Drive past the gated estates of Belle Haven, past the hedge funds along the Post Road and the storefronts of Greenwich Avenue, and you eventually reach a tight grid of modest houses pressed close to the railway. This is Chickahominy, and it is where the Italians in Greenwich, Connecticut built a working-class world inside one of the richest towns in America. The stone that made their reputation went to the Statue of Liberty. The faith they carried from a hilltop village in Campania still walks the streets every August.
The Place
Greenwich is the largest town on Connecticut’s Gold Coast, a commuter haven for wealthy New Yorkers ever since the railroad arrived in 1848. As of the 2020 census it held 63,518 people, with a mean household income above $300,000 and a median home price north of $2 million.
It is the kind of place where Ray Dalio and Steven Cohen built their fortunes, where some estates change hands for upward of $50 million. Yet within its borders sits Chickahominy, a dense neighbourhood of small lots wedged between the Byram River and the Metro-North tracks, near the Port Chester line.
The name is the strangest thing about it. Civil War veterans returning to Greenwich christened the area after the Battle of Chickahominy in Virginia, where Lee won his first major victory. It stuck, and the Italians who came a generation later made it their own.
You feel the contrast the moment you cross into the neighbourhood. The lots shrink, the houses sit closer to the street, and the church spire of St. Roch’s rises over rooftops that have sheltered the same families for a hundred years. It is, in the most literal sense, a village inside a metropolis of wealth.
How It Became Italian
The quarries came first
Before the Italians, there was stone. The land along Byram Shore Road held seams of hard granite, and by 1880, at the zenith of the business, seven separate quarries were cutting it from the bluffs above the cove.
Byram bluestone built local churches and great estates, but most of it was loaded onto barges and floated to New York City. It went into office building foundations, into the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, and into the base of the Statue of Liberty. The work was brutal, skilled, and badly in need of hands that knew how to split and dress rock.
The railroad had reached Greenwich in 1848, and that same connection that brought wealthy New Yorkers out to build their estates also made it cheap to ship quarried granite back the other way. The town was, briefly, an industrial supplier to the city it would later mostly serve as a bedroom.
From a hilltop in Campania
Those hands came from southern Italy. Beginning in the 1860s, families left Morra De Sanctis in the province of Avellino, Campania, and Rose in the province of Cosenza, Calabria, fleeing the long agricultural depression that gripped the Italian south.
They were masons, stonecutters, builders and gardeners by trade, and Greenwich needed all four. The men cut granite in the Byram quarries and tended the gardens and walls of the town’s growing estates. They settled where the work was, in Chickahominy and across town in Cos Cob, and they sent for their relatives one by one.
It was not the showy Italian migration of the Lower East Side or Mulberry Street. These were skilled rural tradesmen recruited, in effect, for a particular kind of labour the town could not do without. Greenwich, for all its Gold Coast reputation, could not build its mansions or its bridges without them.
A neighbourhood takes shape
The arrival of the trolley accelerated everything. Service reached Greenwich in 1901, and once cars ran along Hamilton Avenue a six-year building boom followed, filling the streets with the small wood-frame houses that still stand today.
Hamilton Avenue School opened in September 1915 to teach the children of these families, and it has anchored the neighbourhood ever since. Chickahominy became one of Greenwich’s pocket communities, established by and populated primarily with Italian immigrants who served the construction and household needs of the wealthier town around them.
When the stone ran out
The quarries did not last. Around 1900 the building industry shifted from cut stone to poured concrete, demand collapsed, and the Byram quarries closed for good. The masons did not leave.
They had bought their houses, sent their children to Ham Ave, and built a parish. The men who had spent their lives shaping other people’s monuments turned to building one of their own, raising a stone church through the worst years of the Great Depression. Their famously low rate of housing turnover, families holding the same small lots for generations, dates from exactly this moment of staying put.
The Landmarks
St. Roch Church, 10 Saint Roch Avenue. The spiritual centre of Italian Chickahominy. The property was acquired in 1918, a makeshift roof was thrown over the foundation, and the chapel was dedicated on 14 May 1922. The parish was formally established in 1938.
St. Roch’s, the Romanesque Revival church. The finished stone church was designed by the Stamford architect Frank Urso and built during the Depression. By one account a pastor of the period had acoustical tile installed in the sanctuary to muffle the nickels and dimes dropped into collection for its construction.
The St. Roch’s Feast, on the church grounds and St. Roch Avenue. Every August the parish closes the block for a multi-day street festival of food, music, games and carnival rides. Volunteers serve pizza fritta and sausage and peppers, and on the closing Sunday a procession winds through the neighbourhood. It is how Chickahominy celebrates its own history.
Hamilton Avenue School, 184 Hamilton Avenue. Opened in September 1915, the public school known locally as Ham Ave has educated the neighbourhood’s children for over a century. Its grounds host the food tents during the feast, and its pupils get the free carnival rides.
Garden Catering, 177 Hamilton Avenue. A Greenwich institution famous for its fried chicken nuggets. The original Garden Poultry opened in the mid-1970s; after the founder died, Frank Carpenteri Sr. bought the recipes and reopened in late 1991, and the Hamilton Avenue shop remains a Chickahominy fixture.
The Byram quarries, along Byram Shore Road. No longer working, but the origin of everything. This is where the masons earned their living and where the granite for the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge was cut before being barged to New York.
Glory Days Diner, 69 East Putnam Avenue. A neighbourhood diner that has become a casual gathering spot for the families of the area, the kind of unpretentious table that survives even in a town of $50 million estates.
Where They Came From
Two towns account for most of the names you still hear in Chickahominy. The first is Morra De Sanctis, a small commune in the mountains of Avellino in Campania. The second is Rose, in the province of Cosenza in Calabria.
The pull was specific and personal. One mason wrote home about steady work in the quarries, a cousin followed, then a brother, then a whole street’s worth of families, until a piece of inland Campania and Calabria had been transplanted onto a few blocks beside the Byram River. This is why the names cluster: chain migration ran along village ties, not random chance.
The devotion to San Rocco came with them from Morra De Sanctis, which holds him as a patron, and that is why the church bears his name and the August feast carries the rhythm of an Italian village festival. In 2013, nearly 150 years after the first arrivals, Greenwich formally became a sister city to both Morra De Sanctis and Rose in a Town Hall ceremony attended by the mayors of both Italian towns, alongside First Selectman Peter Tesei.
Greenwich Today
Chickahominy is still here, which in a town like Greenwich is itself remarkable. The houses stayed in families, the parish kept its doors open, and the feast still draws crowds every August to St. Roch Avenue. You can read about other Connecticut communities that held their ground, from the Jewish families who built a life in neighbouring Stamford to the Jewish community along the shore in Westport.
The forces pressing on the neighbourhood are the same ones pressing on every modest pocket inside an ultra-wealthy town: rising land values, the temptation to sell a small lot for a price the original masons could never have imagined. The diner, the chicken-nugget counter and the stone church are the anchors that have kept it from dissolving into the surrounding affluence.
For a sense of how Connecticut’s Italians put down roots elsewhere, the story rhymes with the Italians of Wooster Square in New Haven, and with the Italian families of Nutley in New Jersey. In each case a quarry, a factory or a railroad drew the first men, and a church and a feast kept the next three generations together. Greenwich is simply the version where the surrounding town happened to be one of the wealthiest in the country, and the Italians stayed anyway.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do the Italians in Greenwich, Connecticut live?
Historically the heart of the Italian community is Chickahominy, a dense working-class neighbourhood near the Byram River and the Metro-North line in the west of town. A second concentration grew in Cos Cob, particularly the Mianus area, where about a quarter of residents claim Italian ancestry.
Why did Italians settle in Greenwich?
They came for the stone. Beginning in the 1860s, masons and stonecutters from southern Italy arrived to work the granite quarries along Byram Shore Road, and others found work as builders and gardeners on the town’s estates. They settled in Chickahominy to be close to the quarries.
What is the St. Roch’s Feast in Greenwich?
It is the annual Italian street festival held each August on the grounds of St. Roch Church and along St. Roch Avenue in Chickahominy. It features pizza fritta, sausage and peppers, live music, carnival rides and a Sunday procession, and it has long been the way the neighbourhood celebrates its heritage.
Which Italian towns did Greenwich’s families come from?
Most traced their roots to Morra De Sanctis in the province of Avellino, Campania, and Rose in the province of Cosenza, Calabria. In 2013 Greenwich became a sister city to both towns to honour that connection.
What did the Byram quarries produce?
Byram granite was used for local churches and estates, but most of it was barged to New York City. It went into building foundations, the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, and the base of the Statue of Liberty. The quarries closed around 1900 when concrete replaced cut stone.
Is there still an Italian community in Greenwich today?
Yes. Chickahominy remains a recognisably Italian neighbourhood, with St. Roch Church, the August feast and long-standing family-owned businesses. The Italians in Greenwich, Connecticut have held their ground for over a century despite the extraordinary wealth of the surrounding town.
If your family’s story passed through Greenwich, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hilltop in Morra De Sanctis to the quarries above Byram Cove, to wherever you are now.