On the second Sunday of July, a four-ton tower of plaster saints and gilded angels rises off the asphalt of North Eighth Street on the shoulders of a hundred and twenty-five men. A brass band rides the platform with it, blasting an Italian march. A man with a cane stands out front, lifts it skyward on the final note, and the whole impossible structure lurches forward a few feet, then sets down, then lifts again. This is the Giglio, and the men carrying it are the sons and grandsons of the Italians in Williamsburg who started doing exactly this in 1903.
The neighborhood around them has changed past recognition. The factories are condos now, the rents are absurd, and the corner that was once all Italian bakeries sells eleven-dollar cold brew. But every July the feast comes back, and so do the families, from Maspeth and Howard Beach and the suburbs, to put their shoulders under the tower their fathers carried.
Williamsburg: The Place
Williamsburg sits on the East River in northwest Brooklyn, directly across the water from Manhattan’s Lower East Side and linked to it by the Williamsburg Bridge since 1903. The neighborhood’s spine runs from the waterfront east toward Bushwick, sliced by the elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The historic Italian section clustered on the North Side, in the blocks of brick rowhouses and walk-up tenements around Graham and Metropolitan Avenues. The G and L trains and the bridge itself have always made this a place people passed through and stayed.
How Williamsburg Became Italian
Before the Italians
Before it was Italian, Williamsburg was German, industrial, and for a brief moment, rich. Incorporated as a village in 1827 and absorbed into Brooklyn in 1855, it drew industrialists to the deep water along the East River. German chemist Charles Pfizer founded his pharmaceutical company here. The Havemeyer family’s sugar refinery, later Domino, grew so large that Brooklyn at one point produced more than half the sugar in the country.
Wealthy New Yorkers, among them Cornelius Vanderbilt, built shore-side mansions before the smoke and the tenements pushed them out. By the late nineteenth century the riverfront was a wall of refineries, glassworks, and shipyards. It was hard, dirty, well-paid labor, and it needed bodies.
The Italians Arrive
The bodies came from southern Italy. The first wave of Italian arrivals settled the North Side between roughly 1860 and 1880, and the numbers swelled after the Williamsburg Bridge opened in 1903 and emptied families out of the crowded Lower East Side across the river. What made Williamsburg distinct was where so many of its Italians came from: the town of Nola, just inland from Naples.
This was chain migration in its purest form. One family from Nola wrote home, a cousin followed, then a brother, then a whole street, until a corner of Brooklyn spoke in the cadence of one small Campanian town. They took the work the waterfront offered, on the docks and in the refineries, and they brought their patron saint with them.
In 1887 they founded Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the first Italian parish in Williamsburg, at the corner of North Eighth Street and Union Avenue. The parish exploded. It counted twelve thousand souls by 1902 and more than fifteen thousand a decade later. The same pattern of clustered origin and shared faith shaped Italian enclaves across the city, from the families of the Italians in Carroll Gardens to the tenement blocks of the Italians in East Harlem.
Williamsburg at Its Peak
For most of the twentieth century the North Side was solidly Italian American. Social clubs lined the side streets, each named for a town or a saint back home. Pork stores, fish markets, and bakeries supplied the Sunday table. In 1989 the city made it official, co-naming the north stretch of Graham Avenue “Via Vespucci” after the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci. The honorary sign runs from Metropolitan Avenue up to the expressway.
Grand Street was the dividing line. North of it was Via Vespucci. South of it the avenue carries a second honorary name, “Avenue of Puerto Rico,” marking the Southside, known as Los Sures, that became home to some twenty thousand Puerto Ricans by the 1980s. The Italians in Williamsburg held the northern blocks, and the feast each July was the loudest declaration of who lived there.
The Change
The unraveling came in stages. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, built between 1946 and 1964, tore through the neighborhood and forced the demolition of the grand 1930 Mount Carmel church, sending the parish to a new building at 275 North Eighth Street on the far side of the viaduct. Postwar prosperity drew younger families to the suburbs of Long Island and Staten Island. Then, beginning in the late 1980s and accelerating after the 2005 waterfront rezoning, artists and developers arrived, and glass condo towers replaced the refineries. Deconsecrated churches were sold and carved into lofts.
The Landmarks of Italian Williamsburg
Our Lady of Mount Carmel, 275 North Eighth Street. The mother church of Italian Williamsburg, founded in 1887 and rebuilt after the expressway took the old one. Rev. Edward L. Giorgio served the parish from 1909 to 1946, and the small green triangle nearby bears his name. Every July the church is the gravitational center of the twelve-day feast.
Bamonte’s, 32 Withers Street. Pasquale Bamonte, an immigrant from Salerno, opened it in 1900 as a banquet hall called Liberty Hall, and it is now the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Brooklyn. The crystal chandeliers, the framed photos of popes, the white-jacketed waiters, and the glass-paned kitchen have barely changed. Anthony Bamonte took it over in the late 1960s and runs it today with his daughters Lisa, Laura, and Nicole.
Fortunato Brothers, 289 Manhattan Avenue. Three brothers from Naples, Salvatore, Mario, and Michael Fortunato, opened this cafe and pasticceria in 1976. The cannoli, sfogliatelle, and rainbow cookies are still made by hand from the original recipes, and the brothers handed the shop to their children rather than sell to a developer.
The Giglio itself. Not a building but the neighborhood’s true landmark, a roughly seventy-foot spire of saints and angels that exists eleven months of the year as parts in storage and one week as the tallest thing on the street. It and the boat that travels beside it are the reason families still come home.
Napoli Bakery, 616 Metropolitan Avenue. Open since 1981, a no-frills bread bakery whose loaves have anchored Italian Sunday dinners across the North Side for over forty years. It is the kind of place that survives on neighbors, not tourists.
The Northside docks and refineries. Ghost landmarks now, but the reason the Italians came. The East River piers and the sugar houses gave the first generation its paychecks, and the men who carried the Giglio spent the rest of the week loading ships and tending furnaces along the water.
The Giglio: A Tower, a Boat, and the Dancing
The Giglio comes from Nola, where the tradition stretches back more than fifteen hundred years. The legend holds that around the year 410, North African raiders carried off many of Nola’s young men, and the town’s bishop, Paolino, offered himself as a slave in exchange for a widow’s son. A sultan, moved by the act, eventually freed him, and the people of Nola met his returning ship with lilies. “Giglio” is Italian for lily, and the towering structure is the stylized descendant of those flowers.
In 1903 immigrants from Nola incorporated the Società M.S. San Paolino, the initials standing for Mutuo Soccorso, mutual aid, and held the first Giglio feast in the United States that same year. For half a century the lay societies ran it. In 1954 the parish took it over and merged the old Feast of San Paolino, traditionally June 22, with the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on July 16. The two became one, and the modern twelve-day feast was born.
The mechanics are astonishing. The tower weighs roughly four tons, and on top of it sits a brass band of a dozen or more players who are lifted along with it. The capo paranza, the head of the lifting crew, stands in front with a cane, choreographs the route, and conducts band and lifters together like a single instrument. On the final blast of the fanfare he thrusts the cane up, and the paranza, the hundred-plus men beneath the bars, heaves the whole thing off the ground. Alongside the Giglio travels a second lifted structure, a boat shaped like a galleon, carrying San Paolino home.
Where the Williamsburg Italians Came From
Above all, they came from Nola, the small city in Campania a short distance northeast of Naples. The Festa dei Gigli, the feast of lilies, is Nola’s defining civic event, and the Nolani who settled the North Side simply carried it across the Atlantic intact, down to the dancing and the boat. That single-town concentration is what made Williamsburg’s Italian community so cohesive and its feast so faithful to the original.
Beyond Nola, the wider migration drew on southern Italy generally, including Salerno, which sent the Bamonte family, and Naples itself, home of the Fortunato brothers. But it was Nola that set the rhythm of the year, and Nola whose patron saint still rides above the crowd each summer.
Williamsburg Today
The Italians in Williamsburg are no longer the majority on the North Side, and there is no point pretending otherwise. The condos won, the rents climbed, and most of the families who once filled the parish now drive in from elsewhere. The Southside it once bordered has its own layered history, and South Williamsburg today is anchored by the large community of Satmar Hasidic Jews.
And yet the feast does not die. Each July the streets close, the bands tune up, and the lifters return, men who started young, like Tommy Santino, who first went under the tower at seventeen and now lifts beside his son. Bamonte’s still pours wine into the same glasses, Fortunato Brothers still sells the rainbow cookies, and Our Lady of Mount Carmel still fills for the Mass.
What survives here is not a neighborhood frozen in amber but a ritual that refuses to need one. The buildings can turn into condos and the corner store can sell cold brew, and still a hundred men will gather under four tons of saints because their grandfathers did. The feast was never really about the place. It was about coming back to it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle in Williamsburg?
The Italians in Williamsburg came for work on the East River waterfront, the docks, shipyards, and sugar refineries that defined the North Side in the late nineteenth century. Many arrived through chain migration from the town of Nola near Naples, and the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903 brought more families across from Manhattan’s crowded Lower East Side.
Is Williamsburg still Italian today?
Not the way it once was. The Italians in Williamsburg are no longer a majority after decades of suburban migration and intense gentrification following the 2005 waterfront rezoning. Italian American families still own landmark businesses and return in force each July for the feast, but the everyday neighborhood is now a mix of condos, newcomers, and other communities.
What are the most famous landmarks of Italian Williamsburg?
The signature landmarks are Our Lady of Mount Carmel church on North Eighth Street, founded in 1887, and Bamonte’s restaurant at 32 Withers Street, opened in 1900 and the oldest in Brooklyn. The greatest landmark is not a building at all but the Giglio, the towering feast structure danced through the streets each summer.
Where did the Williamsburg Italians come from?
Most came from Nola, a small city in the Campania region a short distance from Naples in southern Italy. They carried with them Nola’s Festa dei Gigli, the feast of lilies honoring San Paolino, which became the Brooklyn Giglio feast. Other families came from elsewhere in the south, including Salerno and Naples.
When did Italians first arrive in Williamsburg?
The first significant wave of Italian settlement on Williamsburg’s North Side came between roughly 1860 and 1880, drawn by waterfront industry. The community grew rapidly after 1887, when immigrants founded Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish, and again after the Williamsburg Bridge opened in 1903. The first Giglio feast in Brooklyn was held that same year.
If your family’s story passed through the North Side of Williamsburg, through a refinery shift, a Sunday at Mount Carmel, or a shoulder under the Giglio, that history is worth holding onto.