WHEN I TOURED THE SMALL HOUSE in southeast Portland that I eventually bought, I asked the owner about the sink, cabinets, and stove hookup I was surprised to find in the basement. "Oh," she said, "the first owners were Italians. They practically lived down here in the summer to keep out of the heat, like they used to do in Italy." Dotted through the neighborhood were fig trees, and my own backyard sprouted leeks and elephant garlic here and there. Oregano filled the side yard. Mint ran rampant, no matter how many of its runners I pulled out. I had moved into Portland's Garlic Gulch.

Between 1880 and World War II, nearly 30,000 Italians immigrated to Portland. They came to escape economic depression at home and to start truck farms, craft stone bridges on the Columbia River Highway, and work in the lumber mills. The first Italians in Portland settled in an Italian and Jewish neighborhood in the Duniway Park area, obliterated in the early 1960s by an urban renewal project.

Italian children earned a nickel for lighting the stoves of their Jewish neighbors on the Sabbath. As the population of Italians grew, it spread across the river to Ladd's Addition, the western portion of Colonial Heights, and the Clinton neighborhood. This second wave of Italians seeded vegetable gardens in empty lots, dried tomatoes on their roofs, and dragged their feather beds into their yards in the summer for the sun to bleach clean.

One afternoon I was pruning the roses in front of my house, and a middle-aged woman came up the walkway. "My name is Joyce," she said, "and I grew up in this house." Her parents, Angelo and Tanie Turturice, were Sicilian, her father having immigrated through Ellis Island in 1913, alone, when he was fifteen years old. Joyce said the neighborhood was filled with Italians in the 1940s and 1950s and reeled off the names of some of the families that once lived within a block of the house: Concilla, Ferranti, Navarra, Bonfiglio, DeStefano, Campagna, and more.

Joyce told me that her father had grown up working in the fields outside Trabia, and when he came to Portland, it was natural that he'd farm here, too. Angelo tilled a swath of land where the Oregon Liquor Control Commission now stands along Milwaukie Avenue. Across Milwaukie were the wood huts and tents of migrant workers. At harvest time, Angelo loaded his flatbed truck with produce and took it to the wholesale farmers' market at southeast 10th Avenue and Belmont. The truck farmers who came to the market were overwhelmingly Italian, but a few Japanese farmers rounded out the numbers. The farmers set up their stalls around 2:00 a.m. and were sold out in four or five hours, when they repaired to the Lido restaurant or the Market Club for breakfast and to bet on card games.

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In 1936, Angelo's produce earned him an article in The Oregonian, "Zuchini [sic] Squash Sky-Rockets as Popular Garden Vegetable." An accompanying photo shows Angelo, looking like he could use a shave, standing in the field in overalls and a newsboy cap. Most Portlanders had never heard of zucchini until local Italians began growing and selling it, and Angelo became known as "the Zucchini King."

For his own use, Angelo planted the backyard densely with endives, fava beans, garlic, chard, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, pole beans, and-yes-zucchini. He also grew a long, vining summer squash called "cagutsa," which he wove through the clotheslines so that its fruit hung down as it grew. Each year he let one squash mature for seed, and that one grew up to six feet long. He rimmed the garden with herbs-basil, oregano, parsley, and mint. Lots and lots of mint.

Another Oregonian article, this one from 1974, shows Angelo in the backyard. He's wearing a union suit and suspenders, and still needs a shave, but his hair is now white. Behind him are rows of vegetables. The article says that Angelo, now a widower, has leftovers of chicken with artichokes, eggplant, and tomatoes in the refrigerator. Joyce remembers that both of her parents were good cooks. While her classmates were eating pork roast and fried chicken, Joyce had pasta sauce made with rabbit or lamb, tomatoes her mother had canned from the summer before, and fresh herbs. Her father baked pizza in the small oven in the basement. She remembers her father peeling prickly pear and feeding her chunks of its fruit from the tip of his knife.

Unlike many of his neighbors, Angelo didn't drink (although Joyce says he kept a bottle of Four Roses whiskey for guests). But other Italians in Garlic Gulch had wine presses in their basements and garages. In the fall, they would go to the eastside industrial area to await boxcars of grapes from California. Families then made wine and often aged it in wooden barrels under the front porch. Prohibition didn't interfere much with making wine, although it did trouble some families. One widow made and sold wine to support her six children. She asked her priest for advice. Should she continue to make wine, even though it was against the law? The priest sagely replied, "There are man's laws, and there are God's laws." The bootlegging continued.

Over the years, most of the first-generation Italians have passed away and their children have moved from southeast Portland. The truck farms that once ringed the city have disappeared, and the wholesale farmers' market burned to the ground. Many of Garlic Gulch's once modest houses are now remodeled with Viking ranges and granite countertops. But the legacy of its Italian residents remains in Portland's appreciation for basil, fava beans, and zucchini. In my case, that legacy includes the mint that still runs through my flower beds, sixty years after it was planted.