Call it vintage South Philly attitude. You got a problem with that?
As Mexican and Vietnamese immigrants - the former driven by sagging restaurant economies in New York after 9/11, the latter by the fall of Saigon - became more of a presence in the Italian neighborhood (which wasn't too excited about Italians moving in a couple of generations ago), a sign of a different stripe went up five years ago at Geno's Steaks, across from its blood rival, Pat's.
"This is America," said the sticker on Geno's window; "when ordering speak English."
It lacked the charm of the old ordering protocol. It had an edge of unwelcome and menace.
That venomous little sign - still mounted proudly next to the window at Geno's - got a lot of ink this week in the obituaries for Joey Vento, the mouthy founder of the neon-plated place, whose fame (infamy?) went global when he posted it in 2006 as anti-immigrant fervor was cresting.
And if Vento, who died at 71 from a heart attack Tuesday, could also be bighearted, funding a snow plow at a Catholic school that once kicked him out, giving $100,000 to help underwrite an AIDS benefit, and donating to police charity, he no less deserves the blot on his legacy that came with that stunt: He gloried in the celebrity and exposure it won him (even as it lost points for the rest of us in the City of Brotherly Love).
He refused, as former mayor Frank Rizzo did before him, to acknowledge the divisiveness he was sowing.
And he was quick to play the picked-upon victim when advocates overreached to get it removed. (They didn't win, and rightly so. It's a free country. Vento had every right to be wrongheaded.)
In precincts where bravado is the norm, he wanted to have his steak and eat it too. He flew Confederate flags on his Harley, and tattooed one on his arm. Then complained about "whiners" who suggested he was racist.
