Walk the length of Pine Avenue in Niagara Falls, New York, and the city’s most enduring story is written in red brick and tomato sauce. Long before the casinos and the souvenir shops, the Italians in Niagara Falls built a corridor of bakeries, churches and social clubs that still anchors the place. Italian ancestry is the single largest reported ancestry in the city, and the avenue locals simply call Little Italy is where that history lives.
The Place
Niagara Falls sits on the Niagara River in the far west of New York State, where the water drops over the escarpment and the United States meets Canada. The American city grew up not on tourism alone but on cheap hydroelectric power, which drew chemical plants, abrasive works and metal foundries through the first half of the twentieth century.
At its 1970 peak the city held 85,615 people. By 2026 that figure had fallen to roughly 46,981, a decline of nearly half as the factories closed and the river crossings changed the shape of trade.
Through all of it, one strip held its character. Pine Avenue runs east from Main Street to Hyde Park Boulevard, and along that line the Italian families who came for the work made their permanent home.
How It Became Italian
The Italians did not drift into Niagara Falls. They were pulled, town by town, in one of the clearest examples of chain migration in the American northeast.
The first arrivals and the construction boom
Italian families began settling in the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A construction boom built the railways, the streetcar lines, the waterworks and the power infrastructure that made Niagara Falls a manufacturing centre, and that boom needed labour.
Much of it was Italian. The men dug, hauled, mixed and laid the stone that turned a frontier mill town into an industrial city, and as the wages came in, the wives and children followed across the Atlantic.
The road from Gimigliano
One town gave Niagara Falls an outsized share of its Italians: Gimigliano, a hill village in the province of Catanzaro, in Calabria. From the early 1900s all the way to the 1960s it was common for Gimiglianese to emigrate to Niagara Falls, both the New York city and its Ontario twin across the river.
The genealogies read like a relay. Giuseppe Rotella reached Niagara Falls from Gimigliano in 1893, and his wife, Angela Rosa Zagordi, followed in 1898 with three of their children. Giuseppe MangiaCasale, born in Gimigliano in 1877, landed at the Port of New York in 1899 and reached Niagara Falls by 1904.
Agostino Salvatore Mariano arrived at Ellis Island in May 1909, then sent for his wife, Maria Saveria Paonessa Mariano, who sailed from Naples and reached Ellis Island that September. One man would establish himself, then write home, and a cousin or a neighbour would book passage. A single Calabrian village seeded a neighbourhood three thousand miles away.
Building a church of their own
As Roman Catholics far from home, the early Italian immigrants wanted a parish that spoke their language and kept their traditions. They founded St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in 1903.
In 1920 a new church rose in the Little Italy neighbourhood on Pine Avenue, designed by architect William Alban Cannon in a red-bricked Romanesque-Lombardi style. The parish celebrated its centennial in 2003, and five years later it merged with another to form the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Parish. The original Italian congregation had built it; the wider neighbourhood inherited it.
Looking after one another
Immigrants who had no safety net built their own. The Cristoforo Colombo Society grew up as a mutual-aid and fraternal organisation, a way for Italians to take care of one another in a new country, providing support to members and to the impoverished around them.
Many of the society’s eleven founding members were also instrumental in founding St. Joseph’s. In 1950 the society bought an old church building at 2223 Pine Avenue, where it met for the next twenty years. Aid, faith and food all sat within a few blocks of one another.
The kitchens that fed the avenue
Italian entrepreneurship in Niagara Falls expressed itself through food, and the restaurants that opened on Pine Avenue became institutions in their own right.
Angelo Scalzo, from Gimigliano, founded Scalzo’s Restaurant in 1906. Francesco Antonacci, an Abruzzese baker who had worked the Pennsylvania coal mines before settling in the city, opened the Como in 1927. These were not chains. They were family tables that happened to be open to the public, and they passed down through generations.
The Landmarks
St. Joseph’s Church, 1413 Pine Avenue. Founded by Italian Catholics in 1903 and rebuilt on Pine Avenue in 1920, the red-brick Romanesque-Lombardi church is the spiritual heart of Little Italy. It marked its centennial in 2003 before merging into the Holy Family parish, but the building still stands as the avenue’s most visible Italian landmark.
Columbus Square Park, Pine Avenue. The square is the social centre of Italian Niagara Falls, with bocce courts where older men still play and a summer concert series. It hosts gatherings through the warm months and remains the place where the neighbourhood’s Italian identity is most openly lived.
The Como Restaurant, Pine Avenue. Francesco Antonacci opened the Como in 1927, named for Lake Como, with six tables and his own sauce recipe. When his daughter Adeline married Dominic Colucci in 1940, the two families merged, and four generations of children nicknamed the “Como Babies” took their turn in the kitchen using recipes unchanged since the start.
Scalzo’s Restaurant, 1602 Pine Avenue. Angelo Scalzo, an immigrant from Gimigliano, founded the restaurant in 1906 at Memorial Parkway and East Falls Street. After a fire, his son Thomas moved it to Pine Avenue, where it reopened at 1602 in the 1970s and ran until the family closed it in the 1990s.
DiCamillo Bakery, 811 Linwood Avenue. A local favourite since 1920, DiCamillo’s has been baking Italian bread, biscotti, holiday cakes and cookies for more than a century. It is one of the oldest continuously operating Italian businesses in the city and ships its baked goods well beyond Niagara County.
Cristoforo Colombo Society, 2223 Pine Avenue. The fraternal society bought this former church building in 1950 and met here for twenty years, providing mutual aid and keeping the immigrants’ bonds intact. The address remains tied to the society’s name and to the avenue’s history of self-help.
The Niagara Falls Italian Festival. Held in late spring, the festival centres Italian food, music and heritage in the city each year. A separate summer Italian festival run by Carmine’s Family Catering and the Pax Romana Commission, long held at Hyde Park, planned a move to Lewiston’s Academy Park for July 2026.
Where They Came From
The Italians of Niagara Falls came overwhelmingly from the Italian south, and Calabria above all. Gimigliano, in the province of Catanzaro, sent so many families that its name recurs through the city’s genealogies for more than half a century.
Calabria in that era was poor, mountainous and crowded, with little land to divide among growing families. America offered wages a Calabrian farmer could not earn at home, and Niagara Falls offered them in steady industrial doses.
Others came from elsewhere in the south. Francesco Antonacci of the Como was from Abruzzo, on the Adriatic side of the peninsula, arriving as a teenager and working the coal mines of Pennsylvania before he ever saw the falls. The common thread was the chain itself: one relative established, then the letter home, then the next passage booked.
Niagara Falls Today
Italian ancestry remains the largest single ancestry reported in Niagara Falls, at around 18 per cent of the population, ahead of Irish, Polish and German. In a city that has lost nearly half its people since 1970, that endurance says something about how deep the roots ran.
Little Italy today is a quieter place than it was. Wikipedia describes the district as surrounded by residential homes and a number of non-Italian businesses, and some of the famous old kitchens, Scalzo’s among them, have closed. The avenue is no longer a wall of Italian shopfronts.
But the anchors hold. St. Joseph’s still stands on Pine Avenue, Columbus Square Park still hosts bocce and summer concerts, DiCamillo’s still bakes, and the festival still draws the descendants back each year. The Italians in Niagara Falls did not so much fade as settle into the bones of the city, which is what a hundred years tends to do. For families tracing that line, the avenue is still legible, brick by brick.
The Italian story in Niagara Falls rhymes with other industrial cities of the northeast. Readers can trace parallel arcs in our profiles of the Italians in Rochester, New York, the Italians in Endicott, New York, the Italians in Utica, New York, the Italians in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the brass-city Italians in Waterbury, Connecticut, each shaped by factory wages and southern Italian chain migration.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Little Italy in Niagara Falls, New York?
Little Italy runs along Pine Avenue, from Main Street east to Hyde Park Boulevard, within the city of Niagara Falls. It is the historic corridor where the Italians in Niagara Falls concentrated their churches, restaurants and social clubs, and Columbus Square Park sits at its heart.
Why did so many Italians settle in Niagara Falls?
A construction and industrial boom in the early twentieth century, building railways, power infrastructure and factories powered by cheap hydroelectricity, created a heavy demand for labour. Italian immigrants filled those jobs, and as men established themselves they sent for relatives, building the community through chain migration.
Where in Italy did the Niagara Falls Italians come from?
Most came from southern Italy, and Calabria above all. The hill town of Gimigliano, in the province of Catanzaro, sent a remarkable number of families between the early 1900s and the 1960s, so many that its name appears throughout the city’s genealogies.
What are the oldest Italian businesses in Niagara Falls?
Scalzo’s Restaurant, founded by Gimigliano-born Angelo Scalzo in 1906, was among the earliest, followed by DiCamillo Bakery in 1920 and the Como restaurant, opened by Francesco Antonacci in 1927. The Como and DiCamillo’s both passed down through multiple generations of the founding families.
Is there still an Italian festival in Niagara Falls?
Yes. The Italians in Niagara Falls celebrate their heritage with an annual Italian festival of food, music and culture, centred on the Pine Avenue community. A separate summer festival long held at Hyde Park planned a move to nearby Lewiston for July 2026.
How Italian is Niagara Falls today?
Italian ancestry is the single largest reported ancestry in Niagara Falls, at roughly 18 per cent of the population, ahead of Irish, Polish and German. Even as the city’s overall population has fallen sharply since 1970, the Italian presence remains the strongest thread in its makeup.
If your family’s story passed through Niagara Falls, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hill town in Calabria to a red-brick church on Pine Avenue, to wherever you are now.