On a Saturday morning in Pelham, the line at DeCicco & Sons curls past the cheese counter and out toward the door, and half the conversations are about who is coming for Sunday dinner. The Italians in Pelham did not arrive here in a single wave or settle around a single church. They came up the New Haven Line a few stops from the Bronx, one mortgage and one moving truck at a time, until this small Westchester town just north of the city line felt like a version of home with a backyard.
The Place
Pelham sits in the southern corner of Westchester County, roughly ten miles northeast of Midtown Manhattan and pressed up against the Bronx border. It is unusual in that it is a single town made of two villages, Pelham and Pelham Manor, that share a school district and a sense of themselves while keeping separate village governments.
The whole place is small and walkable, built around a Metro-North station where the train reaches Grand Central in under half an hour. That commute is the entire reason the town exists in its modern form, and it is the thread that ties Pelham to the city neighbourhoods so many of its families left behind. It is a pattern of comfortable suburban Westchester and Long Island life shared with places like the Italian community in Garden City on Long Island and with the affluent towns just to the north, such as the families who settled in Armonk.
It is also, by any measure, an affluent town. The median household income runs well above $180,000, and the median home value has climbed past $900,000, a long way from the $333,600 it stood at in 2000.
How It Became Italian
Pelham was never a Little Italy. There was no single block where the whole community pressed together, no festa that closed the main avenue. The Italian story here is quieter and more characteristic of the second and third generation: a steady, decades-long arrival of families who had already started their American lives somewhere denser, somewhere closer to the harbour.
From the Manor of Pelham to a commuter town
The town traces back to 1654, when Thomas Pell acquired the land from the Siwanoy, and the Manor of Pelham became the Town of Pelham when Westchester County organised its towns in 1788. For most of that history this was farmland and a scattering of grand estates.
The modern town was made by the railroad. When the New Haven line reached the hamlet then called Pelhamville in 1851, it opened the possibility of living in the country and working in the city. By 1889 developers were laying out Pelham Heights as a planned commuting village, and Pelham Manor incorporated in 1891 in part to keep New York City from annexing the land. Pelham was built, from the start, for people who worked in Manhattan and wanted to sleep somewhere greener.
The Bronx connection
To understand the Italians in Pelham you have to look one stop south, into the Bronx. The North Bronx and the neighbourhoods around Pelham Bay and Pelham Parkway held one of the largest Italian-American populations in the country through the middle of the twentieth century, the same world that produced the Italian community on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Those families were the children and grandchildren of immigrants from southern Italy, raised in apartments and tied to parishes, and after the Second World War many of them began to move out.
The pattern was the same one that reshaped Italian New York everywhere. The GI Bill, rising incomes, and the desire for a house with a yard pulled second and third generation families out of the older enclaves and into Queens, Staten Island, and the suburbs. For Bronx Italians, Pelham was the natural next step, geographically close enough to keep the old ties and just over the line into Westchester, with its schools and its lawns. The same impulse carried other families a little further north into the suburbs, to the Italian families who settled in nearby Eastchester.
Bringing the food up the line
The clearest proof of that Bronx-to-Pelham thread is the store at the centre of the town. DeCicco & Sons began in 1973 when John DeCicco Sr. and his brothers Frank and Joe took over a small grocery in the Bronx, where John had worked as a delivery boy. In 1984 the brothers came to Pelham, taking over a supermarket on Fifth Avenue, and they made it the anchor of the downtown.
The store is now a Westchester institution with a dozen locations, still run by the family, with John Sr.’s sons John Jr., Chris, and Joe Jr. at the helm. In Pelham it functions as more than a grocery. It is where the town gathers, the proof that an Italian family from the Bronx could move up the line and build something that the whole community would organise its weekends around.
The parishes
Catholic life in Pelham was older than the Italian arrival. St. Catharine’s parish in the village dates to 1896, when more than fifty Catholic families in Pelhamville built a small Gothic frame church on a lot at 25 Second Avenue, on land donated by Patrick Farrell and dedicated by Archbishop Michael Corrigan. Those founders carried Irish and German names as much as Italian ones.
By the time the Italian families were arriving in numbers, the parishes were already standing, ready to absorb them. Today St. Catharine and Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Pelham Manor have merged into a single parish, and between them they hold the baptisms, weddings, and funerals that mark out an Italian-American family’s life across generations.
The Landmarks
DeCicco & Sons, 43 Fifth Avenue, Pelham. The town’s beating heart, opened here in 1984 by a Bronx Italian grocery family. The prepared foods, the cheese counter, and the weekend crowds make it less a supermarket than a meeting hall, and in 2023 it marked fifty years in business.
Pelham Pizza, 113 Fifth Avenue, Pelham. Opened in May 1978 by two brothers from Italy, Luigi “Gino” and Ettore “John” Ruffolo. After John died in 1988 and Gino in 2009, the place stayed in the family, run now by Gino’s son-in-law Pino Mancini alongside Gino’s son John. The motto on the door, “everyone is family,” is meant literally.
Sergio’s Ristorante, 503 Fifth Avenue, Pelham. A newer arrival, opened in 2014, serving northern Italian cooking and fresh pasta. It earned Best New Restaurant in the Best of Westchester awards in 2019 and a Michelin Bib Gourmand the following year, a sign that Italian Pelham is not only nostalgia but ambition.
Villaggio Ristorante & Pizzeria, 229 Wolfs Lane, Pelham. One of the town’s longtime neighbourhood pizzerias, on the Wolfs Lane stretch that runs near the train station. It is the kind of place where the order is known before it is spoken.
St. Catharine Church, 25 Second Avenue, Pelham. The parish founded in 1896 by the first Catholic families of Pelhamville and dedicated by Archbishop Corrigan. It anchored Catholic life in the village long before the Italian families arrived, and welcomed them when they did.
Our Lady of Perpetual Help, 559 Pelham Manor Road, Pelham Manor. The Pelham Manor parish now joined with St. Catharine into one community. For Italian families on the Manor side of town it is the church where the sacraments of a lifetime are kept.
Wolf’s Lane Delicatessen, 247 Wolfs Lane, Pelham. A small storefront deli on the lane near the station, locally famous for its breaded chicken cutlets, the workaday cornerstone of an Italian-American food culture that runs from the home kitchen to the corner shop.
Where They Came From
The Italians who settled Pelham were rarely fresh off the boat. By the time they arrived, the immigration story had already happened a generation or two earlier, in the tenements of the Bronx and the older parishes of the city. Their grandparents and great-grandparents had come overwhelmingly from southern Italy, from Campania, Calabria, Sicily, and the regions of the Mezzogiorno that sent millions to New York between the 1880s and the 1920s.
What Pelham received was the next chapter: families who had already become American in the Bronx and were ready to move up. They brought the food, the parish habits, and the Sunday rhythms with them, but they were moving toward schools and homeownership rather than away from poverty. A few of the businesses, like Pelham Pizza, were started by people born in Italy who came directly, but the broader community was the suburban flowering of an immigration that had landed decades before, a stop further down the line.
Pelham Today
Pelham today is one of Westchester’s most sought-after small towns, and Italian heritage is woven into it without dominating it. Census ancestry figures put Italian among the largest in the town, around a tenth of residents, sharing the top of the list with Irish, and the town’s population has been growing, past 13,000 at the 2020 count.
The community is mixed in a way the old enclaves never were. Pelham is also home to substantial English, Jamaican, and Brazilian populations, and its appeal now is the schools and the commute as much as any single heritage. The Italian presence shows up less in numbers than in texture: the store everyone shops at, the pizzeria where the family has run the ovens for over forty years, the parish calendar.
It is, in the end, a quietly Italian town rather than a loudly one. The community did not build a monument to itself here. It built a comfortable life a short train ride from where it started, and left its mark in the places people gather to eat, pray, and run into their neighbours.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Italians live in Pelham, New York?
Census ancestry data puts Italian among the largest reported ancestries in Pelham, at roughly a tenth of the town’s residents, tied near the top with Irish. With a total town population of about 13,000 at the 2020 census, the Italians in Pelham number in the low thousands and form one of the community’s defining groups.
Why did Italian families move to Pelham?
Most came from the Bronx, especially the heavily Italian neighbourhoods of the North Bronx around Pelham Bay and Pelham Parkway. After the Second World War, second and third generation families used rising incomes and the GI Bill to leave the city for suburban homes, and Pelham sat just over the Westchester line with good schools and a short commute.
Is Pelham an expensive place to live?
Yes. Pelham is one of the more affluent towns in Westchester County, with a median household income well above $180,000 and a median home value above $900,000. Its appeal rests largely on the Metro-North commute to Grand Central in under thirty minutes and on a highly regarded public school district.
What is the main Italian grocery in Pelham?
DeCicco & Sons at 43 Fifth Avenue is the town’s central market. It was started by a Bronx Italian family in 1973 and came to Pelham in 1984, and it now anchors the downtown as both a grocery and a community gathering place.
What is the Catholic parish for Italians in Pelham?
The parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help-St. Catharine serves the town’s Catholics. St. Catharine on Second Avenue dates to 1896 and Our Lady of Perpetual Help is in Pelham Manor; the two have merged into a single parish that holds the baptisms, weddings, and funerals of Italian-American Pelham.
Is there a Little Italy in Pelham?
No. Pelham never developed a single Italian enclave the way Bronx neighbourhoods did. The Italian presence here is suburban and woven through the town, visible in family-run restaurants, the local market, and the parishes rather than in one concentrated district.
If your family’s story passed through Pelham, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Campania or Calabria, to a Bronx apartment a few stops down the line, to a house with a yard in Pelham, to wherever you are now.