On a Saturday morning in Massapequa, the line at the pork store counter tells you everything. Numbers are pulled from a red dispenser, the case is stacked with fresh sausage and trays of warm mozzarella, and someone is debating the merits of the semolina. The Italians in Massapequa did not so much arrive here as carry their old Brooklyn block out to the South Shore, set it down on a quarter-acre lot, and keep going.
The Place
Massapequa sits on the South Shore of Long Island, in Nassau County, a string of hamlets that locals call simply the Massapequas: Massapequa, Massapequa Park, East Massapequa and North Massapequa. The name comes from the Marsapeague, an Algonquian-speaking people who lived along these meadowlands long before any deed was written.
It is a town of single-family houses, leafy streets, a Long Island Rail Road line into Manhattan, and a long border with the Great South Bay. The 2020 census counted roughly 21,355 people in the Massapequa community itself, the largest of the hamlets.
What sets it apart on Long Island is the concentration of Italian-American families. The Massapequas are widely noted for having the highest share of residents of Italian ancestry of any community on Long Island.
How It Became Italian
Massapequa was not Italian to begin with. In the 19th century it was farmland and summer cottages, and the area that became Massapequa Park was first settled by German families who moved out from Brooklyn and called their settlement Wurtenberg, after the kingdom of Württemberg back home.
The railroad changed the arithmetic. The Massapequa station opened in 1896, and from the 1890s real estate companies began promoting house lots along the line to commuters who could now reach the city by train.
From cottages to a commuter suburb
For decades Massapequa stayed small. In 1940 only about 3,500 people lived there. Then came the war, and after it the great American suburban rush, and Massapequa became one of its purest expressions.
Between 1940 and 1960 the population exploded from roughly 3,500 to about 40,000. Builders laid out street after street of modest houses, and the families who bought them came, overwhelmingly, from the crowded Italian neighbourhoods of the outer boroughs.
The Brooklyn and Queens pipeline
This was the era when Italian families left the Italian heart of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, along with Bath Beach, Howard Beach and the Italian pockets of Ozone Park, for the promise of a lawn and a driveway. The Southern State Parkway and the rail line made the South Shore reachable. A father could keep his job in the city and still come home to grass.
The move was rarely a single family acting alone. A cousin bought in Massapequa, then a sister followed, then the people from the next block over. Whole social worlds reassembled themselves, parish by parish, club by club, twenty-five miles east of where they started.
What made the leap possible was money and mortgages. The postwar GI Bill put home loans within reach of working families for the first time, and the children of immigrants who had grown up in railroad flats could suddenly buy. For an Italian-American family that had spent two generations renting in Brooklyn, a deed to a house in Massapequa was not just a new address. It was arrival.
And the families brought the old rhythms with them. The Sunday dinner that ran from early afternoon into evening, the basement finished and fitted with a second kitchen for serious cooking, the vegetable garden squeezed between the garage and the fence, with tomatoes and basil and a fig tree wrapped in tar paper every winter to survive the Long Island cold. The quarter-acre lot simply gave those traditions more room.
Matzah pizza
The other great postwar stream into Massapequa was Jewish, and the two communities settled side by side so thoroughly that the town earned an affectionate nickname. Locals have long joked that Massapequa really means “Matzah Pizza,” a one-word portrait of a place that is at once deeply Italian and deeply Jewish.
The joke endured because it was accurate. On the same block you might find a Catholic family with a statue of the Madonna in the front garden and, next door, neighbours hanging a mezuzah, both having made the same journey out from the boroughs in the same decade.
Building the institutions
An Italian Catholic suburb needs its churches, its butcher and its bakery, and Massapequa built all three. The Catholic parishes filled with families who had been baptised and married in Brooklyn and now wanted the same sacraments for their children closer to home.
The commercial Italian life clustered along the main arteries, Broadway, Hicksville Road and Sunrise Highway, where pork stores, pizzerias, delis and pastry shops opened to serve a clientele that knew exactly what good sfogliatelle and good sausage were supposed to taste like.
By the time the Long Island Rail Road elevated the Massapequa Park station in the 1980s, the town’s Italian-American character was fixed. The grandchildren of Bensonhurst were now the established families of the South Shore.
The Landmarks
A & S Pork Store and Deli, 929 North Broadway, North Massapequa. Open since 1967 on the corner of Broadway and Pine, this is the archetypal Massapequa Italian butcher: fresh mozzarella pulled daily, homemade sausage, imported cheeses and the semolina bread that regulars swear by. For many families it is the Saturday-morning ritual that anchors the week.
St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church, 2 Bayview Avenue, Massapequa. One of the parishes around which the town’s Catholic life organised itself, complete with a parish school. Its festivals and family events are the kind of gathering where the suburb’s Italian and Irish Catholic families have crossed paths for generations.
Bar Grazie, 5074 Sunrise Highway, Massapequa Park. A newer arrival that shows the tradition is still being written, blending Italian cooking with a lively neighbourhood bar. It sits on the Sunrise Highway strip that has long been the town’s restaurant row.
Phil’s Pizzeria & Restaurant, 820 Hicksville Road, Massapequa. A family pizzeria of exactly the sort Massapequa has in abundance, the everyday counterpart to the special-occasion bakeries, where a slice and a hero are a fixture of growing up here.
Tackapausha Museum and Preserve, 2225 Washington Avenue, Massapequa. Named for the Marsapeague chief who deeded these meadowlands to Oyster Bay settlers in 1658, the museum and nature preserve hold the older layer of the town’s story, the one that long predates the Italian families.
Grace Church Complex, off Merrick Road, Massapequa. The Old Grace Church was built in 1844 as the summer place of worship for the area’s founding families and marked its 175th anniversary in 2019. It is a reminder that Massapequa was a settled village long before it became a postwar Italian suburb.
Where They Came From
Two migrations stack on top of each other in Massapequa. The deeper one is the journey from southern Italy, the Mezzogiorno, the regions around Naples, Calabria, Sicily and Campania that sent millions of emigrants to New York in the decades on either side of 1900. Those families landed in the tenements of Manhattan and the new Italian neighbourhoods of Brooklyn and Queens.
The second migration, the one that actually built Italian Massapequa, was internal: the postwar move out of those boroughs and onto Long Island. The families who filled Massapequa’s new streets came not directly from Italy but from the Italian streets of Carroll Gardens, from Bensonhurst, from Bath Beach and Howard Beach.
It is the same arc that produced the Italian suburbs of Staten Island and that drew so many away from the old city enclaves like Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Massapequa is the South Shore chapter of that story, the place a Brooklyn family went when it wanted a yard.
The regional roots still show up at the table. A Massapequa Sunday gravy carries the flavours of Naples and Campania, the Sicilian families keep their own feast-day pastries, and the Calabrian households make their soppressata a little spicier than the neighbours’. These distinctions, invisible to outsiders, are exactly the kind of detail that connects a South Shore kitchen back to a specific town in the Italian south.
Massapequa Today
Massapequa today is a comfortable, settled suburb where the Italian-American identity is woven into daily life rather than performed. It shows up in the pork-store lines on Saturday, the bakery boxes tied with string on Sunday, the volume of a family table at a Sunrise Highway restaurant on a Friday night.
The town is also proud of its public schools and its hometown names. The Baldwin brothers, including actor Alec Baldwin, grew up in the Nassau Shores section and went through the local schools, Alec graduating from Berner High School in 1976, a fact the town has never let anyone forget.
Like every Italian-American suburb, Massapequa is watching the immigrant generation recede into memory and the third and fourth generations marry out and move on. But the institutions hold. The pork store still makes mozzarella the way it did in 1967, the parishes still fill, and the matzah-pizza joke still lands, because the town it described is still recognisably here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Italians in Massapequa?
The Italians in Massapequa are overwhelmingly the product of postwar suburban migration. Between 1940 and 1960 the population grew from about 3,500 to roughly 40,000, and most of the new families came from Italian neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and Queens seeking single-family homes on Long Island.
Does Massapequa really have the most Italians on Long Island?
The Massapequas are widely cited as having the highest share of residents of Italian ancestry of any community on Long Island, with Italian heritage accounting for a very large portion of the population across the hamlets.
What does “matzah pizza” mean?
It is a long-running local nickname for Massapequa, playing on the town’s two largest postwar communities, Italian Catholic and Jewish. The Italians in Massapequa settled side by side with Jewish families who made the same move out from the boroughs, and the joke captures that mix in one phrase.
Where did Massapequa’s Italian families originally come from?
Most trace back to southern Italy, the regions around Naples, Calabria, Sicily and Campania, by way of the Italian enclaves of Brooklyn and Queens. The direct move to Massapequa was usually from neighbourhoods like Bensonhurst, Bath Beach and Howard Beach rather than from Italy itself.
What are the best Italian food spots in Massapequa?
Longtime favourites include A & S Pork Store and Deli on North Broadway, open since 1967, along with a deep bench of pizzerias and Italian restaurants on Hicksville Road and Sunrise Highway. The Saturday pork-store run and the Sunday bakery box remain Massapequa institutions.
Is Alec Baldwin from Massapequa?
Yes. Alec Baldwin and his brothers grew up in the Nassau Shores section of Massapequa and attended local schools. Alec graduated from Alfred G. Berner High School in 1976, and the family is among the town’s best-known names.
If your family’s story passed through Massapequa, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in the Mezzogiorno to a Brooklyn block to a quarter-acre lot on the South Shore, to wherever you are now.