other Italians in the neighborhood. There was a beautifully carved rear balcony made by Giuseppi himself. Giuseppi had a downstairs workshop, but he insisted his children learn trades of the mind.

There is one anecdote of him having been called in to consult on an engineering question for the Federal government, and seeing a system that wasn't going to work. He said so in his thick Italian brogue, but the men working there, who had not been the ones to call him, paid him no heed. When the mechanism, whatever it was, indeed failed to function, they desperately returned for his advice, at which point he came back and took a long, hard look, pretending like it was going to be a much harder fix than it was, before finally fixing it easily. His son Francesco, hearing this story as a boy asked, "Now, father, was that being nice?" and Giuseppi replied, "No, but it was delicious."

With the death of Giuseppa in 1948, he sold the brownstone in Harlem and moved to 331 Hayward Avenue with his three unmarried children, Ida, Gilda and Mario. They remained in this house until each of their respective deaths, and so consequently it was a place where the extended family would meet for many decades, and many distant cousins still remember Mario, Ida and Gilda's place. It has been suggested that near the end of his life, Giuseppi became involved with the local Freemasons, which would not be inconceivable as his second cousin Giovanni the politician, who I understand he knew well, was also a freemason at one point.

He died in 1959 and was buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, NY

Sources

• Birth Record: https://www.antenati.san.beniculturali.it/ark:/12657/an_ua263244/5G2QmWE/

• Real Estate Valuation 1920 names G. Amendola at 209 E 115th St, undervalues property: https://books.google.com/books?id=nbtXAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA3-PA14&lpg=RA3-PA14&dq=frank+d+amendola+harlem+election&source=bl&ots=m9IlSdklCB&sig=ACfU3U2_Myk5COsntDOS2EMFbM7F-v3SfQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi365DbzMrqAhXuhHIEHZ3xBSAQ6AEwCnoECAIQAQ

First hand information entered by great-grandson.