📍Elizabeth Street, Little Italy, New York, NY 10012, USA
1950 – 1964“Martin Scorsese was born in Flushing, Queens, in November 1942, the son of Charles and Catherine Scorsese, second-generation Sicilian-Americans who worked in Manhattan's garment district as a presser and a seamstress. When he was about seven, money troubles forced the family to leave Queens and move back to his grandparents' old neighbourhood: a tenement apartment on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy, a crowded world of Sicilian and Neapolitan families, social clubs, churches, street feasts and small-time gangsters. He was a sickly, severely asthmatic child who could not play sports, so he spent much of his childhood at the window of the family apartment, watching the life of the street below: the people, the arguments, the violence and the rituals of the neighbourhood. His father and uncle talked about films around the kitchen table, and his parents took him to the cinema constantly because it was somewhere he could breathe. At ten, his father took him to see The Magic Box, a film about the invention of cinema, which he later called the first time he understood what films were. He was deeply religious, and the old St Patrick's Cathedral around the corner was at the centre of his world. At fourteen he entered a junior seminary to train as a priest but left after a year. He studied film at New York University instead, and his early films, especially Mean Streets in 1973, were set in the streets he had watched from his window. Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and The Departed followed, the last winning him an Oscar. In his 1974 documentary Italianamerican, he filmed his parents in their Elizabeth Street apartment, telling the story of the neighbourhood.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
🛰️ Satellite view · © Google