On Court Street at Fourth Place, an American flag and an Italian tricolor hang side by side over a storefront social club, and a second street sign below the green one reads “Citizens of Mola di Bari Way.” Most mornings the men inside are drinking espresso and arguing about soccer in a dialect from a fishing town on the Adriatic, 4,500 miles away. A few doors down, a baker pulls lard bread from an oven that has been in the same spot since the 1930s. The Italians in Carroll Gardens built one of the most concentrated Italian neighborhoods New York ever saw, and this corner is its surviving core.
This was never a generic “Little Italy” like the one on Mulberry Street in Manhattan. They were, to a remarkable degree, one town transplanted whole: the people of Mola di Bari, who came in such numbers that for a stretch in the 1960s more of them lived on these blocks than remained back home.
Carroll Gardens: The Place
Carroll Gardens sits in western Brooklyn, roughly forty blocks bounded by Degraw and Warren Streets to the north, Hoyt and Smith Streets to the east, the Gowanus Expressway near Ninth Street to the south, and the highway trench to the west. It borders Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Gowanus, Red Hook, and the Columbia Street Waterfront District. The F and G trains stop at Carroll Street and Smith-Ninth Streets. The housing is the draw: rows of brownstones set unusually far back from the sidewalk behind deep, planted front yards.
How Carroll Gardens Became Italian
Before the Italians
The gardens came first, and they were an accident of city planning. In 1846 a surveyor named Richard Butts drew up the street grid for the area’s oldest section, and a law that year required houses between Henry and Smith Streets to sit roughly thirty-three feet back from the curb to leave room for courtyards. That is why the blocks of First through Fourth Place still feel like nowhere else in Brooklyn.
The name on the map honored Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, whose Maryland troops had fought nearby during the 1776 Battle of Long Island. For most of the nineteenth century the wider district was simply called South Brooklyn. Irish dockworkers settled here first, drawn by the piers along the waterfront, and the Catholic parish of St. Stephen opened on Carroll and Hicks Streets in 1866 in a wood-frame church bought from an Episcopal congregation.
The Italians Arrive
Italians began arriving in the 1880s, and the waterfront is the reason. The piers of Red Hook and the Brooklyn docks needed muscle, and the work was brutal, casual, and close at hand. Men walked from tenements on Columbia, Hicks, and Union Streets to load and unload cargo as longshoremen, and they put down roots within sight of the cranes.
In 1882 the parish of Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary was founded by Father Joseph Fransioli, the first Roman Catholic parish established specifically for Italian immigrants in the Diocese of Brooklyn. A young nun who would later be canonized, Frances Xavier Cabrini, did missionary work among the neighborhood’s Italians not long after she reached New York in 1889, teaching catechism and tending to immigrant families. The community honored that history in June 2021, unveiling a statue of Mother Cabrini outside the parish.
Then came the wave that defined the neighborhood. From the 1920s onward, and in a flood after the Second World War left their fishing economy with no work, families poured in from a single place: Mola di Bari, a town on the heel of Italy’s boot, in Puglia on the Adriatic coast. They came through chain migration in its purest form, one relative sponsoring the next, all of them aiming at the same dozen blocks where a cousin already had a room and a job on the docks.
Carroll Gardens at Its Peak
From the 1950s into the 1970s, more than ten thousand Italian immigrants settled in Carroll Gardens, and an estimated two thousand or more came from Mola di Bari alone. Club members put the total number of former Molese residents who eventually passed through the neighborhood at around five thousand. By the 1980 census, Italians made up about 52 percent of the population.
Life ran on the parish and the social club. In 1948 immigrants from Mola founded the Maria Santissima Addolorata congregation at the church, dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrows, the patron saint of their hometown. Beginning in 1953 they carried her statue through the streets each September for the feast. In 1960 fourteen teenagers from Mola, tired of being picked on as dockworkers’ kids, started their own clubhouse on Court Street at Fourth Place, the Van Westerhout Cittadini Molesi.
The block was a closed circuit of bakeries, pork stores, coffee roasters, and pastry shops, most run by Sicilian and Pugliese families who knew every customer. On Good Friday, a tradition older than living memory in the parish, black-clad women walked behind a funeral band reciting the rosary in Italian while pallbearers carried statues of the dead Christ and the grieving Mary through the streets. The neighborhood you can still glimpse on Court Street today was, for forty years, simply how everyone lived.
The Change
Robert Moses cut the first wound. Beginning in the late 1940s his Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Gowanus Expressway carved trenches and elevated decks through South Brooklyn, severing Carroll Gardens from Red Hook and Cobble Hill and walling it off behind highways. The demolition was so complete that it took the Sacred Hearts church building with it. In December 1941 the Italian parish held a final Mass and processed to St. Stephen’s, the two congregations merging into Sacred Hearts-St. Stephen.
The second blow was economic. By the 1960s containerization had made the old finger piers obsolete, the shipping work moved to the deep berths of New Jersey, and the longshoreman jobs that had anchored the community vanished almost overnight. As the docks went quiet, families began leaving for more space in Staten Island, Long Island, and the deeper Italian neighborhoods of Brooklyn like Bensonhurst. The same brownstones they left behind would soon be worth fortunes.
The Landmarks of Carroll Gardens
Sacred Hearts-St. Stephen Church (Summit and Hicks Streets) is the spiritual anchor of Italian Carroll Gardens. Born in 1882 as Brooklyn’s first Italian parish and forced to merge with St. Stephen’s in 1941 when the BQE flattened its building, it remains the home of the Good Friday procession and the September feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, and the Mother Cabrini statue stands at its doors.
The Van Westerhout Cittadini Molesi Club (Court Street at Fourth Place) is the heart of the Mola di Bari story. The fourteen teenagers who founded it in 1960 created a permanent embassy for their hometown, complete with a garden of roses, tomatoes, and basil and a statue of Our Lady of Sorrows. In October 2011 the city co-named the corner “Citizens of Mola di Bari Way” in their honor.
Caputo’s Bake Shop (329 Court Street) opened in 1904 after the Caputo family arrived from Sicily, selling only a few kinds of bread at first. It has since expanded to more than a hundred varieties and remains one of the last true neighborhood bakeries, run by descendants of the founder.
G. Esposito & Sons (357 Court Street) has sold sausage and fresh mozzarella for more than ninety years, the hanging meats and the smell of the place serving as the only menu it has ever needed. It is the kind of pork store that once dotted every Italian block in Brooklyn and now survives in just a handful.
D’Amico Foods (Court Street at Degraw) was opened in 1948 by Emanuele D’Amico, and his descendants still roast coffee in small batches in a red roaster near the door, scenting the whole corner. Court Pastry Shop nearby was bought by the Zerilli family in that same year, 1948, and still turns out sfogliatelle, cannoli, and Sicilian holiday pastries by hand.
Ferdinando’s Focacceria (151 Union Street) opened in 1904 to feed Sicilian longshoremen on their lunch break, and for 121 years it served panelle, chickpea fritters folded into bread, and rice balls in a tin-ceilinged room that briefly appeared in Scorsese’s “The Departed.” It closed abruptly in 2025, ending its run as the oldest Sicilian restaurant in the city. F. Monteleone Bakery (355 Court Street), founded in 1902 and on Court Street since 1935, came back from its own closure when it reopened in 2007 as Monteleone & Cammareri, joining forces with the bakery made famous by the film “Moonstruck.”
Where the Carroll Gardens Italians Came From
The defining origin was Mola di Bari, a fishing and resort town on the Adriatic in the region of Puglia, the heel of Italy. Its people came first in the 1920s and 1930s and then in great numbers after the war, when the local fishing trade collapsed and there was simply no work. They chose Carroll Gardens for the most practical of reasons: it was close to the waterfront jobs, and someone from Mola was already there to take them in.
Sicily and Naples supplied the earlier and broader wave, the families who founded the Court Street bakeries and pork stores around the turn of the twentieth century. But the postwar character of the neighborhood, its dialect, its saint, its feast days, was overwhelmingly Molese, to the point that locals sometimes called these blocks a colony of Mola di Bari rather than a corner of Brooklyn. Where the North End of Boston drew its Italians from across the south, Carroll Gardens drew much of its identity from one small place on the Adriatic.
Carroll Gardens Today
The brownstones now sell for well over a million dollars, and the strollers on Court Street outnumber the old men by a wide margin. The neighborhood gentrified in waves from the 1970s on, accelerating after the Carroll Gardens Historic District was designated in 1973, and by the 2010s the Italian share of the population had fallen to roughly a fifth of what it was at the 1980 peak. Many of the social clubs and ethnic shops are gone, replaced by wine bars and boutiques.
And yet the core holds. Caputo’s, Esposito’s, D’Amico, and Court Pastry are still family-run and still busy, drawing newcomers who line up for the same lard bread and cannoli their predecessors ate. The Van Westerhout club still tends its garden, and every Good Friday the procession still moves through the streets, the funeral band and the rosary in Italian threading past coffee shops and renovated parlor floors.
The loss of Ferdinando’s in 2025 was a real one, a reminder that nothing here is guaranteed. But the neighborhood that the people of Mola di Bari built is not a museum and not a memory. It is a living block of bakeries and a saint carried on shoulders every spring, handing its traditions to whoever shows up willing to carry them next.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle in Carroll Gardens?
The Italians in Carroll Gardens came for work on the Brooklyn waterfront, where the piers of Red Hook needed longshoremen from the 1880s onward. Living within walking distance of the docks, on streets like Columbia, Hicks, and Union, kept the casual dock work close. Once a community formed, chain migration brought relatives straight to the same blocks.
Is Carroll Gardens still an Italian neighborhood today?
Less than it once was, but the roots run deep. The Italian share of the population has fallen sharply since its 1980 peak as gentrification pushed brownstone prices past a million dollars, yet family-run institutions like Caputo’s Bake Shop, G. Esposito & Sons, and Court Pastry Shop still operate on Court Street. The Good Friday procession and the September feast of Our Lady of Sorrows continue every year.
What are the most famous Italian landmarks in Carroll Gardens?
The Sacred Hearts-St. Stephen Church at Summit and Hicks Streets is the heart of Italian Carroll Gardens and the home of its processions. Court Street holds the surviving food shops, including Caputo’s Bake Shop and Court Pastry, while the Van Westerhout Cittadini Molesi club at Fourth Place marks the corner now co-named “Citizens of Mola di Bari Way.” Ferdinando’s Focacceria, the city’s oldest Sicilian restaurant, was a landmark until it closed in 2025.
Where did the Carroll Gardens Italians come from?
Most famously from Mola di Bari, a fishing town in the Puglia region on Italy’s Adriatic coast, who arrived in such numbers after the Second World War that for a time more Molese lived here than in the town itself. Earlier and broader immigration came from Sicily and Naples, the families who founded the Court Street bakeries and pork stores around 1900. Together they made the Italians in Carroll Gardens one of the most tightly knit communities in Brooklyn.
When did Italians first arrive in Carroll Gardens?
Italian immigrants began settling in the area, then known as South Brooklyn, in the 1880s to work the waterfront piers. Brooklyn’s first Italian Catholic parish, Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, was founded here in 1882. The defining wave from Mola di Bari started in the 1920s and 1930s and surged after World War II.
If your family’s story passed through the docks and brownstones of South Brooklyn, the bakeries of Court Street, or a single fishing town on the Adriatic, the threads are worth following.