Little Italy, Omaha: Sicily on the Missouri
Near Omaha, Iowa
Starting in eighteen ninety-five, two brothers from Carlentini, Sicily, Joseph and Sebastiano Salerno, arrived in Omaha following the railroads and the meatpacking plants. They settled near South Twenty-Fourth and Poppleton Streets, and over the next decade they sent for everyone they knew. Sebastiano became a steamship agent in nineteen oh four, channeling immigrants straight from Sicily to Union Pacific's shops. Joseph found them rooms and jobs.
By the time immigration from southern Europe was cut off in the nineteen twenties, more than five thousand Italians called Little Italy home. The neighborhood had a grocery, clothing stores, shoe shops, and the Bank of Sicily, which the Salerno brothers had founded in nineteen oh eight. It was an entire Sicilian village transplanted to the Missouri River bluffs, built by two brothers with a boarding house and a steamship ticket.
