Volume 43- No. 31
August 01, 2013
The Potenz “showroom”
Frank D'Amelio holds a vase. for a section of plaster mold ornaments z ten The majority of Po lds, were cast from plaster mo de. ma which he designed and
by Dan A. D’Amelio
In the July 18, 2013 issue of The Paper I wrote about the immigrants who came to America between 1880-1924, the world’s greatest migration. This is a follow-up to that story.
Of course, there are many instances of the success achieved by immigrants in America. I chose to tell about this one because I know it best.
One spring day in 1997 my wife and I were driving on Long Island to visit some friends. On impulse, I turned off the highway and headed to St. Albans, a small community in New York City’s borough of Queens. When my parents moved to The Paper - 760.747.7119
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St.Albans, it was an attractive community with linden trees— graceful, pear-shaped trees, all of them in a straight line along each block of the main street. And along its side streets were row after row of two-floor, pitched roof houses with small but well-kept front lawns.
Driving along the main street now, I barely could recognize the town. I hadn’t been there since 1972, when my parents’ cement garden ornament business had closed.
I pulled over to the curb and parked on Linden Blvd., near 197th Street where the business used to be. As I peered over the shoulder-high, iron-mesh fence, I winced. Weeds covered the broad lot
where my dad had displayed his statues, and the shop where he used to make them leaned at a precarious angle. It was impossible to tell that it had once been Potenz Garden Ornaments, one of the largest cement garden ornament businesses in New York State. It had all started during the Great Depression when, in 1937, we moved from the Bronx to St. Albans because my father learned that contractors on Long Island needed bricklayers.
One day, about a year after we moved to St. Albans, my parents spotted a “For Rent” sign at an empty store on Linden Blvd. and thought it would be a good place to start a business. So, for $125 a month, my parents rent-
ed the business, which had two rooms in the back; the two rooms became our living quarters (a kitchen and a combination dining room/bedroom). The business began as a gift shop where my mother sold wall ornaments and religious statues. Our inventory was small - a half dozen plaques on each wall, most of them religious scenes, and a few religious statues. And in the beginning, we had only two or three customers a day.
While my mother took care of the store, my father worked as a bricklayer, and after supper each night he made cement flower vases, using old molds that he had bought from a man who was going out of business. I remember falling asleep to the
“Making It in America” Continued on Page 2