Fiorello H. La Guardia

He married his former secretary in the congress, Marie Fisher, in 1929. The couple adopted Eric Henry and Jean Marie who was the daughter of Thea Almerigotti’s sister.

On September 20, 1947, he died in his home in Bronx after suffering from pancreatic cancer. He was buried at the ‘Woodlawn Cemetery’ in Bronx.

Fiorello Henry La Guardia was born on December 11, 1882 in New York City’s Greenwich Village to Achille La Guardia and Irene Coen. His father was an Italian and a lapsed Catholic from Cerignola and his mother was an Italian-Jewish woman from Trieste.

He was brought up as an Episcopalian and remained so all his life. During his childhood, his middle name ‘Enrico’ was anglicized to ‘Henry’.

He and his family shifted to Arizona where his father served as a bandmaster in the U.S. Army at Fort Whipple.

He studied in public schools and at the high school in Prescott in Arizona. After his father was discharged as a bandmaster 1898, he stayed in Trieste.

From 1900 to 1903, he worked in the U.S. consulate in Budapest as a clerk and assistant of the U.S. consul general.

In January 191,5 he became Deputy Attorney General of New York.

On November 7, 1916, he became the first Italian-American Congress member to be elected to the ‘U.S. House of Representatives’.

His tenure in the office of the ‘U.S. House of Representatives’ was short-lived as on August 15, 1917 he was inducted in the Army Air Service of the U.S during World War I. He was promoted as major in command of one of the units of Ca.44 bombers posted at the Italian-Austrian front.

On December 31, 1919, he gave up his seat in Congress. He was chosen to contest as the Republican nominee for the presidential post of ‘New York City Board of Aldermen’ and served in the post from 1920 to 1921.

In 1922, he won a Congress seat from East Harlem and rendered his service in the House till March 3, 1933. As a progressive reformer he railed against immigration quotas and aided labour legislation including the ‘Norris-La Guardia Act’.

As mayor he supported Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt and agencies of New Deal like PWA, CWA and WPA and in turn received $1.1 billion federal money for New York.

The East River Drive, Triborough Bridge, West Side Highway, LaGuardia Airport and Brooklyn Battery are some of the many developments that took place during his tenure as mayor that transformed the face of New York.