Climb the hill above the harbour, past the brick storefronts and the old parish church, and you reach the part of town that the Italians in New Rochelle made their own. They called it the West End, and for most of the twentieth century it was where a Calabrian fruit seller, a Sicilian stonemason and a Neapolitan baker could find a parish, a club and a familiar dialect within a few blocks of one another.
The Place
New Rochelle sits on the Long Island Sound shoreline of southern Westchester County, twenty minutes by train from Grand Central. It was settled in 1688 by French Huguenot refugees from La Rochelle, who gave the city its name, and it incorporated as a municipality in 1899.
For decades it was a byword for money. During the 1930s New Rochelle was the wealthiest city per capita in New York State and the third wealthiest in the country, home to more than a hundred millionaires and a celebrated colony of illustrators and writers.
Today it is the seventh largest city in New York State, with 79,726 residents counted in the 2020 census. The mansions on the water and the apartment towers downtown tell one story. The streets on the hill, where Italian families settled, tell another.
How It Became Italian
The Italians did not arrive in New Rochelle by accident. They were brought, in the first instance, to build the things the wealthy city needed: railways, roads, sewers and the great stone houses of the shore.
The first labourers
Italian workers began arriving in the 1880s, recruited as labourers to lay railway lines through the growing suburb. They were single men at first, sending wages home, sleeping in boarding houses near the work. Then they sent for sisters and brothers, and the sisters and brothers sent for cousins, and a settlement began to take shape.
It took root on a rise of land west of the downtown that earlier residents had known as Dutch Hill. The newcomers filled in the streets between Lincoln Avenue and the curving blocks along Glenwood Avenue, Glenwood Place and Oakdale Avenue. In time the whole quarter had a name of its own: the West End, or simply West New Rochelle.
Church before everything
The institution that anchored the community was the Catholic parish. Blessed Sacrament Church, founded in 1874 at 15 Shea Place as a successor to St Matthew’s of 1848, became the spiritual centre of the West End. When the parish built its present Gothic Revival stone church in 1897, it was made deliberately larger to hold the growing number of Italian immigrants then settling in the neighbourhood.
The interior they worshipped beneath was richly Italian in feeling. It was decorated with 53 oil paintings by the artist Francesco Baraldi, while the depiction of the Blessed Sacrament above the altar was painted by G. Caponi. A lightning strike had burned the earlier church to the ground in 1890, leaving only the bell and the cellar, so the 1897 building was a fresh start in stone.
As the West End filled, a second parish followed. The Church of the Holy Family was founded in 1913 and drew Italian families alongside its other parishioners. Between the two churches, the rhythm of the year ran on feast days, confirmations and weddings conducted in a community that still carried the language of the old country.
The clubs and the mutual aid
Faith was one pillar; mutual aid was the other. Sixteen naturalised Americans from Calabria met and decided to form a society that would embody the best of Italian culture and customs together with the traditions of the United States, and would help fellow immigrants find their feet.
That organisation became the Casa Calabria Society. One of the founding members offered his fruit and vegetable store, on the corner of Union Avenue and Second Street, as the first permanent meeting place. From a shop counter it grew into a club that still gathers the city’s Italians and their friends to promote Italian culture and language.
The historian Anthony J. D’Ermes, who grew up in the quarter, set down its texture in his memoir West New Rochelle N.Y.: An Italian Journey. He named the three institutions that carried immigrant families into American life: the Catholic Church, the New Rochelle school system, and the Feeney Park Boys Club and Library. Through those doors passed the children who would translate documents for their parents and, in a generation, send their own children to college.
From enclave to establishment
By the middle of the twentieth century the West End was a settled Italian American neighbourhood rather than an immigrant landing place. Italian heritage spread across the wider city too. In one count of Italian American populations by community, New Rochelle ranked eighth in New York State, with more than fourteen thousand residents claiming Italian ancestry in the 2005 to 2009 American Community Survey.
Families that had started on the hill moved outward into the leafier sections of the city, and into neighbouring Westchester towns, while the West End itself began to change hands. The Italian story in New Rochelle is in that sense a familiar American arc: arrival at the bottom, a generation of work and worship, and a steady climb into the middle of the place that had once only hired them.
The Landmarks
Blessed Sacrament Church, 15 Shea Place. The mother church of Italian New Rochelle, rebuilt in stone in 1897 to hold the West End’s growing congregation. Its walls carry dozens of oil paintings by Francesco Baraldi, and the parish traces its roots through St Matthew’s all the way back to 1848.
Church of the Holy Family, 110 Webster Avenue. Founded in 1913, this West End parish gathered Italian families alongside its other parishioners and remains one of the most ethnically mixed congregations in the city, a sign of how the neighbourhood has turned over while keeping its faith.
Casa Calabria Society. Born when sixteen Calabrians turned a fruit and vegetable store at Union Avenue and Second Street into a mutual aid society, it is the living thread back to the first generation. It still hosts members and friends for Italian food, language and culture.
Saccone’s Pizzeria, 56 Sixth Street. One of the survivors of the old Italian West End, a neighbourhood pizzeria whose regulars insist the sauce tastes the same as it did decades ago. It is the kind of place that outlasts the demographic change around it.
Maria Restaurant, 11 Huguenot Street. The modern flagship of Italian New Rochelle, run by brothers Peter and Giovanni Cucullo, whose late father Mario first put the family on the city’s map with Fratelli Pizzeria. Maria earned the Michelin Guide’s Bib Gourmand recognition in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Pizzeria La Rosa. A wood-fired pizzeria built around a roughly century-old Peterson oven, in a building that began life as a bakery in the 1920s. In 2026 it was named a USA TODAY Restaurant of the Year, proof that the city’s Italian table is still drawing notice.
Feeney Park, West End. The green space and the Boys Club and Library beside it formed one of the three institutions D’Ermes credited with raising the immigrant generation, a place where the children of labourers learned to read and to belong.
Where They Came From
The strongest single thread runs to Calabria, the toe of the Italian boot, the region named in the founding of the Casa Calabria Society. Calabrian emigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was driven by poor soil, heavy taxation and the pull of work abroad, and chain migration funnelled relatives from the same villages into the same American streets.
Sicilians and Neapolitans came too, part of the broad southern Italian exodus that fed the whole New York region. The men who first laid New Rochelle’s rails were largely from this Mezzogiorno, the impoverished south, where a railway labourer’s American wage could change a family’s standing back home.
What bound them in New Rochelle was less a single province than a shared starting point: rural southern Italy, the Catholic calendar, and the habit of sending for the next relative as soon as there was a bed and a job to offer.
New Rochelle Today
The West End is no longer the Italian quarter it once was. Italian immigration ran from roughly 1900 to the 1960s; since about 1985 the neighbourhood has become predominantly Hispanic, the latest chapter in a hill that has always housed the city’s newest arrivals.
Yet the Italian remnants are everywhere if you know to look. The Casa Calabria still meets, Saccone’s still sells pizza, Blessed Sacrament still rings its bell. The institutions held even as the families that built them dispersed into the wider city and the surrounding towns.
And at the foot of the hill, downtown, Italian New Rochelle is having a second act on white tablecloths. Maria, with its run of Michelin Bib Gourmand nods, and Pizzeria La Rosa, with its national restaurant award, are run by descendants of the same immigrant generation, cooking the food of the south for a city that has grown far beyond its Huguenot beginnings. You can read the layered history of the place in the city’s own archives at the New Rochelle Public Library, and the parish story at Blessed Sacrament Church.
The Italian footprint here belongs to a wider Westchester pattern. The same families who climbed the hill in New Rochelle put down roots in places like the Italians of Scarsdale, Eastchester and Pelham, just as their cousins crossed the line into Clifton and Bloomfield in New Jersey.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle in New Rochelle?
The Italians in New Rochelle first arrived in the 1880s as labourers recruited to lay railway lines through the rapidly growing and wealthy suburb. They settled on a rise west of downtown known as Dutch Hill, and chain migration from southern Italy steadily filled the surrounding streets into a neighbourhood called the West End.
Where is the Italian neighbourhood in New Rochelle?
It is the West End, on the hill west of the downtown, with sections running between Lincoln Avenue and the curving blocks along Glenwood Avenue, Glenwood Place and Oakdale Avenue. Italian families dominated it from around 1900 to the 1960s, after which the neighbourhood became predominantly Hispanic.
What church served the Italians in New Rochelle?
Blessed Sacrament Church at 15 Shea Place was the spiritual centre of the community. When it rebuilt in stone in 1897 the building was made larger specifically to hold the growing number of Italian immigrants in the West End, and its interior was decorated with 53 oil paintings by the artist Francesco Baraldi.
What is the Casa Calabria Society?
It is a mutual aid and cultural society founded by sixteen naturalised Americans from Calabria, who first met in a member’s fruit and vegetable store at the corner of Union Avenue and Second Street. It still brings the Italians in New Rochelle and their friends together to promote Italian culture and language.
Are there still Italian restaurants in New Rochelle?
Yes. Old standbys like Saccone’s Pizzeria on Sixth Street remain, while downtown the brothers Peter and Giovanni Cucullo run Maria on Huguenot Street, a Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurant, and Pizzeria La Rosa was named a USA TODAY Restaurant of the Year in 2026.
How Italian is New Rochelle today?
Italian ancestry remains one of the city’s largest heritage groups, and in one count New Rochelle ranked eighth among New York communities for Italian American population. The West End itself has changed hands, but Italian churches, clubs and restaurants endure across the city.
If your family’s story passed through New Rochelle, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Calabrian village to the hill above the harbour, to wherever you are now.