Borough Park is not Williamsburg. The corner of 58th St. & 18th Ave is Brooklyn-Brooklyn and the headquarters, the still-beating heart, of the Brooklyn Italians Soccer Club. “It used to be Italian people as far as you could see in this neighborhood,” said Ludo Masucci, current club director, unlocking the front door and nodding to a family of Hasidic Jews who pass. “All the way up to 85thstreet. To Bensonhurst and the Bay.” 

He threw a switch inside and the fluorescent bulbs warmed over an old social club. It’s an ethnic club like thousands of others established by Italians and Poles and Slovaks and Portuguese. These waves, these eager arrivals through the 19th and 20th century, through to the end of World War II, made America the place it is today.