The pie comes out of the oven backward. The cheese went down first, straight onto the dough, and the crushed tomatoes ride on top in rough red streaks, so the crust chars dark and the sauce stays bright. For most of the twentieth century you could trace that order of operations to a hundred square blocks in the East Ward of Trenton, where men who had crossed the Atlantic from mountain villages baked it the way they remembered. They called the place the Burg.
The Italians in Chambersburg built a city within a city: bakeries and banquet halls, mutual aid societies, a parish that drew three thousand families, and a tomato pie that became a regional religion. The people have mostly gone now. The pie has not.
Chambersburg: The Place
Chambersburg sits in the East Ward of Trenton, New Jersey, a dense grid of roughly a hundred blocks bounded by South Broad Street and the old Roebling works to the west and Hamilton Township to the east. It was its own borough before Trenton swallowed it in 1888, and it kept the feel of a separate town. The housing is tight: two and three story brick rowhouses, narrow alleys, corner storefronts on nearly every block. Roebling Avenue, Hudson Street, Butler Street, and South Clinton Avenue carried the streetcars and the trade.
How Chambersburg Became the Italian Burg
Before the Italians
The Burg was an industrial place before it was an Italian one. John A. Roebling set up his wire rope company along the Delaware and Raritan Canal in 1849, and under his sons it grew into Trenton’s largest employer, a sprawling complex on the western edge of Chambersburg. Roebling wire went into the Brooklyn Bridge and, later, the Golden Gate. The earliest workforce was native born, German, and Irish, and when a priest named Father Jachetti arrived in 1869 to minister in the area, his congregation was largely German speaking and tied to the Roebling enterprise.
Around the wireworks were the potteries and the rubber works that gave Trenton its old boast, stamped on the bridge over the Delaware: what the world takes, Trenton makes. The factories needed hands. By the 1880s the bosses had found a labor pool that would work for less.
The Italians Arrive
The first Italians in Chambersburg were noticed in the mid 1880s, and the chain that pulled them in ran to one improbable place: San Fele, a rural village high in the Apennines of Basilicata, the region southern Italians called Lucania. Between 1880 and 1905, as much as eighty percent of the Italians living in the Burg came from Lucania, and roughly two thirds of those came from San Fele alone. One man would send for a brother, a brother for a cousin, a cousin for half a hamlet, until whole streets of Trenton answered to the same southern dialect.
The San Felese organized fast. On April 10, 1902, they founded the Unione e Fratellanza San Felese, a mutual benefit society that survives as the oldest Italian American society in central New Jersey. It paid out when a member fell sick or died, when no insurance company would.
Other strands wove in beside the Lucanians. A Neapolitan current arrived from the province of Caserta, from towns like Casandrino, carrying the devotion that would later fill the streets each September. Sicilians came too. By 1910 Italians were the majority in Chambersburg, and by 1920 the Burg was almost entirely theirs.
Chambersburg at Its Peak
At full tide the Burg ran on its own clock. Men walked to the Roebling shops, the potteries, the rubber plants, and walked home to dinner. Women kept gardens of tomatoes and basil in backyards barely wider than a hallway. The corner groceries sold provolone and dried sausage, and the smell of bread came out of the ovens before dawn.
St. Joachim’s parish, founded for the Italians in 1901, swelled to around 3,500 families at its height, and twenty of its sons went on to be ordained priests. The feast days turned the streets into processions, with statues carried shoulder high and lights strung over the pavement. This was the world Peter Peroni later set down in his book on the neighborhood, The Burg: An Italian-American Community at Bay in Trenton. The same dense, walkable Italian quarter took shape in other Northeastern cities, from the Italian heart of South Philadelphia to the mile of Italian Hoboken across the Hudson.
The Change
The unraveling began with the factories. Deindustrialization and the pull of suburban retail were already eroding Trenton in the 1950s. Then came the night of April 9, 1968, when unrest swept the city after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Hundreds were arrested and downtown storefronts burned.
For many Burg families it confirmed a decision already half made. They moved east into Hamilton Township and the newer suburbs, a few miles and a world away, trading the rowhouse for a lawn. The Roebling works, the engine that had built the whole place, shut down in 1974. The grandchildren of San Fele did not stay to inherit the corner store.
The Landmarks of the Burg
St. Joachim’s Church, 20-56 Butler Street. Bishop James McFaul founded the parish for Italian immigrants in 1901, with Father Aloysius Pozzi as first pastor and Mass said at first in a rented hall. The cornerstone of the permanent church went down on August 15, 1903, and the first Mass was offered there in July 1904. Each September the parish still keeps the Festa della Madonna di Casandrino, the feast the Neapolitan families carried from home; the parish merged into Our Lady of the Angels in 2005, but the Butler Street church stands.
Italian People’s Bakery, 61-63 Butler Street. Open since 1936, the bakery has sent its bread and seeded loaves into Burg kitchens for the better part of a century. A faded mural on its wall still welcomes the world to Chambersburg and calls the place the home of the finest bakeries and restaurants. It is, by long local consent, the pride of the neighborhood.
Roman Hall, Butler Street. Built in 1938 as a meeting place and banquet hall, Roman Hall hosted the weddings, christenings, and society dinners that held the Burg together. Its rooms have seated everyone from neighborhood families to visiting names, and it remains a fixture of Italian Chambersburg.
Joe’s Tomato Pies, South Clinton Avenue. Joe Silvestro opened it in 1910, and it is remembered as the birthplace of the Trenton tomato pie, the thin, crisp round with the cheese underneath and the crushed tomatoes on top. A teenage immigrant from Naples named Giuseppe Papa learned the trade in this kitchen. Joe’s closed in 1999 after nearly ninety years.
Papa’s Tomato Pies. That same Giuseppe Papa opened his own shop in April 1912, first on Butler Street, then on Chambers Street from 1945. It is widely called the oldest continuously family run pizzeria in the country, a claim that turns on the word continuously: Lombardi’s in Manhattan opened earlier, in 1905, but shut for roughly a decade before reopening. Papa’s never stopped, and in 2013 it carried its mustard pie and its century of recipes out to Robbinsville.
De Lorenzo’s, 530 Hudson Street. Alexander “Chick” De Lorenzo ran his tomato pie shop here from 1947, charred and sliced with a steak knife, and his daughter Eileen and her husband Gary Amico kept it going for sixty-six years. Their son Sam opened a Robbinsville location in 2007; the Hudson Street original closed in January 2012, and the family now also has an outpost in Yardley, Pennsylvania.
De Lorenzo’s of Hamilton Avenue, 1007 Hamilton Avenue. A separate branch of the same family ran this one, opened in 1961, with no relation in the kitchen to the Hudson Street Eileen beyond the name. Rick De Lorenzo Sr. and then his son ran it for decades, hauling Trenton water out to a Sloan Avenue address in Hamilton when they relocated in 2013. The State of New Jersey seized the Sloan Avenue shop for unpaid taxes in March 2025.
Where the Chambersburg Italians Came From
The dominant root of the Burg was Lucania, modern Basilicata, and within it the mountain town of San Fele, source of as much as two thirds of the neighborhood’s early Italians. These were not city people but farmers and shepherds from an isolated stretch of the southern Apennines, leaving in the great exodus that ran from the 1860s into the 1920s, when poverty and crushing land arrangements pushed millions of southern Italians out.
Around that Lucanian core gathered other southerners: Neapolitans from the province of Caserta, including the town of Casandrino whose Madonna still gets her September feast, and Sicilians drawn by the same factory wages. It was a southern Italian neighborhood to its core, built by people the established city had treated as outsiders, much as the stonecutters and millworkers of the all-Italian town of Roseto in Pennsylvania built their own world a hundred miles west.
Chambersburg Today
Walk the Burg now and you hear Spanish more than Italian. Chambersburg holds Trenton’s largest Latino community, with deep Guatemalan roots alongside Mexican, Ecuadorian, and Costa Rican families. They have done what the San Felese did a century ago: opened groceries and restaurants, filled the rowhouses, and started over in a place that asks newcomers to make it their own. The bakeries and bodegas now sell different bread.
The Italian institutions mostly followed their people east. Papa’s and De Lorenzo’s thrive in Robbinsville, the Hamilton suburbs absorbed the rest, and on feast weekends the old families still drive back in. A few holdouts keep the pie in its hometown, like Original Dominick’s on Sanhican Drive, one of the last to sell the tomato pie under Trenton’s own name.
What lasted was not the address but the recipe and the feast. The neighborhood scattered; the cheese still goes down first. A community can move out of its streets and keep the thing that made it, which is its own kind of permanence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle in Chambersburg, Trenton?
The Italians in Chambersburg came for factory work, drawn by the Roebling wire works, the potteries, and the rubber plants that ringed the neighborhood. Bosses recruited southern Italian labor in the 1880s, and chain migration did the rest as early arrivals sent for relatives. By 1920 the Burg was almost entirely Italian.
Is Chambersburg still an Italian neighborhood today?
No. After deindustrialization and the suburban flight that followed the 1968 unrest, most Italian families moved east into Hamilton Township and beyond. Chambersburg is now home to Trenton’s largest Latino community, led by Guatemalan, Mexican, Ecuadorian, and Costa Rican families.
What are the most famous landmarks of the Italians in Chambersburg?
St. Joachim’s Church on Butler Street, founded in 1901, anchored the community, and the Italian People’s Bakery has stood nearby since 1936. The neighborhood’s tomato pie institutions are the most famous of all: Joe’s, Papa’s, and De Lorenzo’s, which together made Trenton a pizza capital.
Where did the Chambersburg Italians come from?
Most came from the south of Italy, above all from San Fele in the region of Lucania, now Basilicata, which supplied up to two thirds of the Burg’s early Italians. Smaller groups arrived from Naples and the Caserta area, including Casandrino, along with Sicilians.
When did Italians first arrive in Chambersburg?
The first Italians in Chambersburg appeared in the mid 1880s, drawn to the area’s factory jobs. They became the majority by around 1910 and made the neighborhood almost exclusively Italian by 1920.
If your family’s story passed through the Burg, through San Fele or Casandrino, through a Roebling shift or a Butler Street oven, that history is worth holding onto.