Walk down Main Street in Pittston on an August afternoon and the air smells of sausage and peppers, hot oil and ripe tomatoes. This small city on the Susquehanna, wedged between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, was once called the Tomato Capital of the World, and the people who earned it that name came mostly from the hill towns of southern Italy. The story of the Italians in Pittston is a story of coal first, then of bread and gardens, and of a community that outlasted the industry that brought it here.
The Place
Pittston sits at the heart of Pennsylvania’s northern anthracite field, on the east bank of the Susquehanna River in Luzerne County, roughly halfway between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. It is a compact city, home to about 7,554 people at the 2020 census, built on a grid of steep streets that climb away from the water.
For more than a century its fortune was hard coal. The first mine in the region was opened near here in 1775, and by the late nineteenth century the railroads and the collieries had turned Pittston into what one local account calls a true melting pot, a patchwork of distinct ethnic neighbourhoods.
Today Italian ancestry is the single largest in the city, claimed by roughly a quarter of residents. That figure is not an accident of a single generation. It is the residue of a migration that began in earnest in the 1880s and never fully stopped.
How It Became Italian
Coal called, and the hill towns answered
Pittston did not start out Italian. The earliest miners in the anthracite fields were English, Welsh, Irish and German, the experienced collier families who knew how to read a coal seam. The Italians, like the Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians and Ruthenians who arrived alongside them, came later and went deeper.
From the 1880s onward, the collieries and the railroads pulled in thousands of immigrants, and Italians settled in particular in the eastern anthracite towns: Pittston, Shamokin and Nanticoke. They came overwhelmingly from the Mezzogiorno, the poor agricultural south of Italy, where land was scarce and the work was harder than the pay.
The men who came were not miners by trade. They were farmers and labourers from Sicily, Calabria, Abruzzo and Molise, and they took the jobs the established families did not want: the wet, the dangerous, the badly lit. One of them, Steven La Torre, was born in the Sicilian sulphur town of Montedoro in 1886 and lived out his American life in Pittston, a single thread in a much larger weave.
Chain migration and the streets above the mine
Italian settlement in Pittston followed the familiar pattern of chain migration. A man would arrive, find work in the breaker or the mine, save, and then send for a brother, a cousin, a wife, a whole village in instalments. People from the same Italian town tended to cluster on the same Pittston streets, marry within the group, and worship together.
The church anchored everything. Italian Catholics in Pittston built their own parishes rather than fold quietly into the older Irish ones. Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St. Rocco both grew as distinctly Italian congregations, named for saints carried over from the old country, where the feast day was as much a civic event as a religious one.
Around the churches grew the small economy of an immigrant neighbourhood: the bakery, the butcher, the grocer, the social club. Bread was baked daily. Gardens filled every spare yard. Wine was pressed in basements. The men worked the seams while the women held the household economy together, and the second generation grew up bilingual, Catholic, and American.
Disaster and the end of coal
The reckoning came on 22 January 1959, a few miles downriver at Port Griffith in Jenkins Township. The Knox Coal Company had ordered its men to dig upward toward the bed of the Susquehanna, leaving as little as six feet of rock where thirty-five was the safe minimum. The river broke through. Twelve men were killed, and their bodies were never recovered.
Among the survivors was Amedeo Pancotti of nearby Exeter, who led thirty-two trapped men through the flooding workings, dug through thirty feet of debris, then scaled a fifty-foot rock wall to the surface to call for help. His name is remembered locally as one of the heroes of that day.
The Knox Mine Disaster effectively ended deep anthracite mining in the northern field. The flood poured into miles of interconnected workings and never came out. For the Italian families of Pittston, whose grandfathers had crossed an ocean to go underground, the industry that had defined three generations was simply gone.
From breaker to sewing machine to tomato
What came next was not prosperity, but it was survival. After coal collapsed, Pittston reinvented itself as a national centre for clothing manufacturing, and the garment shops ran until roughly the 1980s. Many of the workers who had grown up in mining families now sat at sewing machines instead.
Through it all the Italian community held its shape through food and faith. In the 1930s Pittston had already earned the nickname Tomato Capital of the World, thanks to the rich bottomland soil along the river and the gardening culture the immigrants brought with them. That reputation would, decades later, become the foundation of the city’s most famous celebration.
This same anthracite-and-Italian story repeats across the region. You can see versions of it in the Italians of Old Forge, Pennsylvania, the self-styled pizza capital just up the valley, and in the company-town Italians of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, another coal town remade by southern Italian hands.
The Landmarks
St. Rocco Church, 62 West Oak Street. One of Pittston’s historic Italian parishes, named for the saint invoked against plague and beloved across the Italian south. For generations the church and its feast marked the rhythm of the Italian neighbourhood, a place where the old village devotions were kept alive on American ground.
Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The other great Italian congregation of Pittston, now part of the consolidated St. Joseph Marello Parish. Carmel devotions came directly from southern Italy, and the parish stands as a monument to the immigrants who refused to worship as anything other than themselves.
Sabatelle’s Market. Family owned and run by Rocky, Jane and Jason Sabatelle since October 1978, this is the kind of butcher and Italian deli that holds a town’s food culture together. They make their own porketta, chicketta, sausage, sopressata and prosciutto, age their own provolone, and have been voted Best Family Butcher in the Greater Pittston area.
The Quality Tomato Capital of the World statue. A roadside monument celebrating Pittston’s old boast, a literal giant tomato that has become a beloved local landmark. It is a tongue-in-cheek civic shrine to the river-bottom gardens that the Italian families made famous.
Downtown Pittston’s Main Street murals. Part of the city’s revitalisation, the painted walls, sculptures and street art that now line Main Street include scenes from the city’s mining and immigrant past. The Second Fridays Artwalk has made the old commercial centre a destination again.
The Pittston Tomato Festival grounds, downtown Pittston. Every August the heart of the city is given over to homemade ravioli, eggplant rollatini, sausage and peppers, cannoli and gelato, a four-day open-air feast of the Italian American table. In 2026 the festival runs from 20 to 23 August.
Where They Came From
The Italians of Pittston came overwhelmingly from the Mezzogiorno, the south of Italy and the islands. Sicily was heavily represented, including sulphur and farming towns like Montedoro, and so were Calabria, Abruzzo and Molise, the mountainous regions that sent so many of their people to the Pennsylvania coalfields.
These were not industrial people. They were contadini, peasant farmers and day labourers from places where the land could no longer feed everyone and emigration had become a fact of family life. America offered wages, and the anthracite towns offered work that asked no English and no skill beyond endurance.
What they carried with them was not coal knowledge but agricultural memory: how to coax tomatoes and peppers and figs out of difficult ground, how to cure meat through a winter, how to bake bread for a household. That knowledge, transplanted to the fertile flats along the Susquehanna, is precisely what made Pittston the Tomato Capital of the World.
The same southern Italian streams reached far beyond Pittston. They built the Italian neighbourhoods of Reading, Pennsylvania, the industrial wards of Schenectady, New York, and the mill districts of Springfield, Massachusetts, each a variation on the same migration from the same impoverished south.
Pittston Today
Pittston is no longer a mining town, and it has spent the last thirty years deciding what to be instead. Revitalisation began in 1996, when former mayor Mike Lombardo helped found the group Downtown Tomorrow, as the city of Pittston began reinventing itself, and the boarded-up storefronts of Main Street have slowly given way to galleries, restaurants, a medical centre and public art.
The Italian inheritance is most visible, fittingly, in food and festival. The Pittston Tomato Festival, first held in 1984 after planning began in 1983 under organiser Val Delia and Mayor Thomas Walsh, has become the city’s signature event. Its tomato fight, parade, pageant and groaning tables of Italian American cooking draw crowds from across northeastern Pennsylvania every August.
The community is, of course, more diffuse than it was. The mines are closed, the garment shops are gone, and many descendants have moved to the suburbs or out of the valley entirely. But the parishes still stand, the family markets still cure their own meat, and a quarter of the city still answers Italian when asked about ancestry. In Pittston the old country survives less as a neighbourhood now and more as a way of eating, gardening and gathering that the grandchildren have refused to give up.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Italians in Pittston, Pennsylvania?
The Italians in Pittston came to work the anthracite coal mines and railroads from the 1880s onward. They arrived through chain migration from southern Italy, taking the deep, dangerous mining jobs that the older Welsh, Irish and German families avoided, and they built their own parishes and neighbourhoods around that work.
Where in Italy did Pittston’s Italian families come from?
They came overwhelmingly from the Mezzogiorno, the south of Italy. Sicily, Calabria, Abruzzo and Molise were the main sending regions, areas of poor farmland where emigration had become a way of life. They were peasant farmers and labourers rather than experienced miners.
What is the Pittston Tomato Festival?
It is the city’s signature August celebration, first held in 1984, honouring Pittston’s old title as the Tomato Capital of the World. It features a tomato fight, a parade, a pageant and large quantities of Italian American food, and it reflects the gardening culture the Italians in Pittston brought from the old country. In 2026 it runs from 20 to 23 August.
How many Italian Americans live in Pittston today?
Italian ancestry is the single largest in Pittston, claimed by roughly a quarter of the city’s population. With about 7,554 residents at the 2020 census, that makes Italians the dominant heritage group in the city.
What ended the coal mining that brought Italians to Pittston?
The Knox Mine Disaster of 22 January 1959, when the Susquehanna River broke into the River Slope Mine at Port Griffith and killed twelve men, effectively ended deep anthracite mining in the northern field. The flood ruined miles of interconnected workings and closed the industry that had drawn three generations of Italian families.
Are there still Italian landmarks in Pittston?
Yes. The historic Italian parishes of St. Rocco and Our Lady of Mount Carmel still stand, family-run Italian markets like Sabatelle’s continue to cure their own meats, and the Tomato Festival and the Quality Tomato Capital statue keep the Italian heritage of Pittston firmly in public view.
If your family’s story passed through Pittston, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hill town in Sicily or Calabria to a breaker on the Susquehanna, to a tomato garden on Main Street, to wherever you are now.