On a Sunday in late July, a wooden saint nearly two hundred pounds in weight rides on the shoulders of a hundred men down Wolfle Street, past two-family houses and folding chairs, while the smell of frying zeppole drifts in from Third Street. This is the Feast of St. Rocco, and it is the loudest proof that the Italians in Glen Cove, New York, did not just pass through this North Shore city. They built a parish, a neighbourhood, and a homesickness that became a tradition.
The Place
Glen Cove sits on the North Shore of Long Island, in Nassau County, on a curve of Long Island Sound about an hour east of Manhattan. It is one of only two cities on Long Island, having broken away from the Town of Oyster Bay to incorporate as a city on 1 January 1918.
The waterfront made it famous. In the 1920s this stretch of shoreline became part of the Gold Coast, the line of palatial estates owned by families like the Pratts, J.P. Morgan Jr., and the Woolworths. The Pratts alone, descendants of the Standard Oil partner Charles Pratt, controlled roughly 5,000 acres. The same coastline drew other immigrant communities to service its grandeur, among them the Greeks of nearby Port Washington.
But Glen Cove was never only a place of lawns and gatehouses. It had factories, a working harbour, and a southern neighbourhood of narrow streets where the people who kept the estates and the mills running made their own city within the city. The pattern echoes other North Shore enclaves, from the Italian families of Massapequa to the planned streets of Garden City.
How It Became Italian
The Italian story in Glen Cove begins around 1890, in a triangular patch of land in the southern part of town that everyone still calls the Orchard. Before the Italians, the streets here belonged to Irish and German farmers: the Kenarys, the McCarthys, the Allgaiers. One farmer named Carney left his name on Carney Street, which survives to this day.
Work first, then a neighbourhood
The first arrivals came for the work, and Glen Cove had a great deal of it. There were the Gold Coast estates, which needed gardeners, masons, chauffeurs, and labourers. There was industry too: the Duryea Corn Starch Manufacturing Company, which had moved its main plant to Glen Cove in the 1850s, and the Ladew Leather works, and a cluster of shirt factories.
Italian women found wages in those factories. At the Glen Cove Shirt Company, at the corner of Willow and Hazel, the owner Hymie Frank and his brothers paid Italian women roughly five dollars a week. Five dollars went a long way for a family that had crossed an ocean with very little. The men, meanwhile, dug, hauled, planted, and laid stone, much of it on the estates whose owners would never learn their names.
The Orchard fills in
By 1910, the local count put roughly 10,000 Italians in Glen Cove, concentrated heavily in the Orchard. The neighbourhood was small and dense, six streets with names like Stanco, Capobianco, Hazel, Grove, Willow, and Carney, and it became its own self-contained world.
The shops followed the people. By the early 1920s the Orchard had Pelusi’s deli, Maccarone’s grocery, Marfioti’s fruit store, and the Sanfratello bakery. You could live an entire week, buy your bread and your provolone and your tomatoes, without leaving the few blocks where your neighbours spoke the same dialect you did. A grocery was never only a grocery in a place like the Orchard; it was a post office for news from home, a bank that extended credit on a handshake, and a parlour where the men argued politics over the counter.
Orchard House and the mutual-aid instinct
Help came from two directions. From inside, the immigrants formed the St. Rocco Society, a mutual-aid organisation that pooled small dues against the disasters of illness and death, the way such societies did in every Italian American enclave of the era, from the Arthur Avenue Italians of the Bronx to the markets and parishes of every borough.
From outside, the estate families took an interest. Philanthropists including Mrs. Florence Gibb Pratt backed Orchard House, a settlement-style centre offering a library, sports, citizenship classes, and a meeting hall. Before there was a church, Orchard House is where Sunday Mass was said, by Italian-speaking priests, for an Italian-speaking congregation.
Building St. Rocco
The crowning act came in the 1930s. The St. Rocco Society acquired land, and the community raised and largely built the church itself. They broke ground on 18 July 1937 and finished it by Christmas Eve of the same year, a remarkable pace for a working-class parish in the teeth of the Depression.
The architect, Michael Pascucci, did something quietly extraordinary. He modelled the new church on a church back in Sturno, the Avellino hill town in Campania that so many of the families had left. The people of the Orchard walked into a building that looked like the one they had prayed in as children. St. Rocco is recognised today as the oldest Italian parish on Long Island.
The Landmarks
Church of St. Rocco, 18 Third Street. The spiritual centre of Italian Glen Cove, built by the parishioners themselves and finished in 1937. Its design echoes a church in Sturno, Italy, so that the immigrants would feel at home the moment they crossed the threshold. It remains an active Catholic parish with deep Italian American roots.
St. Rocco Place and Third Street, the feast grounds. For four days every summer the streets around the church close to traffic and fill with rides, vendor stalls, and food booths. This is the staging ground for the Feast of St. Rocco, billed locally as “the Best Feast in the East.”
The Orchard. The triangle of streets in southern Glen Cove, including Stanco, Capobianco, Hazel, Grove, Willow, and Carney, where Italian settlement began around 1890. The houses are close together and the history is closer still; this is where the community took root.
La Bussola Ristorante, 40 School Street. A downtown fixture that has carried Glen Cove’s reputation for Italian cooking well beyond the city limits, named among the best Italian restaurants on Long Island. Proof that the food culture the Orchard families brought never left.
Buon Gusto Pizzeria and Restaurant, 70 Forest Avenue. One of the neighbourhood spots that keep the everyday Italian table alive in Glen Cove, the kind of place that anchors a corner and feeds three generations of regulars.
St. Rocco’s Panetteria e Pasticceria. A bakery carrying the saint’s name and the old craft, turning out the breads and pastries that fill the feast tables and the Sunday kitchens. The bakery is a living link between the parish and the appetite that defines it.
The Gold Coast estates. The grand properties of the Pratts, Morgans, and Woolworths along the shore are the other half of the story, the reason so many Italian masons, gardeners, and labourers had work waiting for them when they arrived.
Where They Came From
Most of Glen Cove’s Italians traced back to one town: Sturno, a small place in the Province of Avellino, east of Naples, in the Campania region. Others came from Calabria. These were agricultural communities, far from Italy’s industrial cities, where land was scarce and the future was thin.
What pulled them specifically to Glen Cove was chain migration. One man found work on an estate or in a shirt factory, sent word and sometimes a ticket home, and a cousin followed, then a brother, then a whole branch of a family. Sturno did not scatter randomly across America; a large piece of it reassembled itself in the Orchard.
The bond is now official. Glen Cove and Sturno are sister cities, a formal acknowledgement of a connection that families had been keeping alive by themselves for more than a century. The patron of Sturno is San Rocco, which is why the saint who watches over the Orchard came from the same hill town as its people.
Glen Cove Today
Glen Cove in 2026 is a more mixed city than it was a century ago. The 2020 census counted 28,365 residents, its highest ever, and the Hispanic and Latino population has grown to over a third of the total. The Orchard, like much of the city, has changed hands and changed languages.
Yet the Italian imprint has not faded. The Feast of St. Rocco, revived in 1975 after years of dormancy, is now bigger than ever. The 50th edition, held over four days in late July 2025, drew more than 30,000 people, with committee members noting the biggest turnout in years.
The procession is the heart of it. On the feast Sunday, between 75 and 100 parishioners shoulder the heavy statue of San Rocco and carry it through the streets, down Wolfle Street and Bella Vista, with some walking barefoot as a form of penance, exactly as their grandparents did in Sturno. The Pasta Pavilion still runs on the recipes of the nonnas. The community that built a church in one Depression winter has, four generations on, kept faith with itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where did the Italians in Glen Cove come from?
Most of the Italians in Glen Cove, New York, traced their roots to Sturno, a town in the Province of Avellino in the Campania region east of Naples, with others coming from Calabria. Chain migration drew families from these places to the same neighbourhood over several decades.
What is the Orchard in Glen Cove?
The Orchard is a triangular neighbourhood in the southern part of Glen Cove where Italian settlement began around 1890. It is made up of six streets, including Stanco, Capobianco, Hazel, Grove, Willow, and Carney, and was the heart of the city’s Italian community.
When was the Church of St. Rocco built?
Parishioners broke ground on the Church of St. Rocco at 18 Third Street on 18 July 1937 and completed it by Christmas Eve of the same year. The architect Michael Pascucci modelled it on a church in Sturno, Italy, so the immigrants would recognise the place where they worshipped.
What is the Feast of St. Rocco in Glen Cove?
The Feast of St. Rocco is an annual four-day Italian festival held around the church on Third Street, revived in 1975 and known as “the Best Feast in the East.” Its 50th edition in July 2025 drew more than 30,000 people for food, rides, and a procession of the saint’s statue.
Why are Glen Cove and Sturno sister cities?
So many of the Italians in Glen Cove came from Sturno that the two places formalised their bond as sister cities. The connection runs through San Rocco, the patron saint of Sturno, after whom the Glen Cove parish and feast are named.
Are there still Italian businesses in Glen Cove?
Yes. Glen Cove still has well-known Italian restaurants such as La Bussola Ristorante on School Street and Buon Gusto on Forest Avenue, along with bakeries like St. Rocco’s Panetteria, keeping the food culture of the Orchard alive.
If your family’s story passed through Glen Cove, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hill town in Avellino to the streets of the Orchard, to wherever you are now.