They called it Little Italy of Pittsburgh. Not on any map, not on any city sign, but every August the proof spills out onto Liberty Avenue: bocce on a court chalked across Cedarville Street, a procession behind a saint carved in plaster, the smell of frying dough and gravy meat drifting past storefronts that have changed hands a dozen times but still answer to Italian names. From the early 1900s through to the long postwar tail, if you walked the four blocks of Liberty between the Bloomfield Bridge and the old Immaculate Conception, you were standing inside Abruzzo. The street remembers.
The Place
Bloomfield sits on a plateau three miles east of downtown Pittsburgh, a long ridge of brick rowhouses and tight side streets perched above the Allegheny River. It is bordered by Garfield to the north, Friendship to the east, Shadyside to the south, Polish Hill to the southwest, and Lawrenceville to the west. The 1914 Bloomfield Bridge spans Skunk Hollow to Polish Hill and Oakland beyond it, carrying generations of Italian Catholics to work and Polish Catholics back to their own parish.
Liberty Avenue is the spine. Four busy blocks of awnings, neon, and second-floor apartments above shopfronts, running diagonally through the neighbourhood like a stripe of red sauce. The cross streets, Cedarville, Edmond, Pearl, Taylor, are where the families lived and where, in some houses, they still do.
How It Became Italian
Before the Italians
Bloomfield was German first. In the decades after 1868, German Catholic immigrants laid out the streets, opened the bakeries, and in 1886 built St. Joseph’s Church on Liberty Avenue as their parish home. The neighbourhood’s name itself nods to that earlier wave: the rolling open fields east of the city, the bloom of orchards above the river.
By the 1890s the Pennsylvania Railroad was running freight along the southern edge of the plateau, and the steel mills down in Lawrenceville and along the Allegheny were hungry for labour. The Germans were rising. New arrivals were needed.
The First Wave, 1890s to the 1920s
The Italians began arriving around 1900, and within twenty years they had reshaped the neighbourhood. They came almost entirely from a handful of mountain villages in Abruzzo, in central Italy: Pescocostanzo, Rivisondoli, Roccacinquemiglia, Palena, Forli del Sannio, Ateleta, and the towns ringing Sulmona, including Pacentro, the village in the hills above the valley. A second stream came from Calabria, and a smaller one from Sicily.
They were drawn by the same engines that pulled the Germans: the Pennsylvania Railroad cuts, the steel mills, the foundries, the construction crews paving and bridging a city that was doubling in size. They followed family. One brother sent for the next, one cousin wrote home for another, and entire streets in Bloomfield filled with people who had grown up within sight of the same Abruzzese church bell.
The Italians of Bloomfield were unusual for how strongly they kept campanilismo, the loyalty to one’s home village. You were not simply Italian. You were from Pescocostanzo, or from Ateleta, and that mattered for who you married, who you trusted, who you stood with at Mass.
The Parish, 1905
In 1905 the Italians organised their own parish, Immaculate Conception, and within a year they had built the first church on a small lot off Liberty Avenue, behind the row of storefronts on the east side of the street. It was the catalyst. A parish meant baptisms, funerals, a school, a feast day, a place where the village priest’s Italian could be heard from the altar instead of the German Latin down at St. Joseph’s.
The first building burned in 1925 and was rebuilt and enlarged. The modernist church that most Pittsburghers picture today, with its sweeping concrete arches, was dedicated by Cardinal Wright in 1960. By then the parish had been the spiritual centre of Italian Bloomfield for half a century.
Bloomfield at Its Peak
Between the wars and through the 1950s, Bloomfield was as Italian as any neighbourhood in the eastern half of the country. The mutual aid societies were everywhere. The Ateleta Beneficial Association, founded by immigrants from that single Abruzzese village, built a clubhouse on Cedarville Street in 1927. Other societies followed, each one a kind of insurance policy stitched out of memory: dues paid in, sickness benefits paid out, banquets held on the saint’s day of the home village.
Liberty Avenue filled with Italian businesses. Grocers, butchers, bakers, tailors, shoemakers, undertakers, all of it in a four-block stretch where a housewife could finish her shopping in an hour without speaking a word of English. Children walked from the row houses on Pearl Street to the parish school. Men carried lunch pails down to the mills. On Sunday the smell of gravy started before nine in the morning.
The Change
A second Italian wave arrived right after the Second World War, when Abruzzo, ravaged by German occupation, sent another generation across the Atlantic. They reinforced the neighbourhood for one more decade. But the postwar story for working-class Italians, here as elsewhere, was the move out: to Penn Hills, to Plum, to Verona, to Springdale, anywhere with a yard and a driveway and a parish closer to the new subdivision than to the old block. The grandchildren of the Pescocostanzo immigrants grew up in the suburbs and drove back to Bloomfield on Sundays for the food and the funeral Mass.
The Landmarks
Immaculate Conception Church, 4071 Liberty Avenue. Organised as the Italian national parish in 1905, the church anchored Bloomfield’s Italian identity for over a century. The modernist 1960 building, designed by Belli & Belli of Chicago and dedicated by Cardinal Wright, replaced the original Gothic Revival structure damaged by fire in 1925. The parish merged with St. Joseph’s in 2001, and the church closed in 2022 with demolition then under review, but the structure remains the visual landmark of Italian Bloomfield.
St. Maria Goretti Parish, 321 Edmond Street. The current parish name for the merged Immaculate Conception congregation, established in 2012 when Immaculate Conception and St. Joseph were combined with St. Lawrence O’Toole in Garfield. The Edmond Street address sits behind the Liberty Avenue storefronts, on the small block where Italian Bloomfield held its feast-day processions.
Donatelli’s Italian Food Center, 4711 Liberty Avenue. Frank Donatelli, the son of Calabrian immigrants, opened his grocery in 1932 and ran it through the Depression on a tab and a handshake. His son Paul took over in 1975 and his grandchildren after that. For ninety years it was the place you went for prosciutto sliced thin enough to read through, fresh sausage in two heats, and the kind of olive oil people drove in from Penn Hills to buy. Donatelli’s closed in August 2022. The storefront is still there. Many Bloomfielders are still not over it.
Pleasure Bar, 4729 Liberty Avenue. Opened in 1941 by the Collinger family, the Pleasure Bar has been pouring Iron City and serving Italian-American cooking on the same corner of Liberty for over eighty years. Pittsburgh Hornets hockey players drank here in the 1960s. During Little Italy Days the bocce court is set up on Cedarville Street right next to the bar, which is exactly where it belongs.
Tessaro’s, 4601 Liberty Avenue. Newer to the Italian story but woven into the Bloomfield one. The building dates to about 1892. Richard Tessaro bought the bar in 1982 and gave it his name, and the Harringtons took it over in 1985 and built the hardwood-grill burger that the city has been arguing about ever since. Not strictly an Italian house, but a Bloomfield house, and on Liberty Avenue that is most of what counts.
The Ateleta Beneficial Association clubhouse, Cedarville Street. Built in 1927 by immigrants from the single Abruzzese village of Ateleta, the clubhouse is the most concrete artefact left of how this neighbourhood actually worked. A village, recreated on a side street, three thousand miles from home, with its own dues book and its own saint’s day.
Little Italy Days, Liberty Avenue. Launched in 2002 by the Bloomfield Business Association to put a spotlight on the neighbourhood’s heritage, the festival has grown into a four-day affair every August. Liberty Avenue closes to traffic. There is a bocce court, a sauce contest, a Mass, a procession, accordions, and a great deal of meatball. It is the day Bloomfield’s diaspora drives back in from the suburbs to remember who they are.
Where They Came From
The Italians of Bloomfield were overwhelmingly Abruzzese, and to a degree that surprised even sociologists at the time, they were from a tight cluster of mountain villages around Sulmona and the Maiella massif. Pescocostanzo, Rivisondoli, Roccacinquemiglia, Palena, Ateleta, Pacentro, Forli del Sannio. These are not large places. They were towns of a few thousand people each, perched at high elevation, with stone houses and a single bell tower, and they emptied themselves out into Pittsburgh’s eastern plateau over forty years.
A smaller but real share came from Calabria, in the far south, and a smaller share again from Sicily. The Donatellis were Calabrian. Most of the parish was Abruzzese. The campanilismo that defined daily life in Bloomfield, the sense that the family from the next street over were not quite your own people because they were from the next valley over, came directly out of that geography.
Bloomfield Today
The Italian community in Bloomfield is older, smaller, and more dispersed than it has been in a century. Most of the grandchildren of the original immigrants live in Penn Hills, Plum, Verona, or further out into Westmoreland County, and they come back for Little Italy Days, a funeral, or a Sunday lunch at Pleasure Bar.
Liberty Avenue itself has been gentrifying for fifteen years, pulled by spillover from a fast-changing Lawrenceville next door. Vacant storefronts have filled with cocktail bars, coffee roasters, and restaurants that cook a kind of cuisine that has nothing to do with Sunday gravy. Del’s Ristorante is gone. Donatelli’s is gone. Groceria Italiana, on Cedarville Street since 1929, closed in 2023.
And yet. The church still stands. The Pleasure Bar still pours. The Ateleta clubhouse is still on Cedarville Street. The festival each August grows, not shrinks, and the children of the children of Pescocostanzo are now driving in from the suburbs with their own children to teach them how to roll meatballs and how to throw a bocce ball. Bloomfield’s Italian story is not over. It has simply moved house, the way Italian stories tend to.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle in Bloomfield, Pittsburgh?
Italians began arriving in Bloomfield around 1900, drawn by work in the steel mills, on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and in the construction crews building out east Pittsburgh. Chain migration from a small cluster of Abruzzese villages, especially Pescocostanzo, Rivisondoli, and Ateleta, concentrated the community on Liberty Avenue and its side streets, where a new Italian national parish, Immaculate Conception, was organised in 1905.
Is Bloomfield still Italian today?
Bloomfield is still called Little Italy of Pittsburgh, but the resident Italian community is older and smaller than it was at its peak. Most descendants now live in the eastern suburbs of Penn Hills, Plum, Verona, and Springdale, and return to Bloomfield for Mass, family meals, and the annual Little Italy Days festival in August.
What are the most famous Italian landmarks in Bloomfield?
The key landmarks are Immaculate Conception Church at 4071 Liberty Avenue (the historic Italian national parish, organised in 1905), the former Donatelli’s Italian Food Center at 4711 Liberty Avenue (1932 to 2022), the Pleasure Bar at 4729 Liberty Avenue (opened 1941), Tessaro’s at 4601 Liberty Avenue, and the Ateleta Beneficial Association clubhouse on Cedarville Street (built 1927). The annual Little Italy Days festival, launched in 2002, runs along Liberty Avenue every August.
Where in Italy did the Bloomfield Italians come from?
The overwhelming majority came from a handful of mountain villages in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, especially Pescocostanzo, Rivisondoli, Roccacinquemiglia, Palena, Ateleta, Pacentro, and Forli del Sannio, in the hills around Sulmona. Smaller streams of immigration came from Calabria in the south and from Sicily.
When did Italians first arrive in Bloomfield?
Italian immigration to Bloomfield began in the 1890s and accelerated rapidly around 1900. The community was large enough by 1905 to organise its own national parish, Immaculate Conception. A second significant wave arrived after the Second World War, when many Abruzzesi, displaced by German occupation, came to join family already in Pittsburgh.
What is Little Italy Days in Bloomfield?
Little Italy Days is a four-day Italian heritage festival held every August on Liberty Avenue, launched in 2002 by the Bloomfield Business Association to spotlight the neighbourhood’s Italian roots. It features a bocce court on Cedarville Street, a sauce competition, a procession, live music, and food from the surviving Italian-owned businesses along Liberty. It is the largest single gathering of Bloomfield’s Italian diaspora each year.
If your family’s story passed through Bloomfield, or any of the Abruzzese villages that made it, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a stone house in Pescocostanzo to a rowhouse on Pearl Street, to wherever you are now.