On a humid July evening in East Utica, the smell of pizza fritta drifts down Jay Street, a brass band tunes up outside a church whose cornerstone was blessed in 1901, and a hundred-odd families queue for tomato pie sold cold by the square. This is the heart of the Italians in Utica, New York: a community that, at its peak, made up nearly a ninth of a small upstate mill city, and which still shapes how the whole town eats, prays and votes.
The Place
Utica sits on the Mohawk River in central New York, midway between Albany and Syracuse, a city built on textile mills, knitting factories and the railroads that ran through them. For most of the twentieth century it was a working town of canals, brick smokestacks and dense ward neighbourhoods packed close to the factories.
The 2026 population is roughly 62,500, a fraction of the industrial-era peak. Italian remains the single largest reported ancestry in the city, around 12 per cent of residents, ahead of every other group. East Utica, the old Fifth Ward, is where that story began.
How It Became Italian
Utica was not an obvious destination for southern Italians. It had no Italian colony to speak of in 1880. What it had was work: railroads to lay, brickyards firing clay along the river, and textile mills that wanted hands willing to take factory shifts.
The first arrivals, 1870s and 1880s
Many of the first Italians reached Utica not as settlers but as migratory labourers, sent up from New York City in crews to lay railroad track through the 1870s and 1880s. The West Shore Railroad, completed in 1883, drew hundreds of them into the area.
Some stayed. Where the railroad ended, the brickyards and the knitting mills began, and a man who had come for a season could find a year-round wage. By the late 1880s a recognisable Italian settlement had taken root in the city’s Fifth Ward, on the east side, close to the factories.
A colony takes shape
By 1902 the community was substantial. A contemporary account counted some 6,000 Italians in the city, roughly one-ninth of the population, concentrated so tightly along Bleecker Street that a reporter walking two blocks could find barely two dozen non-Italian surnames.
The historian Philip A. Bean, who wrote the standard study of the community, “The Urban Colonists: Italian American Identity and Politics in Utica, New York,” noted something striking about that concentration. Italians constituted a higher percentage of the foreign-born and of the overall population in Utica than they did in New York City, Chicago or Philadelphia. The colony was small in absolute numbers but unusually dense.
Bleecker Street became the spine of it. Salumerias and groceries, barber shops, ice cream parlours, shoe stores and saloons lined the blocks from First Street toward the avenues. A three-storey red brick building called the Roma Hotel housed a bank, a newspaper office and a steamship agency under one roof, the kind of one-stop institution that let a newcomer wire money home, buy a return ticket and read the news in Italian.
Building the parish
The community organised itself around a church. In 1895 a lot was purchased between Catherine and Jay Streets, and the architect A. J. Grenier was hired for 150 dollars to design a building. Excavation began on 23 April 1896.
The first Mass was celebrated on Sunday 20 December 1896 by Father Antonino Castelli, in what was in reality only the basement of the planned church. In 1900, under Castelli, a 10,000 dollar loan from the Utica Savings Bank funded the upper church. On 15 September 1901, Bishop Scalabrini, the Italian prelate later canonised as the patron of migrants, blessed the cornerstone.
That parish, St. Mary of Mount Carmel at 648 Jay Street, became the spiritual and social centre of East Utica’s Italians, and it remains an active parish today as St. Mary of Mount Carmel / Blessed Sacrament.
A Methodist mission, too
Not every institution that served the colony was Catholic. The Women’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church opened an Italian Settlement House on Mary Street, completed in May 1912 at a cost of 23,000 dollars. It ran a kindergarten, sewing classes, boys’ clubs, domestic science and, above all, English lessons, a quieter counterpart to the parish across the ward.
From ward to political bloc
What set Utica’s Italians apart was how fast they moved into politics. The community formed a coherent voting bloc unusually early, and by 1910 Italian candidates were being elected to office in the city on a regular basis.
The influence reached beyond Utica. Historians generally credit the East Utica Italian community as the spark that helped ignite Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1928 campaign for governor of New York. For a colony that had begun as railroad gangs four decades earlier, that was a remarkable arrival.
The Landmarks
St. Mary of Mount Carmel / Blessed Sacrament Church, 648 Jay Street. The mother church of Italian Utica, its basement chapel first used in 1896 and its cornerstone blessed by Bishop Scalabrini in 1901. Its annual Italian Festival, held on Jay Street each summer with pizza fritta, a flea market and a five-figure raffle, is still the high point of the East Utica year.
O’Scugnizzo Pizzeria, 614 Bleecker Street. Founded in 1914 by Eugenio Brullino, a Neapolitan who had emigrated the year before and started by selling tomato pies for a nickel a square. It is recognised as one of the oldest continuously operating pizzerias in the United States, famous for its upside-down pie with the cheese under the sauce.
Florentine Pastry Shop, 667 Bleecker Street. An old-line Bleecker Street bakery known for “pusties,” the local name for pasticciotti, the single-serving custard tarts that generations of Uticans buy by the boxful. It anchors a stretch of the street where Italian bakeries still cluster a few doors apart.
Caruso’s Pastry Shoppe, 707 Bleecker Street. A few doors from the Florentine, Caruso’s is the address Uticans name for sausage rolls and for the spreads that fill Communion and holiday tables across the east side. The two shops between them define what a Bleecker Street pastry box looks like.
Chesterfield Restaurant, Bleecker Street. A long-running East Utica institution that lays claim to inventing chicken riggies, the city’s defining pasta dish. Whether or not the claim holds, the restaurant sits squarely in the tradition of Italian-American cooking that Utica turned into a regional cuisine.
The Roma Hotel, Bleecker Street. The three-storey red brick building that, in the colony’s early years, combined a bank, an Italian newspaper office and a steamship agency. It captured what the immigrant district was: not just a place to live but a self-contained machine for sending money, news and people back and forth across the Atlantic.
Utica University Ethnic Heritage Studies Center. Now part of Utica University, the centre collects and preserves the records and oral histories of the city’s immigrant communities, the Italians foremost among them, keeping the documentary memory of East Utica intact for researchers and descendants.
Where They Came From
Utica’s Italians were overwhelmingly southerners. Contemporary accounts describe the Fifth Ward as settled by immigrants “from the south of Italy,” part of the great mezzogiorno emigration that, after 1890, drew chiefly from Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily.
Basilicata and Abruzzo in particular saw enormous outflows in these years, with whole provinces losing more than two per cent of their people annually in the peak period before the First World War. The men who founded O’Scugnizzo came from Naples and the Campanian coast; many others came from the poorer interior hill towns.
The mechanism was chain migration: a man who found steady work in a Utica brickyard or knitting mill would send for a brother, a cousin, a neighbour from the same village, until a single Italian comune might be heavily represented on a single Utica street. The colony’s density was the visible trace of those village-to-ward chains.
Utica Today
The mills are long closed and the city is far smaller than it was, but Italian Utica did not disappear. It diffused. Italian remains the largest single ancestry in the city, and the institutions of the old Fifth Ward are still standing and still working.
The clearest proof is on the plate. Utica gave the wider region a cuisine that is genuinely its own. Chicken riggies, rigatoni with chicken and hot and sweet peppers in a spicy tomato-cream sauce, surged in popularity from the 1960s and 1970s and is claimed by several East Utica kitchens. Utica greens, escarole sautéed with garlic, cherry peppers, prosciutto and breadcrumbs, came up out of frugal home cooking in the 1980s and onto every Italian-American menu in the valley. Tomato pie, sold cold by the square, predates them both. These are not nostalgia dishes; they are what central New York eats now.
Utica is also, famously, a refugee city, having taken in Bosnians, Karen, Somali Bantu and others over the past three decades. That second chapter rhymes with the first. The Italians who arrived as railroad gangs and built a colony around a basement church in 1896 set the template: a small upstate city absorbing newcomers, putting them to work, and being remade in the process. East Utica’s pastry shops and its July festival are what the first version of that story looks like, a century and a quarter on.
The story connects outward, too. The same southern Italian migration that filled East Utica filled Italian Norristown in Pennsylvania and the older colonies downstate, from the Italians of Ozone Park to the Italian community of Commack on Long Island. Across the river in New Jersey, the same villages seeded Belleville’s Italian community. And Utica’s wider immigrant tradition runs alongside other upstate stories, from the Ukrainians of Cohoes to the Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Italians first settle in Utica, New York?
The first Italians came to Utica mainly as migratory railroad labourers in the 1870s and 1880s, with the West Shore Railroad of 1883 drawing hundreds into the area. A permanent colony took shape in the Fifth Ward, on the east side, by the late 1880s. By 1902 there were roughly 6,000 Italians in the city.
Where do the Italians in Utica live?
The historic centre is East Utica, the old Fifth Ward, anchored by Bleecker Street and Jay Street. This is where the Italians in Utica built their first church, their bakeries and their businesses, and where the annual Italian festival is still held today.
Why are there so many Italians in Utica?
Industrial work pulled them in: railroads, brickyards and textile and knitting mills all needed labour at the turn of the twentieth century. Chain migration did the rest, as early arrivals sent for relatives and neighbours from the same southern Italian villages. At its peak the colony made up nearly a ninth of the city.
What region of Italy did Utica’s Italians come from?
Overwhelmingly the south, the mezzogiorno: Campania, Basilicata, Abruzzo, Calabria, Sicily and the neighbouring regions that dominated Italian emigration after 1890. The founder of O’Scugnizzo Pizzeria, for instance, came from Naples in Campania.
What is Utica tomato pie and where did it come from?
Tomato pie is a thick, focaccia-style square of dough topped with sauce and a dusting of grated cheese, usually eaten cold or at room temperature rather than hot. It was brought by southern Italian immigrants and is sold at bakeries and at O’Scugnizzo Pizzeria, which has made it since 1914.
Are the Italians still a major community in Utica today?
Yes. Italian is still the single largest reported ancestry in Utica, around 12 per cent of residents. The old parish of St. Mary of Mount Carmel is active, Bleecker Street’s Italian bakeries are open, and Utica’s signature dishes, chicken riggies and Utica greens, remain Italian-American inventions that define how the whole region eats.
If your family’s story passed through Utica, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hill town in Basilicata or a Naples backstreet to a basement church off Bleecker Street, to wherever you are now.