They called it Ducktown. Not officially, and not on any city map. But from the 1880s through to the casino age, if you got off the train at Atlantic City and walked a few blocks back from the boardwalk, you were in southern Italy. The smell of sauce on Mississippi Avenue. The sound of dialects from Naples and Sicily and Calabria carrying through narrow streets. And tucked behind almost every house, a duck pen.
That last detail is where the name came from. Italian families who settled the blocks between Missouri Avenue and Texas Avenue built duck houses along the bay, raised waterfowl and chickens in their backyards, and sold the birds to the grand boardwalk hotels a few streets south. The neighbourhood became Atlantic City’s Little Italy, and the city’s gamblers and bathers ate Italian sauce without ever knowing it.
The Place Itself
Ducktown sits in the heart of Atlantic City, on the bay side of the island. The traditional boundaries run from Missouri Avenue east to Texas Avenue, with Absecon Bay forming the northern edge and Pacific Avenue the southern. Walk a single block south of Pacific and you are on the boardwalk.
The housing is modest by design. Brick and frame row houses, two and three stories, tight to the street, with small yards that once held the ducks. Mississippi Avenue ran like a spine through the centre of it, the commercial heart with bakeries, butchers, social clubs, and the church.
How It Became Italian
The First Arrivals
Atlantic City incorporated in 1854 and grew through the second half of the nineteenth century into a working-class summer resort, reachable by rail from Philadelphia. The grand hotels needed labour. Waiters. Cooks. Porters. Maids. Stonemasons for the building boom. Italians began arriving from the 1880s onward, part of the great wave that left southern Italy after unification, and they settled in the cheap bayside blocks that the hotel owners and the wealthier white residents had no use for.
The pull was the work. The boardwalk hotels and restaurants ran year-round on tourist money, and a man fresh off the boat could find a job washing dishes or peeling potatoes the same week he arrived. Wives took in laundry from the same hotels. Children sold newspapers or worked the kitchens after school.
A Parish, a Centre, a Name
By 1904, there were enough Italian families to need a church of their own. In September of that year, Father John Quaremba, a priest from Castelgrande in Basilicata, said the first Mass in a vacated storefront at Mississippi and Atlantic Avenues. About thirty families attended.
The permanent church building was blessed in December 1912 at North Mississippi Avenue. Father Quaremba opened a parish school shortly after, taught by Salesian Sisters, and St. Michael’s became the anchor of Italian Atlantic City. Saints’ day processions wound down Mississippi Avenue. Babies were baptised, daughters married, parents buried, all in Italian.
The neighbourhood was already known as Ducktown by then. The name stuck because the practice was so visible. Decoy ducks were carved here too. Wild birds shot in the bay were dressed and sold to the hotels along with the domestic poultry. It was a working bay neighbourhood with a saltwater accent on a cuisine carried from another sea.
Ducktown at Its Peak
The 1920s and 1930s were Ducktown at its most concentrated. The streets were entirely Italian. Bakeries on every block. Tomato pies coming out of coal ovens. The social clubs ran cards and bocce and ran weddings and wakes. Sicilians and Neapolitans and Calabrians and Abruzzesi sorted themselves block by block, then mostly forgot the sorting when they married each other a generation later.
Chef Vola’s opened in 1921. Tony’s Baltimore Grill opened in 1927. Angelo’s Fairmount Tavern opened in 1935. White House Sub Shop opened in 1946, almost the moment the war ended. Each of these places started as a single room in someone’s house or shop, and each of them is still operating today under the same family lines, or close to them.
The four bakeries that operated in the 1960s, Rando’s, Formica’s, Renault’s, and the others remembered by old Ducktown residents, kept the neighbourhood in fresh bread and rolls every morning. The smell at six in the morning on Mississippi Avenue was something former residents still describe seventy years later.
The Change
After the Second World War, the children of the immigrants began moving out. Cars made the shore suburbs reachable. Margate, Ventnor, Linwood, and Egg Harbor Township offered bigger lots, new schools, and a backyard without a duck pen in it. Ducktown began to thin.
The deeper rupture came with the casinos. New Jersey voters approved casino gambling for Atlantic City in 1976, with the first casino opening in 1978. The political pitch was urban renewal, that gambling would rebuild a city that had been visibly declining since the early sixties. The casinos rose along the boardwalk through the late 1970s and 1980s, and the city designated parts of Ducktown as part of the tourism district. Blocks of houses came down. Whole stretches of the old neighbourhood disappeared under parking decks and casino access roads.
What remained got smaller and older. Many of the families who had stayed through the sixties used the casino-era buyouts to follow their cousins out to Margate or Ventnor. The bakeries went from four to two. The social clubs closed one by one. The neighbourhood Father Quaremba had built around in 1904 was, by the mid-1980s, a fraction of what it had been.
The Landmarks
St. Michael’s Catholic Church, 10 North Mississippi Avenue. The Italian national parish, founded September 1904 by Father John Quaremba from Castelgrande, Italy. The permanent church was blessed in December 1912. For more than a century it baptised, married, and buried Ducktown. In 2015 the Diocese of Camden consolidated Atlantic City’s parishes into the new Parish of Saint Monica, and St. Michael’s celebrated its last regular Mass that September. The building still stands.
Chef Vola’s, 111 South Albion Place. Opened in 1921 by Pina Vola as a boardinghouse with a small restaurant in the basement. It has been a basement restaurant ever since, run by the Esposito family since 1982. The James Beard Foundation named it one of America’s Classics in 2011. Reservations are taken months ahead by phone, and it is cash only.
Tony’s Baltimore Grill, 2800 Atlantic Avenue. Founded in 1927 by Joseph Tarsitano at 604 Atlantic Avenue as the Baltimore Grille, serving pasta and fried seafood from Baltimore docks. The name passed to his son Tony, who returned from the Second World War and took over with his brothers. The current location at 2800 Atlantic opened in 1965 after the original block was lost to urban renewal. Local lore claims Tony’s was the first place in Atlantic City to serve a tomato pie.
Angelo’s Fairmount Tavern, 2300 Fairmount Avenue. Opened in 1935 by Angelo and Isabella Mancuso, who started with a small bar and dining room serving two things, fried shrimp and spaghetti with meatballs. Four generations of the Mancuso family have worked in the building since. It is still in family hands.
White House Sub Shop, 2301 Arctic Avenue. Opened in October 1946 by Anthony Basile and his aunt Basilia and uncle Fritz Sacco, in what had been Basile’s tailor shop. A whole sub cost fifty cents on opening day. The Beatles, after a 1964 concert in Atlantic City, ordered a six-foot sub from the counter. Frank Sinatra used to send for them. The shop is still at the same address.
Mississippi Avenue. The commercial spine. Bakeries, butchers, the church, the social clubs. Some of the street is gone now under casino infrastructure, but the church building still anchors the block, and a few of the old storefronts have been repurposed.
Where They Came From
Ducktown’s Italians came almost entirely from the Mezzogiorno, the south. Sicily sent the largest share. Campania, particularly the villages around Naples and the Avellino province inland, was the second great source. Calabria, the southern toe of the boot, sent families to specific blocks. Abruzzo and Basilicata, the mountainous interior, sent enough that Father Quaremba’s own hometown of Castelgrande was repeated in the names of his congregants.
These were the regions that the great Italian emigration of 1880 to 1920 emptied. Agricultural collapse, malaria in the lowlands, taxes set by a northern government in Rome that the south had no real voice in, and the simple fact that a brother or a cousin already in Atlantic City could write home and say there was work on the boardwalk. Chain migration did the rest. A son followed an uncle. A bride was sent for from the same village.
Ducktown Today
Most of the families are gone. The casino-era demolitions and the suburban drift to Margate and Ventnor and Linwood took the population out across the 1970s and 1980s, and the children and grandchildren of Ducktown’s first families now live across South Jersey rather than in the old streets. The neighbourhood today is mostly Bangladeshi and Hispanic, with a growing Asian plurality, and the bayside blocks that once held duck pens hold new businesses with names in Bengali script and Spanish.
What survives is mostly the food. Chef Vola’s still requires a reservation made months in advance. White House Subs still has a queue down Arctic Avenue on summer afternoons. Tony’s Baltimore Grill is still pouring beer and sliding tomato pies onto Formica tables at two in the morning. Angelo’s Fairmount is still in the Mancuso family. The four old institutions outlived the neighbourhood that made them, which is a strange and very Italian-American kind of survival.
The church building on Mississippi Avenue still stands, even though the parish closed in 2015. For descendants who drive down from Margate on a Sunday, it is the building that holds the memory. The duck pens are gone. The bakeries are mostly gone. But the sauce is still on the stove at four in the afternoon on Atlantic Avenue, and that, for now, is enough.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle in Ducktown, Atlantic City?
Italians settled in Ducktown from the 1880s because Atlantic City’s grand boardwalk hotels and restaurants needed year-round labour, and the cheap bayside blocks just behind the boardwalk were affordable to new arrivals. Chain migration from southern Italy did the rest, with brothers and cousins pulling each other across through the 1920s.
Where does the name Ducktown come from?
The name came from the Italian residents’ practice of raising ducks, chickens, and other poultry in their backyards and in small duck houses along Absecon Bay. The birds were sold to the boardwalk hotels and restaurants. The neighbourhood was so consistently full of duck pens that the nickname stuck and replaced any official designation.
Is Ducktown still Italian today?
Largely no. Most Italian-American families left Ducktown during the casino-era redevelopment of the 1970s and 1980s, moving to the shore suburbs of Margate, Ventnor, Linwood, and Egg Harbor. The neighbourhood today is predominantly Bangladeshi and Hispanic. A handful of Italian-founded restaurants, including Chef Vola’s, Tony’s Baltimore Grill, Angelo’s Fairmount Tavern, and White House Sub Shop, are still operating.
What are the most famous Italian landmarks in Ducktown?
The anchors are St. Michael’s Catholic Church at 10 North Mississippi Avenue, founded in 1904 as the Italian national parish, and four restaurants still in operation: Chef Vola’s, since 1921; Tony’s Baltimore Grill, since 1927; Angelo’s Fairmount Tavern, since 1935; and White House Sub Shop, since 1946.
Where in Italy did the Ducktown families come from?
Almost entirely from southern Italy, the Mezzogiorno. Sicily sent the largest share, followed by Campania, including villages around Naples and Avellino province, then Calabria, then Abruzzo and Basilicata. Father John Quaremba, who founded St. Michael’s parish in 1904, was himself from Castelgrande in Basilicata.
What happened to the Italian community in Ducktown?
Two waves of departure thinned it. After the Second World War, the second generation began moving to the new shore suburbs by car. Then the casino developments of the late 1970s and 1980s, which Atlantic City framed as urban renewal, demolished or absorbed substantial parts of the old neighbourhood, and many remaining families took buyouts and followed their cousins to Margate and Ventnor.
If your family’s story passed through Ducktown, or through any of the southern Italian towns that sent people to Atlantic City’s boardwalk, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Avellino or Castelgrande or the hills above Palermo, to a row house on Mississippi Avenue, to wherever you are now.