Saving Little Italy

“IN SOME SENSE, LITTLE ITALY, WAS [ALREADY] FACING AN IDENTITY CRISIS, BUT THE PANDEMIC MAKES IT AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS. . .THIS IS OUR GREAT DEPRESSION.”

Present day, Cafe Gia Ristorante on High Street, which added an outdoor dining space this year. Photography by Gregory McKay

It has also had a devastating impact on the remaining eateries. Aldo’s and Germano’s have closed temporarily almost since the start of the pandemic, but do plan to return. Others, such as Isabella’s, Vaccaro's Italian Pastry Shop, Casa di Pasta, and the newer Little Italy additions—Angeli’s Pizzeria and Ovenbird Bakery, which opened during the pandemic—transitioned more easily to a carryout-oriented operation. Amicci’s, already a less formal dining experience than some of the older establishments, blends its limited indoor capacity with outdoor seating and a carryout menu, but revenue there remains way down.

Sabatino’s added sidewalk tables as well and also created a delivery program, “Sab’s in the Suburbs,” that targets different county areas—Parkville, Towson, Ellicott City, etc.— on different days of the month. The mammoth restaurant, which for decades was open until 4 a.m. while catering to the late-night bar crowd and hospitality industry staffs, seats more than 400 people. But it has struggled to fill a quarter of its tables, which would be allowable by law, in large part because of health fears by its generally older clientele. “We are one of the restaurants that still has a regular customer base that comes once or twice a month and has been coming for decades, mostly folks that live in the county,” says Vince Culotta, co-owner of Sabatino’s, which was founded in 1955 by his uncle, Joseph Canzani, and Sabatino Luperini, both Italian immigrants. “But once people establish new habits, it’s hard to bring them back. That’s why we are going to them.”

Gia’s constructed a cozy sidewalk table dining area to help limit coronavirus exposure for its guests. But the general fear is what happens as temperatures plummet and the coronavirus’ second wave spike continues this winter.

“We are at an inflection point in Little Italy,” says Sergio Vitale, who opened the acclaimed Aldo’s Ristorante Italiano in 1998. “In some sense, Little Italy, irrespective of the pandemic, was facing an identity crisis, but the pandemic makes it an existential crisis. Our business is down 85 percent. This is our Great Depression.

“The apprehension, the mood,” Vitale adds, “hasn’t been matched since the Great Fire in Baltimore, when everyone in Little Italy banded together and prayed that the fire would stop.”

Italian immigrants first began coming to Baltimore in significant numbers shortly after the Civil War. Between around 1880 and 1924, more than four million Italians immigrated to the United States, half of them between 1900 and 1910 alone—the majority fleeing grinding rural poverty, epidemics, earthquakes, and tensions between the new government and workers in Southern Italy and Sicily. Today, Americans of Italian ancestry are the nation’s sixth-largest ethnic group, behind German, Black, Irish, Mexican, and English Americans. For the most part, like Mario Scilipoti, Italians entered the country in New York City, initially at Castle Garden, America’s first immigration center, which opened in 1855, and then at Ellis Island, which received roughly 12 million immigrants between 1892 and 1924. Baltimore’s Locust Point immigration pier, built in 1867 by the B&O Railroad and the North German Lloyd Shipping Company, received more than 1.2 million immigrants between 1868 and 1914, making the city the third-largest port of entry in the U.S. at the time (after New York and Boston). But most of those immigrants, the minority of whom actually remained in Baltimore, came from Germany, and then from Eastern Europe. That group included many Russian Jews, who first settled in and around Little Italy and Jonestown, and Polish Catholics, who worked in and filled the rowhouses of Fells Point and Canton—Sen. Barbara Mikulski’s corner bakery-owning grandparents among them. (One more recent shock to Little Italy families of a certain period was the permanent closing this summer of the all-girls, 173-year-old Institute of Notre Dame high school in East Baltimore, which incredibly produced both Mikulski, the longest-serving woman senator in U.S. history, and Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House.)

Nancy Pelosi with her father, Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., and mother, Anunciata “Nancy” D’Alesandro.

Many of the first wave of Italian immigrants who came to reside in Baltimore are said to have gotten here by chance, planning to pass through Baltimore on their way from New York to the burgeoning Midwest. But disembarking at the President Street train station across from what would become Little Italy (and near, coincidentally, the site of some of the first bloodshed of the American war), they found available boarding houses and a familiar, if still budding, Italian culture and associated cooking, and decided Baltimore looked pretty welcoming. Either way, most did not stray far. These immigrants were mostly peasants who took backbreaking work digging ditches and building rail lines, which is not say the era should be romanticized. Partly how the new immigrants got by—and got exploited—was through a complex turn-of-the-century contract labor network known as the “padrone system” (padrone means “boss” in Italian), which helped American rail, mining, and agricultural businesses meet their needs for cheap workers. The Italian middlemen in these networks, the “padroni,” typically took high fees from workers in exchange for jobs, and some served as landlords as well. Child labor among immigrants was common, too, with even small children working in factories and on farms. The first World War, which interrupted the flow of immigrants, finally contributed to the end of the padrone system.

“[Italian immigrants] were lured initially to America with one incentive: they were told that this magnificent country would offer a better way of life for the family,” wrote Suzanna Rosa Molino, the founder of the Promotion Center for Little Italy, Baltimore, in her book, Baltimore’s Little Italy. “Men usually arrived first. They sweated and labored and pinched pennies, and with limited capacity to speak English, they accepted any job, no matter the stench, danger, or task.” Many came intending to send for their families after they had gained a foothold in Baltimore. For others, coming to the U.S. was not necessarily a permanent decision. Many expected to return to Italy after a few years of work and saving. “[My grandfather] was very excited because he heard so much about America,” Little Italy native Ida Cipolloni Esposito told the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project in a 1979 oral history. “But he decided just to come over so that he could add an addition of one room to his home in Abruzzi. And he stayed here for about three years and went back. Then he decided, ‘Italy is not for me anymore. I’m going back to America.’ It was easier living, he said. He brought his son with him.”

By the early 1900s, craftsmen—carpenters, bricklayers, and stonemasons—arrived from Sicily and the Italian “boot” regions of Abruzzo, Campania, and Calabria. These laborers and artisans sought out the nearest Roman Catholic church. At that time, it was St. Vincent de Paul on North Front Street, which by 1874 had begun hosting Mass in Italian in its basement. St. Leo’s Church, just blocks away, was established in 1881, specifically for the influx of Italians. But at first it also served the Irish Catholics in a neighborhood that was then a quintessential melting pot of German, Irish, Jewish, Lithuanian, and Czech immigrants. By the 1920s, the Italians had displaced every other group as they moved from the neighborhood’s tiny rowhouses to bigger digs. In fact, Lombard Street, one of city’s older downtown streets and once known as the center of immigrant Jewish life—home of famed Corned Beef Row and 106-year-old Attman’s Deli—takes its name from the small Italian town of Guardia Lombardi outside Naples.

Present day Little Italy, site of Rocco’s Cappriccio on Fawn Street, which closed permanently in 2013 along with some other prominent area restaurants. Photography by Gregory McKay

The story of “modern” Little Italy begins in the post-World War II boom. (One of the more remarkable World War II stories related to Little Italy is the number of Italian POWs, estimated at more than two dozen, who were allowed local visitors while held captive at Fort Meade and then stayed in Baltimore and married Italian-American women.) In those days, Little Italy seemingly had at least two of everything—butcher shops, bakeries, hairdressers, barbers, luncheonettes, pharmacies, corner stores, tailors—plus the school, church, Della Noce funeral home, a repair garage, and all the family-owned restaurants.

As had been the case since the days of the organ grinders of Little Italy’s Slemmers Alley, daily life took place in the streets. Arabbers came through with horse-drawn wagons selling fruits and vegetables, and street life was particularly vital on the corners in front of Luge’s Confectionary, now the site of Sabatino’s, and Mugavero’s Confectionary, now the site of the Ovenbird Bakery. Mugavero’s was owned by one Marion “Mugs” Mugavero, a World War II veteran and larger-than-life figure to neighborhood boys in the 1950s and 1960s. Mugs was known for his meatball sandwiches, the phone booth in his store, from which he did his bookmaking (one of many in the neighborhood, by all accounts), and for a tough exterior that belied a gentle heart. He was a man who somehow managed to run a popular corner store, an illegal gambling operation, and keep an eye on local teenagers making sure no one got into “real” trouble. “How do you explain the street corners in Little Italy had requirements?” says Ray Alcaraz, trying to convey the spirit of neighborhood in the mid-20th century. “You had to meet those requirements to hang on a particular corner or earn your way. How do you explain bookmakers and numbers runners? What can be said about living in a multiple generational house or a tenement? Or having an ‘aunt’ on every block? How about the looks you get when you tell [people] how you shoveled horse manure into buckets after the arabbers [had] passed through so your grandfather could use it to fertilize his fig trees and grapevine?”

Baltimore never had the Italian crime mobs of New York or Philadelphia. But if there’s any doubt about the scale of the throwback gambling operations in Little Italy, consider the story behind Sabatino’s famed Bookmaker Salad. “Our maître de Al Isella invented it and named it after his friends, who were regular lunch customers, but had been coming in less frequently because they were getting older and didn’t want a big meal anymore,” says Vince Culotta. “Al went into the kitchen and put seasoned shrimp, salami, provolone cheese, a hardboiled egg, and some olives, red onions, and tomatoes on one of the house salads and named it The Bookmaker’s. He told my uncle, ‘They’ll love that.’” Isella spoke from experience. He once estimated he’d been arrested for gambling more than 50 times, which did not prevent him from serving as a 26th Ward precinct captain. It was like that. If you wanted a job, the guys from the neighborhood recall, you went and saw Anunciata “Nancy” D’Alesandro—not Nancy Pelosi, but her mother, the wife of the mayor. She’d ask if you were registered to vote, and once confirmed, assist you in finding work. (“I think about if she were born today, what she would’ve accomplished,” Nancy Pelosi told Maryland Public Television in 2013.)

“We didn’t have organized crime, we had ‘disorganized crime,’” jokes Ed Mattson, a former Baltimore city cop of Italian descent. He’s describing this on a warm fall day alongside the Little Italy ROMEO crew—Retired Old Men Eating Out—as they reminisce over pasta, eggplant, and Chianti at DiPasquale’s in Highlandtown. That area just north of Eastern Avenue and around Our Lady of Pompei, founded in 1923, is another, later Italian enclave. ROMEO regular Bill Bertazon, who grew up in Little Italy and is also a former city police officer, is there, too. He worked as a teenager at Mugavero’s Confectionary, as did fellow ROMEO Richard Di Seta. “A true education,” Bertazon recalls with a laugh. Inevitably, their conversation turns to what it was like growing up—running errands for bookies, collecting pennies for an afternoon playing the arcades on The Block, learning to smoke cigarettes, laying bricks in the summer between school for someone’s father’s contracting company, and playing baseball on the diamond squeezed in-between the city morgue, pumping station, and rail tracks down at the end of President Street. Baseball talk also leads to memories of Cosimo “Toodie” Geppi and his legendary fastball. “Toodie was twice as big as the rest of us and threw twice as hard as anyone,” says Di Seta of the beloved deceased older brother of this magazine’s publisher. “It was brutal to try to hit him, and he was wild, too. He had you shaking in your shoes.”

“INEVITABLY, THEIR CONVERSATION TURNS TO WHAT IT WAS LIKE GROWING UP. . . PLAYING BASEBALL ON THE DIAMOND SQUEEZED INBETWEEN THE CITY MORGUE, PUMPING STATION, AND RAIL TRACKS. . .”

The first Little Italy Little League included Cubs, Yankees, Cardinals, and White Sox teams, 1957.

It’s undeniable that people like to reminisce about the “good old days” of Little Italy. Scott Panian, who opened Amicci’s in 1991, notes how much has changed in just the past five years. As he stares out his front window, he can’t help but see that Ciao Bella’s, Rocco’s, Caesar’s Den, and Da Mimmo have all closed around him. “When I came down here, there were 22 restaurants, and High Street was gridlocked every night.” The demographic base of his restaurant has also changed. For 25 years, he says, his typical customers were 40-year-old couples who had moved to the county and stuck with them. That changed in the aftermath of the Baltimore Uprising, he says, and in the long run, may be a blessing in disguise. His client base and staff have gotten more diverse, better reflecting the city today, and perhaps indicating a way forward for the restaurants and neighborhood in post-pandemic Baltimore—whenever that is.

“We had to pivot to get those 20 to 40-year-olds who are picking up chicken parms on the way home from work,” Panian says. “Little Italy was very provincial. Our clientele has gotten way more diverse since 2015, and our staff has gotten way more diverse, too. We’ve redecorated and tried to make it more of a Baltimore city neighborhood restaurant as opposed to old-school Italian. During the pandemic, I’m staring at my bar not being open, and I’m like, ‘We have to paint this place.’ Instead of rehanging the old Italian movie posters, I put out a call on social media for local art, and we’ve been overwhelmed with the response. Since March, my dining room has been filled with local art.”

In an effort with similar echoes, Cyd Wolf of Germano’s says she and her husband are moving forward with plans for an art gallery in Slemmers Alley. They also plan to remake the restaurant, adding an Italian market. “There needs to be more retail businesses,” Wolf says. “We need other types of businesses that will bring people into the neighborhood.”

Panian stresses Little Italy restaurants have to look inward and embrace the diversity of the city. “The people [who live and work] within 20 blocks of me are going to build my business back up. You’re doing yourself a disservice when you live in a city that’s 65 percent minority and not reaching out to those customers. If you look around this neighborhood now, there’s less Italian ladies with housecoats and there’s more 30-year-old couples. I’ve got to get those people in here. I’m not getting those people back from Timonium.”

Little Italy native Rosalia Scalia, author of the forthcoming short story collection Stumbling Toward Grace, believes the sentiment about restaurants needing to appeal to a broader cross section of the city applies to the rest of the neighborhood as well. At the Rev. Oreste Pandola Adult Learning Center, in the former St. Leo’s School, that’s already happening, with culinary and language classes that bring folks in from other neighborhoods. The cozy Little India restaurant remains open, and a Black-owned sports bar and restaurant, featuring an international menu, is planned for the old Vellegia’s site.

After the Columbus statue was toppled, Scalia penned an op-ed to The Sun, stating her opinion that he was not the best representative of Italian Americans. Instead, she suggested Italian Americans could honor Mother Cabrini, the Italian-born founder of Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the first U.S. citizen to be canonized for her decades of service to Italian immigrants. Contrary perhaps to common stereotypes, she says she received more notes in support of her position from the neighborhood than against.

Bill Martin, a past president of the Associated Italian Charities of Maryland, says the statue is being remade, but will be placed elsewhere. He also said he’d like the Columbus memorial replaced by a statue of an immigrant Italian family, an idea that no doubt would resonate in many parts of Southeast Baltimore, which continues to see its Mexican and Central American immigrant population grow and open new businesses.

“It’s harder to attract some of the younger people, whose sensibility about Columbus, and the Catholic Church, is different today,” says Scalia, adding quickly that she loves “Father Bernie” and invited him over to bless her rowhouse after her recent renovations.

In other ways, she continues, the beauty and simplicity of living in Little Italy, as walkable a neighborhood as there is in the city, remains as compelling as ever.

“I moved out of my parents’ house when I was 19 because I thought it was too confining. Everyone knew each other’s business,” she says. “I got married, moved to Owings Mills, and got pregnant. When I knew my marriage wasn’t going to work out, I moved back, because I knew I would need support, and it was here waiting for me. That was 41 years ago. I haven't left since.”

Scalia’s mother, Philomena, 92, and her mother’s sister, Eleanor, 88, still live here, too. Next door to each other, of course.