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From:
Subject: neighborhood named "Bari"
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2005 22:40:36 EDT

On 10/19/05 (1:02:22 PM MDT), in a posting to , Mary
Anne () asked,

"My son's friend says her grandparents were from an area called Bari in
Brooklyn. I cannot begin to guess where she is talking about! Any suggestions?"


Here's a guess:

Bari could be a sub-neighborhood or area in the Brooklyn neighborhood of
Bensonhurst (the main Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn), mainly along 18th Avenue
(also known as Christopher Columbus Boulevard) in the 60s and 70s, in the
southern part of Brooklyn.

According to Google, there are several stores with Bari as part of their
name: Bari Woodwork (7019 20th Ave), Bari Pork Store (7119 18th Ave), Bari Pork
Store (6319 18th Ave).

The Bari area of Bensonhurst could be named so because many of the Italian
folks who lived there either came, or are descended from folks who came, from
Bari in Italy.

Also, with some help form Google, we find that the Italian Bari lying roughly
halfway along the Adriatic coast, on the fringes of the fertile Terra di
Bari, the city consists of two distinct parts, the old city, a maze of twisting
lanes, which lies on a small peninsula between the bays of the old and new
ports, and the modern town stretching inland as well as along the coast, built to a
neatly square plan.

Probably of Illyrian origins and prosperous under the Greeks, Bari was an
important Roman municipium. Conquered by the Goths, and later an object of
contention by Byzantines and Lombards, it was repeatedly sacked and destroyed.
Conquered by the Saracens in 840, it passed to the Eastern Emperor in 875, who made
it the seat of a governor-general. It fell into Norman hands (taken by Robert
Guiscard) in 1071 and from that date shared the vicissitudes of the Kingdom
of Sicily (later known as the Kingdom of Naples and the Two Sicilies). It
became part of Italy in 1860.


I hope this information is useful or, at least, interesting.

Regards,

Walter Greenspan

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