On a summer Friday on the North Side of Endicott, the smell reaches you before the music does. Vinegar, lemon, garlic, mint and charring meat, drifting up Witherill Street from the grills of GUSTO! It is the smell of the spiedie, and it is the smell the Italians in Endicott carried here from the mountains of Abruzzo more than a century ago. This small village in New York’s Southern Tier was built by shoes, computers and the people who made both. A great many of those people were Italian.
The Place
Endicott sits on the Susquehanna River in Broome County, part of the cluster of Southern Tier towns once known as the Triple Cities. It was incorporated as a village in 1906, named for Henry B. Endicott, the Massachusetts shoemaker who had bought the struggling Lester Brothers Boot and Shoe Company in 1890.
Endicott was never an accident of geography. It was a company town, planned and paid for by the Endicott Johnson Corporation, and its prosperity was deliberate. The village today is small, with a population of roughly 13,000, and its fortunes have risen and fallen with its two great employers.
Those employers were extraordinary. One made shoes for the world. The other, founded here in 1911, became IBM.
How It Became Italian
The Square Deal and the call for labour
The man who made Endicott Italian did not mean to. George F. Johnson, a former factory foreman who became Henry Endicott’s partner in 1899, simply needed workers, and he needed a great many of them.
Johnson built a labour philosophy he called the Square Deal. He offered company-financed homes whose title reverted to the worker once the loan was paid, free medical care, libraries, parks, swimming pools and carousels. In 1920 his employees built two stone arches at the village entrances to honour him, each bearing the words “Home of the Square Deal.” The story of the company is told in detail by the Endicott Johnson Corporation’s Wikipedia entry.
That reputation travelled. It travelled across the Atlantic to southern Italy, where word spread that a shoe man in upstate New York would house you, doctor you and pay you fairly. Between roughly 1900 and 1940 Italians arrived in Endicott in their thousands to answer the demand. The pattern repeated across the state, from the Italians of Commack on Long Island to the close-knit Italian enclave of Ozone Park in Queens.
Settling the North Side
The Italians settled predominantly on the North Side of the village, in the streets around Oak Hill Avenue and Odell Avenue. Many came first to the tanneries, the hardest and most pungent work in the shoe trade, before moving into the machine shops and technical units. The North Side became known, simply and permanently, as Little Italy, much as factory wages drew Italians to the mill streets of Belleville, New Jersey and the industrial blocks of Norristown, Pennsylvania.
By 1913 the colony was large enough to need its own church. That September the Bishop of Syracuse placed the Rev. Matthew Pellegrini in charge of the Italian parish of Binghamton and Endicott, and a spiritual adviser to the Italians of Endicott and Union counted more than 700 of them.
Early in 1914 a committee of North Side Italians began taking up a collection for a building fund of their own. The Endicott Johnson Corporation donated three lots at the corner of Odell Avenue and Witherill Street. The cornerstone of St. Anthony of Padua church was laid in June 1917, and the completed church was blessed and dedicated on 30 June 1918.
Societies and self-help
Italians in Endicott did not wait for institutions to be built for them. In 1914 a group founded the Society Duca Degli Abruzzi, named for Luigi Amadeo, the Duke of the Abruzzi, an Italian nobleman and explorer. Its aim was mutual protection: helping immigrants become citizens, providing sickness and death benefits, opening doors to education.
In 1915 the society affiliated with the Order of Sons of Italy in America, which had been founded in New York City a decade earlier. The Johnsons, true to form, donated land and 20,000 dollars toward a permanent home. Ground was broken in 1923, and the Sons of Italy building on Odell Avenue opened in 1924.
It took the members twenty-two years to clear the mortgage. When they finally did, in 1937, they marked it the only way that felt right: a mortgage burning ceremony, a banquet and a dance. A women’s lodge, founded in 1933 as the Principessa Maria Di Piemonte, ran alongside it.
From shoes to circuits
The second generation did not stay in the tanneries. When the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, founded in Endicott in 1911, grew into International Business Machines in 1924, it drew its workforce from the same streets that had supplied Endicott Johnson.
Scores of IBM’s machinists, engineers and clerks were the sons and daughters of immigrants who had cut leather a generation before. An Italian name on a North Side mailbox in 1915 might belong to a tannery hand. By 1955 the same name might belong to a man building punched-card machines that would change the world.
Endicott was one note in a wider chorus of immigrant New York, from the Ukrainian mill families of Cohoes on the Mohawk to the Hasidic Jewish village of Kiryas Joel in the Hudson Valley. Each built its own institutions; Endicott’s Italians built theirs around shoes, faith and food.
The Landmarks
St. Anthony of Padua Church, corner of Odell Avenue and Witherill Street. Born in 1917 as the parish of the North Side Italians, on three lots given by Endicott Johnson, it remains the spiritual anchor of Little Italy. It is now part of the North Endicott Catholic Community, but the patron saint of Padua still watches over the same streets the founders walked.
The Sons of Italy building, Odell Avenue. Opened in 1924 with help from the Johnsons, it housed the Society Duca Degli Abruzzi and its successors for the best part of a century. The 1937 mortgage-burning here was less about money than about arrival: an immigrant fraternity that owned, free and clear, a building of its own.
Little Italy Endicott, Oak Hill Avenue. The heart of the old North Side is now stewarded by the Oak Hill Avenue Improvement Corp, a volunteer body dedicated to preserving the neighbourhood’s Italian immigrant roots. It runs a farmers market, a golf tournament and a heritage centre, and is the reason the name Little Italy still means something here.
Concordia Restaurant, 101 Oak Hill Avenue. In the heart of Little Italy, Concordia took over the building that for nearly eighty years was Consol’s Family Kitchen, carrying forward Consol’s beloved pizza on its own menu. Endicott does not let its kitchens die; it inherits them.
George W. Johnson Park Carousel. One of six carousels George F. Johnson gave to the people of Broome County, built in 1934 by the Allan Herschell Company with 36 jumping horses standing three abreast. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992, it still turns for free, as Johnson always insisted it must.
The Endicott Square Deal Arch, Main Street. Raised by Endicott Johnson employees in 1920 to honour Johnson’s Square Deal, the stone arch reads “Home of the Square Deal.” Dismantled and rebuilt in 1995 to widen Main Street, it was added to the National Register in 2001. For the immigrants it greeted, it was a promise carved in stone.
GUSTO! Italian Festival, Witherill Street. Held each summer between Oak Hill and Hill Avenues, GUSTO! fills the North Side with meatball subs, sausage and peppers, cannoli and pizza fritte, two dozen vendors, live music and fireworks. Its proceeds fund the Little Italy Endicott Heritage Center. Gusto means taste, and the festival is exactly that.
Where They Came From
The Italians of Endicott came overwhelmingly from the south. Many traced their origins to Abruzzo, the mountainous region east of Rome, and the cultural fingerprints are still everywhere on the North Side.
The clearest is on a skewer. The spiedie, Endicott’s signature food, descends directly from the Abruzzese spiedini, cubes of marinated meat grilled over coals. Italian immigrants brought the idea to the Southern Tier in the 1920s. The name comes from spiedo, Italian for spit or skewer.
Two brothers turned a home tradition into a local institution. Camillo, remembered locally as “The Spiedie King,” and his brother Agostino served spiedies at their Park View restaurant in Endicott from around 1938, then opened Augie’s in 1939. The original marinade, which Camillo called Zuzu, was wine vinegar, water, lemon juice, garlic and mint. Today you cannot drive through Broome County without finding it, and the dish has earned its own place in the record as a regional speciality.
The choice of Endicott over a thousand other American towns was rarely random. Chain migration carried whole villages here, one letter at a time. A man who found steady work and a Square Deal house wrote home, and a cousin followed, and then a brother, until a single Abruzzese hill town had a colony on the North Side.
Endicott Today
Endicott is a harder town than it was. IBM, which had supplanted Endicott Johnson as the great employer, drew down from the early 2000s, and in 2023 it did not renew the lease on its final office, ending nearly a century of physical presence in the village where it was born. The population has slipped below 13,000, the median household income sits around 47,000 dollars, and the poverty rate is high.
The Italian imprint, though, has proved more durable than either company. Little Italy still has a large Italian population, and it has organised itself to stay that way. The Oak Hill Avenue Improvement Corp, the GUSTO! festival, the new Little Italy Restaurant Week that debuted in April 2026 with seven establishments, all of it is deliberate, the same instinct for self-help that built St. Anthony’s and the Sons of Italy hall a century ago.
You can still eat a spiedie a short walk from where the tanneries stood. You can still ride a free carousel that a shoe magnate gave the children of his immigrant workers. The shoes are gone and the computers have left, but the people who came to make them, and the food and faith and festivals they brought, are still very much here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Italians in Endicott, New York?
The Italians in Endicott came to work at the Endicott Johnson Corporation’s shoe factories between roughly 1900 and 1940. George F. Johnson’s “Square Deal” policy of company-financed homes, free medical care and fair pay drew thousands of southern Italian immigrants, who settled on the North Side in a neighbourhood that became known as Little Italy.
What is the spiedie and is it really Italian?
The spiedie is Endicott’s signature food: cubes of meat marinated in vinegar, lemon, garlic and mint, then grilled on a skewer. It descends directly from the Abruzzese spiedini brought by Italian immigrants to the Southern Tier in the 1920s, and the name comes from the Italian spiedo, meaning spit or skewer.
Where is Little Italy in Endicott?
Little Italy is the North Side of Endicott, centred on Oak Hill Avenue and the surrounding streets including Odell and Witherill Avenues. It is home to St. Anthony of Padua church, Concordia Restaurant in the former Consol’s building, and the annual GUSTO! Italian Festival.
What is the GUSTO! festival?
GUSTO! is an annual Italian street festival held on Witherill Street between Oak Hill and Hill Avenues, on Endicott’s North Side. It features more than two dozen food vendors, live music and fireworks, and its proceeds support the Little Italy Endicott Heritage Center. The name means “taste” in Italian.
What happened to IBM and Endicott Johnson in Endicott?
The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company was founded in Endicott in 1911 and became IBM in 1924, while Endicott Johnson made shoes for the world. Both employers declined over the decades; IBM did not renew its final Endicott office lease in 2023, ending nearly a century of physical operations in the village.
Is the Italian community in Endicott still active today?
Yes. The Italians in Endicott remain a defining part of the North Side, with the Oak Hill Avenue Improvement Corp preserving the neighbourhood’s heritage, the GUSTO! festival drawing crowds each summer, and a new Little Italy Restaurant Week launched in April 2026. The spiedie and St. Anthony of Padua church keep the immigrant story present.
If your family’s story passed through Endicott, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hill town in Abruzzo to a tannery on Odell Avenue, to a spiedie grilling on Witherill Street, to wherever you are now.