On the last weekend of June, the streets around Wooster Square in New Haven fill with the smell of sausage and peppers, the brass of a marching band, and a statue of a saint carried shoulder high. A good share of the families lining those kerbs drove in from three miles east, from East Haven, where the Italians of greater New Haven settled in their thousands and never really left. To understand the Italians in East Haven, you have to understand a town that, by local reckoning, became roughly half Italian-American, one Foxon Road bakery and one Taylor Avenue parish at a time.
The Place
East Haven sits about three miles east of downtown New Haven, in New Haven County, hard against Long Island Sound. The town was granted township status by the Connecticut Colony in May 1707, when its name shifted from Iron Works Village, and it was formally incorporated in 1785.
For most of its early life it was a quiet shoreline town of farms, salt marsh and oyster beds. The Old Stone Church, the First Congregational Church of East Haven, was built in 1774 and still stands on the town green, a reminder of the Yankee Puritan world that came first.
As of the 2020 census the town had a population of 27,923. It is not a wealthy enclave in the manner of nearby Greenwich or the Westchester suburbs. East Haven is a working town of modest houses, beach cottages and family businesses, and that is precisely the kind of place where Italian immigrants put down roots.
How It Became Italian
The Italian story in East Haven is really a chapter of the larger New Haven story. By 1880 the federal census listed just 102 Italians in New Haven. The trickle became a flood in the 1890s, and by 1910 New Haven, the state’s largest Italian colony, counted more than 13,000 people of Italian birth or descent.
The Amalfi Coast comes to Connecticut
New Haven’s Italians did not come from everywhere in Italy. They came, overwhelmingly, from a cluster of towns on the Amalfi Coast in the province of Salerno, Campania, above all from Amalfi itself and its tiny neighbour Atrani.
This was chain migration in its purest form. A man from Atrani found work, sent for a brother, a cousin, a fellow townsman, and within a generation whole streets of New Haven were peopled by families who had been neighbours on the same Campanian hillside.
They brought their patron saint with them. Sant’Andrea, Saint Andrew the Apostle, is the protector of Amalfi, and the immigrants founded the Society of St. Andrew the Apostle to honour him. Its annual Festa, a multi-day feast with food, music and a procession through Wooster Square, has run for well over a century and remains the beating heart of the region’s Italian calendar.
Spilling east across the line
The original colony was Wooster Square, the dense brick district just east of downtown New Haven that remains the most famous Italian neighbourhood in the state. You can read the fuller story of that founding district in our piece on the Italians in Wooster Square, New Haven.
But Wooster Square was crowded, and as families found steadier wages they looked for land and air. East Haven, just over the line and easy to reach, was one of the places they found.
The Shore Line trolley made that move practical. Passenger service on the line running from downtown New Haven, through East Haven and into Branford began on 31 July 1900, one of the first electrically powered trolley lines in the country. A man could live in a cottage near the Sound and ride the trolley to a job in the city, and many Italian families did exactly that.
Parishes and the rooting of a community
You can chart the growth of East Haven’s Italian Catholics by its churches. St. Vincent de Paul parish, on Taylor Avenue, was dedicated in 1914, the same era the community was taking hold. Our Lady of Pompeii, on Foxon Road, was dedicated in 1947, its name borrowed straight from the Marian shrine south of Naples. St. Clare followed in 1966 as the postwar generation pushed into new neighbourhoods.
Those three parishes, joined later by St. Bernadette, merged on 29 June 2017 into a single body, the Catholic Community of East Haven, now known as St. Pio of Pietrelcina Parish. The choice of Padre Pio, the great twentieth-century Italian friar, as patron of the merged parish says plainly whose faith built these churches. The parish today serves roughly 3,250 families.
From newcomers to townsfolk
By the second half of the twentieth century, Italian-Americans were no longer the outsiders in East Haven. They were the town. Local reckoning holds that roughly half the populations of East Haven, West Haven and North Haven came to be descended from Italian immigrants.
That share showed up in town hall. East Haven has been led for decades by mayors with names like Maturo and Carfora. Joseph Maturo Jr., a Republican, became only the second person in town history to win five terms as mayor. The Italian surname on the ballot stopped being remarkable and simply became the norm.
The Landmarks
St. Vincent de Paul Church, 80 Taylor Avenue. Dedicated in 1914, this is the older of East Haven’s two great Italian Catholic anchors and now part of St. Pio of Pietrelcina Parish. For generations its baptisms, weddings and funeral Masses marked the rhythm of Italian family life in the town.
Our Lady of Pompeii Church, 355 Foxon Road. Dedicated in 1947 and named for the Marian sanctuary near Naples, the church carries Campania in its very title. It served the Foxon Road end of town as the community spread north and east after the war.
Capotorto’s Apizza Center, 688 Foxon Road. A neighbourhood apizza institution on the Foxon Road strip, baking New Haven style pies. The very word apizza, pronounced ah-BEETS, is a New Haven Italian-American coinage, and East Haven inherited the obsession with it.
Gia Marie’s Pizzeria, 945 Foxon Road. Another Foxon Road pizzeria turning out classic Connecticut-style pies with the crisp, charred crust that the region’s Amalfitano bakers made famous. Foxon Road is, in effect, East Haven’s Italian high street.
Minervini’s Pizzeria, 457 Main Street. A Main Street fixture for pizza, subs and sandwiches, the kind of family-run counter that knits a neighbourhood together. The name itself is a small census of who built the town.
Shore Line Trolley Museum, 17 River Street. Incorporated in 1945 as the Branford Electric Railway Association, it preserves the very trolley line that first carried Italian families from New Haven out to the East Haven shore in 1900. It is the oldest continuously operating trolley museum in the United States and sits on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Cosey Beach shoreline. Along Cosey Beach Avenue, the strip of cottages and seafood spots facing Long Island Sound has long drawn East Haven families on summer evenings. It was here, in the Momauguin and Cosey Beach districts, that many Italian-American households kept their warm-weather cottages within sight of the water.
Where They Came From
The overwhelming origin point was Campania, and within Campania the towns of the Amalfi Coast in the province of Salerno. Amalfi and tiny Atrani sent so many of their sons and daughters to New Haven that the link became a two-way road, with families travelling back to the old town for decades afterward.
The pull was simple economics and the push was hard. Southern Italy at the turn of the twentieth century offered little land and less opportunity, and the great wave of Italian emigration to America ran roughly from 1880 to 1915 in overlapping surges. Each arrival became a foothold for the next, providing lodging, a job lead and a familiar dialect.
That is why the saint matters. Carrying Sant’Andrea of Amalfi through the streets of Wooster Square was not nostalgia for a vague homeland. It was a precise act of memory for a specific stretch of Salernitan coast, repeated every June, and East Haven’s families were and are part of it.
East Haven Today
East Haven is no longer only Italian, and it never pretended otherwise for long. Since the late twentieth century the town has drawn a new wave of immigrants, many of them Latino, and recent census estimates put the Hispanic share above a fifth of the population. Foxon Road now carries Colombian and Vietnamese kitchens beside the apizza ovens.
That mirrors a wider Connecticut pattern. The Italians who once arrived as strangers in a Yankee town are now the established residents, and a newer generation of newcomers is writing its own first chapter, much as the Amalfitani did a century ago. You can see the same dynamic across the state line in our look at the Brazilians in Danbury, Connecticut and the Irish in Greenwich, Connecticut.
But the Italian grain runs deep. The surnames still fill the parish rolls and the ballot, the pizzerias still line Foxon Road, and on the last weekend of June the families still go to the Festa. The pattern that built East Haven echoes other Italian strongholds in the wider tri-state world, from the Italians in New Rochelle, New York to the Italians in Bloomfield, New Jersey and the Italians in Clifton, New Jersey. East Haven simply tells the Connecticut version, with a trolley and a saint from Amalfi.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there many Italians in East Haven, Connecticut?
Yes. By long-standing local reckoning, roughly half of East Haven’s population is descended from Italian immigrants, alongside neighbouring West Haven and North Haven. The Italians in East Haven are among the most established communities in the greater New Haven area.
Where did East Haven’s Italian families come from in Italy?
Overwhelmingly from the Amalfi Coast in the province of Salerno, in the Campania region, especially the towns of Amalfi and Atrani. New Haven was their main colony, and East Haven grew as families spread east from crowded Wooster Square.
What is the St. Andrew Festa?
It is the annual Italian feast held by the Society of St. Andrew the Apostle, honouring Sant’Andrea, the patron saint of Amalfi. Held in late June with food, music and a procession through Wooster Square in New Haven, it has run for well over a century and draws Italian families from across the region, East Haven included.
Which Catholic churches served the Italians in East Haven?
St. Vincent de Paul on Taylor Avenue, dedicated in 1914, and Our Lady of Pompeii on Foxon Road, dedicated in 1947, were the two great Italian anchors. With St. Clare and St. Bernadette they merged in 2017 into St. Pio of Pietrelcina Parish.
What is New Haven style apizza and why is it in East Haven?
Apizza, pronounced ah-BEETS, is the thin, charred, coal- or wood-fired pizza developed by Amalfitano immigrant bakers in New Haven. As Italian families settled in East Haven, the tradition came with them, and Foxon Road today is lined with apizza shops like Capotorto’s.
How did Italians first get from New Haven to East Haven?
Many rode the Shore Line trolley, whose passenger service began in 1900 and ran from downtown New Haven through East Haven to Branford. It let families live in shoreline cottages while working in the city, and that line is now preserved by the Shore Line Trolley Museum.
If your family’s story passed through East Haven, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hillside lane in Amalfi or Atrani, to a cottage near Cosey Beach and a pew at Our Lady of Pompeii, to wherever you are now.