Walk the length of Shrewsbury Street on a Friday evening and the air carries garlic, wood smoke from a pizza oven, and the low hum of a hundred dinner conversations. This mile of road, running east from Belmont Street down to Washington Square, is where the Italians in Worcester, Massachusetts, built a world of their own. They came as labourers and stonemasons and ended up owning the butcher shop, the bakery, the bank, and eventually the city’s whole idea of a good night out.
The Place
Worcester is the second largest city in New England, a former mill town of roughly 216,000 people set in the rolling hills of central Massachusetts, about 40 miles west of Boston. For most of the nineteenth century it ran on metal, wire, machine tools, and abrasives, and it pulled in waves of immigrant labour to feed those factories.
Shrewsbury Street sits on the city’s East Side, a long commercial spine that climbs gently away from downtown. Locals call it Worcester’s Little Italy, and for once the nickname is earned rather than invented for tourists. The street is the dining capital of the city, lined end to end with restaurants, and it still anchors itself around Cristoforo Colombo Park, the green heart the Italian community claimed as its own.
How It Became Italian
Italians arrived in Worcester relatively late among the city’s immigrant groups. The Irish, Swedes, French Canadians, and others had already filled the early mill jobs through the mid-nineteenth century. The great Italian arrival came in the 1880s, 1890s, and the first years of the twentieth century, part of the enormous southern Italian migration that reshaped industrial New England.
Work first, neighbourhood second
The men came for labour. Worcester was a city of wire, machine tools, and construction, and an expanding industrial city needed strong backs for the heavy and dangerous work that earlier immigrants were leaving behind. Many arrived through the padrone system, the labour brokers who recruited peasants from the Italian south, found them work gangs and tenement beds, and skimmed a punishing cut of their wages.
They settled at first on the East Side, in the low ground below the hills, close to the rail yards and the factories. It was cheap, crowded, and near the work. From those tenement blocks grew the streets that would define Italian Worcester for a century. The pattern echoed the older Italian enclaves of the region, from the Italians who settled in Everett to the tight industrial wards of Belleville, New Jersey.
Building a church of their own
A community measured its permanence by its church, and Worcester’s Italians wanted their own. The first attempt came in 1894, when Father Vincent Magliore gathered around 700 Italian worshippers at St Stephen’s Church, though the effort to form a separate parish stalled.
Success came the following decade. In 1904 a mission chapel was bought from the First Swedish Baptist Church at the foot of Normal Hill, and on 4 November 1906 it was dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel. It was Worcester’s first Italian national parish, a church built by and for the Italian community.
The congregation grew faster than the building could hold. In the late 1920s the parish raised more than $100,000, much of it in cash from immigrant families, and began construction of a grand Romanesque church on Mulberry Street in 1929. For the better part of a century that church on the hill was the spiritual centre of Italian Worcester, the place where the community baptised, married, and buried its own.
From corner shops to restaurant row
Shrewsbury Street in the first half of the twentieth century was a street of small Italian shops and tradesmen. The Italians brought their culture and their love of food, and they opened the fresh markets, the salumerias, and the bakeries that fed the neighbourhood.
A single building put up in 1911 captured the whole world of the street under one roof, housing an Italian language newspaper, several Italian doctors, a dry goods store, bakeries, a shoe shop, and a restaurant. Early business leaders such as the Laraia family moved from real estate into banking, opening financial services for Italian families around 1924 when the established banks would not.
Those food markets are the ancestors of today’s restaurant row. The Wonder Bar opened in 1922 and has fed the street, with one closure and a family rescue, for more than a century. The fresh markets became trattorias, the trattorias became destinations, and slowly the whole city learned to come to the Italians for dinner.
The highway and the long change
The hardest blow to the old neighbourhood came in the 1960s, when Interstate 290 was driven straight through the middle of Worcester. Homes were demolished, blocks erased, and the dense Italian East Side that had clustered around Mulberry Street and the church was permanently divided. The highway took the ground from under one version of the community even as Shrewsbury Street, a little to the north, kept going.
The slow ebb continued for decades. Families prospered and moved out to the suburbs of Shrewsbury, Holden, and beyond, much as other Massachusetts immigrant communities have dispersed, from the Greeks of Peabody to the Portuguese of Taunton. The Mulberry Street church, neglected and structurally unsafe, was finally demolished in September 2019, a heavy loss for the people who had paid for it stone by stone. The parish itself survives, merged in 2017 into Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Our Lady of Loreto.
The Landmarks
Shrewsbury Street. The mile of road between Belmont Street and Washington Square is the whole story in one line. Worcester’s traditional Little Italy and the city’s dining capital, it carries the Italian Heritage Parade westbound along its length every autumn and remains the address every Worcester family thinks of first when they think of Italian food.
Cristoforo Colombo Park, Shrewsbury Street, Worcester. Formally Chandler Hill Park, the city took title to it on 6 December 1909, and in 1977 renamed it for Christopher Columbus, claiming it for the Italian community. Two stone griffins, salvaged in 1916 from the old Union Railroad Station train shed, flank the entrance and have guarded the park ever since.
Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Mulberry Street, Worcester. The Romanesque church begun in 1929 was built by Italian immigrants who paid cash, and it stood as the parish heart of Italian Worcester for ninety years. Deemed structurally unsafe, it was demolished in September 2019, though the parish itself continues under a merged name.
The Wonder Bar, 121 Shrewsbury Street, Worcester. A pizza institution since 1922, the Wonder Bar is one of the oldest continuously remembered names on the street. After the original owners retired and it closed in 2014, Frank Prizio and his family reopened the landmark rather than let it disappear.
Volturno, 72 Shrewsbury Street, Worcester. Housed in a former Buick dealership, Volturno was the first restaurant in Massachusetts to earn certification from the Associazione Verace Pizzaiuoli Napoletani for true Neapolitan pizza. It is proof that the street’s Italian food tradition is still being renewed by a younger generation, not merely preserved.
Coral Seafood, Shrewsbury Street, Worcester. A long-running fixture of restaurant row, Coral Seafood is one of the Italian American family establishments that turned Shrewsbury Street from a strip of corner markets into a regional dining destination. It sits among dozens of restaurants that now define the street’s character.
Pepe’s Italian Restaurant, Shrewsbury Street, Worcester. Pepe’s car park becomes the festival ground each October, hosting the food, music, and stalls that accompany the Italian Heritage Parade. The restaurant is one of the family-run anchors that keep the street’s calendar tied to the Italian community’s year.
Where They Came From
Worcester’s Italians were overwhelmingly from the south, part of the same vast wave that filled the North End of Boston and the Little Italys of Hartford and Springfield. They came from the small communes and hamlets of the Mezzogiorno, the regions around Naples and Avellino and the provinces deeper south, leaving on whatever transport they could find for the long road to the port of Naples. The same southern origin links Worcester to Italian neighbourhoods across the country, from Ozone Park in Queens to the mill towns of Norristown, Pennsylvania.
They left land that could not support them. The southern Italian countryside in the late nineteenth century offered poverty, heavy taxes, and shrinking farms, and America offered wages. Word travelled back along chains of family and village, so that a single hamlet might send its young men one after another to the same Worcester street, the same factory gate, the same boarding house.
That chain migration is why Italian Worcester felt like a transplanted village rather than a random scattering. Neighbours in the old country became neighbours again on the East Side, and the saints they carried with them, including Our Lady of Mount Carmel, were the saints of the towns they had left.
Worcester Today
Worcester remains, after Boston, the second largest Italian American community in Massachusetts. The city counts roughly 18,000 residents of Italian ancestry, about 4.9 per cent of the population, and around the Shrewsbury Street district that share runs closer to 13 per cent. The numbers are smaller than they once were, but the imprint is permanent.
The street itself has changed in the way successful immigrant neighbourhoods always do. Shrewsbury Street is now a destination for the whole city and a welcoming home to many cultures, its restaurants no longer exclusively Italian. The old corner markets and salumerias have given way to a dense run of dining rooms, and the families who built the street have largely moved to the suburbs, returning for dinner and for the feast.
The community keeps its calendar alive in public. The Shrewsbury Street Italian Heritage Parade, revived in 2022 as the successor to the discontinued Columbus Day parade, steps off at noon and marches the length of the street, with a festival in Pepe’s car park and a soccer tournament and children’s games at Cristoforo Colombo Park. The church on Mulberry Street is gone, but the parade, the park, and the table remain, and on Shrewsbury Street that is more than enough to keep a heritage standing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do the Italians in Worcester, Massachusetts, live?
The historic centre of the Italian community is Shrewsbury Street on the city’s East Side, the mile of road between Belmont Street and Washington Square known as Worcester’s Little Italy. The community originally clustered in the dense East Side neighbourhood around Mulberry Street, and many families have since moved to suburbs such as Shrewsbury and Holden while keeping their ties to the old street.
When did Italians first settle in Worcester?
The major Italian arrival came in the 1880s, 1890s, and the early 1900s, later than the city’s Irish, Swedish, and French Canadian immigrants. Worcester’s first Italian Catholic parish, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, was dedicated in 1906, which marked the community’s arrival as a settled and permanent part of the city.
How many Italian Americans live in Worcester?
Worcester is home to roughly 18,000 residents of Italian ancestry, about 4.9 per cent of the city, making it the second largest Italian American community in Massachusetts after Boston. In and around the Shrewsbury Street district, the Italian share of residents is considerably higher, near 13 per cent.
Why is Shrewsbury Street called Little Italy?
Italian immigrants settled along Shrewsbury Street in the early twentieth century and filled it with their own butcher shops, bakeries, markets, and tradesmen. Those fresh food markets evolved over the decades into the dense row of restaurants the street is famous for today, which is why it remains the heart of the Italians in Worcester, Massachusetts.
What happened to Our Lady of Mount Carmel church?
The Romanesque church on Mulberry Street, built with cash by Italian immigrant families and begun in 1929, was demolished in September 2019 after years of neglect left it structurally unsafe. The parish survives, having merged in 2017 into Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Our Lady of Loreto.
Is there an Italian festival in Worcester?
Yes. The Shrewsbury Street Italian Heritage Parade, revived in 2022 as successor to the old Columbus Day parade, marches the length of Shrewsbury Street each October, with a festival at Pepe’s Italian Restaurant and activities at Cristoforo Colombo Park.
If your family’s story passed through Worcester, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hamlet near Avellino to a tenement on the East Side, to a table on Shrewsbury Street, to wherever you are now.