Drive north up Plandome Road on a Saturday morning and the town reads as pure North Shore money: tailored hedges, a Tiffany window at the Americana, a school district that lands on national best-of lists. Look closer, and you find the other Manhasset, the one built by the Italians in Manhasset who laid the stone, tended the gardens, and eventually opened the bakeries and trattorias that still anchor the village. Their story runs underneath the lawns, in the valley below the hill.
The Place
Manhasset sits on the North Shore of Long Island in Nassau County, a hamlet of roughly 8,000 people spread across the head of Manhasset Bay. The Matinecock called it Sint Sink, place of small stones, long before Dutch and English settlers arrived in the 1600s. For most of the nineteenth century it was farmland and bay frontage.
Everything changed in 1898, when the Long Island Rail Road reached the village and wealthy New Yorkers came looking for country homes. Today the median household income runs well above $130,000, and the Americana Manhasset on the Miracle Mile carries Hermes, Chanel, and Dior. It is the image of WASP and Gold Coast affluence, the same affluent North Shore world that drew the Jewish families who settled in nearby Great Neck. It was also, quietly, an Italian working town.
How It Became Italian
The Italian story here begins not on the hill but in the valley, and not with merchants but with hands.
The estates that needed builders
When the railroad arrived in 1898, it carried two kinds of passengers. One kind built mansions. The other kind built the mansions for them.
The Gold Coast of Long Island, the stretch of North Shore estates that F. Scott Fitzgerald turned into Gatsby’s West Egg and East Egg, rose between roughly 1900 and the 1930s on the labour of immigrant tradesmen. The Gold Coast estate era remade the entire North Shore in a generation. The stonemasons, plasterers, and iron forgers who carved those great houses were among the finest in the world, and a large share of them were recent arrivals from southern Italy, trained in a craft tradition that American mass production had not yet erased. The same building boom drew Italian tradesmen into other North Shore towns, including the long-established Italian community of Glen Cove a few miles east.
Manhasset stood at the edge of that estate country. Italian masons, gardeners, and stonecutters who worked the surrounding properties needed somewhere modest to live, and they settled where land was cheapest and the commute on foot was shortest: down in the old commercial valley near the bay, and on the slopes around it.
The valley, the hill, and the help
For generations Manhasset had two centres. The original commercial hub sat in the low ground near the bay, along what was simply called Valley Road. After 1900, shops began opening on higher ground along Plandome Road, and the railroad station went up on the hill in 1899. The business district followed it uphill, and the old valley was left to the families who served the town rather than the families who summered in it.
That divide had a school to match it. The Manhasset Valley School was originally built to teach the children of the help who worked the local Gold Coast estates, the gardeners and maids and labourers, many of them Italian and African American, who kept the great houses running. The pattern echoed the way Italian families settled at the edges of nearby Garden City and shared the bay with the Greek community of neighbouring Port Washington. The valley was where the working town lived, within sight of the lawns but not on them.
The church that took them in
Catholic Manhasset began with the Irish and the Germans. St. Mary’s traces to 1853, when a Flushing priest asked permission to start a mission for the few German and Irish Catholic farmers in the area, and the parish dedicated its first church on Plandome Road on 4 October 1857.
By the early twentieth century, the Italian newcomers joined those pews. The parish that had been founded for German and Irish farmers became, like so many Long Island parishes, a place where southern Italian families baptised their children, married, and buried their dead. The present St. Mary’s church, now on Northern Boulevard, opened in 1917 as the parish outgrew its valley-era roots, and St. Mary’s High School followed. For Italian Manhasset, the parish calendar was the social calendar.
From the trowel to the storefront
The arc of Italian Manhasset is the classic American one: from labour to ownership, from the estate gate to the high street. Men who arrived to swing a trowel saved, took contracts of their own, and built businesses with their names on them.
The most visible example sits on the Miracle Mile itself. The Americana Manhasset, Long Island’s most famous luxury centre, was developed beginning in 1955 and 1956 by Gerace & Castagna, a masonry contracting firm founded in 1922. Its founder, Ferdinand Castagna, was exactly the kind of builder Italian Long Island produced. His son Frank Castagna, born in Brooklyn in 1928, married Rita Ronzoni of the Italian-American pasta family and spent his life turning that strip into a destination that rivalled Milan and Paris.
It is a fitting twist. The masonry trade that began with Italians cutting stone for other people’s mansions ended with an Italian masonry family owning the most exclusive address in town.
The street they made their own
Plandome Road became the Italian main street by the ordinary work of feeding a town. Steiner’s Bakery, Louie’s Diner, the delis and the pizzerias gave the village its everyday texture. Villa Milano opened at 168 Plandome Road in 1984 and has fed Manhasset families for four decades beneath its painted Italian murals. The pattern that built Italian Manhasset, hands first and ownership later, kept repeating itself one storefront at a time.
The Landmarks
Church of Saint Mary, 1300 Northern Boulevard. The Catholic heart of Manhasset, traced to an 1853 mission for German and Irish farmers and dedicated on Plandome Road in 1857. The present church opened in 1917, and across the twentieth century its pews filled with the Italian families who had come to build and stayed to worship.
Plandome Road. The village high street, which took over from the old Valley Road as the business district after 1900. Its bakeries, delis, barbers, and pizzerias are where Italian Manhasset went from being the help to being the merchants. The Memorial Day Parade still runs its length each spring.
Americana Manhasset, 2060 Northern Boulevard. The Miracle Mile’s luxury centre, developed from 1955 by the Italian-American masonry firm Gerace & Castagna and later Castagna Realty. It is the clearest monument to the Italian journey here, from cutting stone for estates to owning the grandest commercial address on the North Shore.
Villa Milano, 168 Plandome Road. A neighbourhood Italian restaurant and pizzeria open since 1984, known for its seventeenth-century-style murals. For four decades it has fed Manhasset’s weddings, wakes, and ordinary Tuesdays, the kind of family kitchen every Italian-American town keeps at its centre.
Cipollini Trattoria and Bar, 2110 Northern Boulevard. Opened in the spring of 2005 inside the Americana, an Italian dining room set in the middle of the luxury mall. It is Manhasset’s two stories in one room: the estate-builder heritage and the haute-couture present, both speaking Italian.
The Manhasset Valley. The low ground near the bay where the working town lived, home to the original commercial centre and to the Manhasset Valley School built for the children of estate workers. This is the geography of the early Italian arrival, below the hill rather than on it.
St. Mary’s High School, Manhasset. The parish secondary school that grew alongside the church, where generations of Catholic Manhasset families, Italian among them, were educated within walking distance of the trades their grandfathers had worked.
Where They Came From
The Italians who reached Manhasset were overwhelmingly southerners, part of the great wave that left the Mezzogiorno between the 1890s and the 1920s. Regions like Calabria and Campania sent skilled tradesmen whose ornate masonry demanded years of training, and it was precisely that skill that the Gold Coast estates were hungry for.
They did not arrive in a vacuum. Italian Long Island was already taking shape across Nassau County, which today counts well over 200,000 residents of Italian ancestry, the second-largest Italian population of any county in the state. Manhasset’s Italians were one node in a dense North Shore network of masons, gardeners, and bakers who moved between estate towns as the work demanded.
Chain migration did the rest. A mason who found steady estate work would write home, and a brother or a cousin would follow into the same trade and the same valley, until whole stretches of southern Italy had relatives in the same few Long Island parishes.
Manhasset Today
Manhasset in 2026 is, by the numbers, an affluent suburb where the Italian story has folded into the background. The 2020 census recorded a population of about 8,176, a median household income above $130,000, and a racial profile that is majority white with a large and growing Asian community, according to census figures for the hamlet. The town that estate workers helped build is now one of the most expensive in the New York region.
The Italian presence survives less as a visible enclave than as inheritance. The names are on the businesses and the parish rolls; the masonry firm that started in 1922 still casts its shadow over the Miracle Mile; the bakeries and trattorias on Plandome Road keep the daily rhythm. Many descendants of the original tradesmen long ago moved up the hill, or out to newer suburbs, joining the very class their grandfathers once served.
What is hard to see now is the valley as it was: a working district of immigrant families living within sight of the lawns they tended. That Manhasset has been mostly paved over by affluence. But the next time someone calls this a WASP town, remember who cut the stone, and whose firm built the mall where the limousines park.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where did the Italians in Manhasset originally settle?
The earliest Italians in Manhasset settled in the low-lying valley near Manhasset Bay, the original commercial centre along Valley Road, rather than on the hill that became the wealthy modern town. They lived close to the Gold Coast estates where many of them worked as masons, gardeners, and labourers.
Why did Italians come to Manhasset in the first place?
They came for work on the Gold Coast estates that rose along the North Shore after the Long Island Rail Road arrived in 1898. Southern Italian immigrants were prized as stonemasons, plasterers, and gardeners, and Manhasset sat at the edge of that estate country, offering steady building and grounds work.
Is there still an Italian community in Manhasset today?
The Italian presence in Manhasset persists more as heritage than as a distinct enclave. Italian family names remain on Plandome Road businesses and the St. Mary’s parish rolls, and Italian restaurants and bakeries still anchor the village, though many descendants have moved up the hill or to newer suburbs.
What is the connection between Italians and the Americana Manhasset?
The Americana Manhasset luxury centre on the Miracle Mile was developed from 1955 onward by Gerace & Castagna, an Italian-American masonry contracting firm founded in 1922 by Ferdinand Castagna. His son Frank Castagna transformed it into one of the most exclusive shopping destinations in the country.
Which church served the Italians in Manhasset?
St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church served the Italians in Manhasset. Founded as a mission for German and Irish farmers in the 1850s and first dedicated in 1857, the parish became the spiritual home of the Italian families who arrived to build and maintain the estates, and its present church opened in 1917.
What was the Manhasset Valley School?
The Manhasset Valley School was originally built to educate the children of the help who worked the local Gold Coast estates, including Italian and African American families. It reflected the divide between the working valley and the wealthy hill, and was closed in the 1960s following a desegregation lawsuit.
If your family’s story passed through Manhasset, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a mason’s village in Calabria to the valley below Plandome Road, to wherever you are now.