Read Online Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell - Free Book Online Page A

in a regular middle-class enclave.
    From this oversight, you get the feeling that Hoboken is having a hard time celebrating itself—and having a harder time fitting its most famous son into its story. This has something to do with the fact that its most famous son left. “Frank turned his back on Hoboken,” third-generation Hobokenite Robin Shamburg tells me. And who could blame him? At his first big public homecoming, during the town’s Italian American Day in 1948, his former paisanos threw rocks at the stage. “They shat on him,” Shamburg continues. Still, some Hobokenites hardly mind that their prodigal son has largely avoided the town through the years. “There are certain diehard fans who gloss over that fact,” she says. “They idolize him.”
    That idolatry is on display, albeit in understated Hoboken fashion, at Sinatra’s birthplace at 415 Monroe Street. The blocks leading up to it are meaner, shabby. You get there, and it’s not there. The building where the newborn Frankie belted his very first song of life burned down. In its place is a monument, the saddest possible brick arch, with wooden doors below it to block the view of an empty lot. No triumphal arch for this Jersey Justinian, no ornate relief carvings of his Oscar triumphs, his gold records, his pals or his gals. Just a plain stack of unadorned bricks. A comparatively snazzy blue-and-gold star marks the sidewalk in front of it. “Francis Albert Sinatra,” it reads. “The Voice, Born Here at 415 Monroe Street, December 12, 1915.” You’d step on it if you weren’t looking down.
    Tell it to the town planners: All the birthplace site really needs to spiff up its ambience is a loudspeaker. Frank’s voice can make any old shack feel luxurious. Witness the scene at the architecturally modest Piccolo’s, a delightful all-Sinatra, all-the-time cheesesteak dive on Clinton Street, established in 1955. The joint blares a constant Sinatra sound track, inside and out. As I walk up to it for lunch one Friday, the first thing I hear from down the street is “Although I may not be the man some girls think of as handsome.” This line from “Someone to Watch Over Me” is completely ironic given Frank’s angel eyes, but the voice singing it is a slow, warm kiss.
    It helps if you’re hungry more for myth than for food at Piccolo’s. The fare is midcentury American, greasy but handmade. The grill is manned by a bunch of good-humored guys in white hats chopping atcheesesteaks and cooking up french fries hot enough to burn your tongue. I slip into the back room. The walls are crammed with framed photos, most of which are of Sinatra. The highlight is a proud photograph from the November 6, 1986, issue of The Jersey Journal that shows the exterior of Piccolo’s plastered with a giant sign reading, “It’s All Right Mr. Sinatra, We Love You, That Book Lies!”, a reference to local disdain for Kitty Kelley’s unauthorized biography His Way.
    To refute “that book” is the reason Hoboken’s Ed Shirak Jr. wrote Our Way: In Honor of Frank Sinatra, which you can pick up at Lepore’s Home Made Chocolates, the Garden Street candy store Shirak owns with partner Mario Lepore. Shirak writes that his fellow citizens “were incensed by ‘that book’ as if it had disgraced the town.” If Hoboken deplores hubbub—disdaining Kelley’s book while at the same time not exactly going out of its way to honor Sinatra either—Ed Shirak is a one-man band, embarking on his story (which lists some of Shirak’s Sinatra tourism dreams and schemes) after reading “the first forty-four pages of Kitty Kelley’s book” and vowing to “simply tell the truth.” The self-published Our Way reads like a book-length fanzine, which is to say that the joy of it lies in the author’s personal account of Sinatra’s life