The 1977 film Saturday Night Fever immortalized the working class Italian-Americans of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The movie not only made an impact on bell bottoms, and disco culture but came to symbolize the middle class outer borough experience in New York City.
The scrappy, foul-mouthed, sexpot played by John Travolta was the uncanny personification of both alpha-male and arrogant jackoff at the same exact time.
Another Italian from Bay Ridge is Michael Allegretti, one of Congressman Mike McMahon’s potential Republican opponents in the 2010 election.
Though demographics have changed in Bay Ridge, the area has been unmistakably linked to the borough of Staten Island ever since the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opened in 1964.
I myself was born in Bay Ridge in 1979, around the same time that the Bee Gees coaxed John Travolta onto the dance floor.
I moved to Staten Island with my parents as a small child and it seems that a large percentage of the neighborhood came with us.
While population has exploded in all of Staten Island’s three community districts (especially the southern portion) the population for Bay Ridge and its neighboring Dyker Heights decreased by 7 percent in the ’80s, according to census figures.
Census figures also show that Staten Island in 64 percent Italian-American: John Travolta with receding hairline, a tracksuit, and three kids in grade school.
Still, the association with their former Bay Rige neighborrhood runs deep, deeper perhaps than the one with the boot-shaped penninsula their ancestors emigrated from. Islanders speak with a reverence for the RR Train and Woolworth’s as if it were their home country.
The truly off-the-boat Italians came to this country in turn-of the-century (last century), so these Italian-Americans are three, or four, generations removed.
Where does that leave Mike Allegretti in the 13th District? Bay Ridge native, Richmond county transplant, son of a successful small businessman, and, most importantly, Italian.
I’d say he’s right at home.