603 Crescent Avenue
Roberto Paciullo, from Salerno, in Campania in southwestern Italy, opened his eponymous restaurant a few doors from here in 1989, moving to the present location in 2004. Highly recommended by the Michelin Guide, which describes Roberto’s as a “storied Italian-American favorite whose design falls somewhere between a cozy farmhouse and Mediterranean villa.”
Photo courtesy of Bronx Little Italy.
2342 Arthur Avenue
Mario’s opened in 1919. It received a rave review from Craig Claiborne in The New York Times in 1976, and is known to have served Nelson Rockefeller, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher, the
renowned soprano Anna Moffo, and Clint Eastwood. The restaurant’s renown extended to its mention in Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather (1969), though the restaurant’s owners, the Migliucci family, declined a request to have the restaurant appear in the film version. In 2018, John Mariani, the authority on Italian-American food, wrote in Forbes that Mario’s “sets a civilized example for anyone who wants to know what the Italian- American restaurant should be.”
Photo courtesy of Bronx Little Italy.
2348 Arthur Avenue
One of the most popular stories one hears on Arthur Avenue is that of how in 1924 the wife of Mario Madonia, the Palermo-born founder of the then six-year-old bakery, still in its original location on nearby Adams Place, gave birth to her youngest son right in the bakery when a car crashed through the front window, sending her into premature labor. The child, Peter Madonia Sr., was incubated in a shoebox placed next to the oven. The bakery is now run by partners Peter Jr. and Charlie La Lima. In 2018, Peter Jr. returned to the family business after a distinguished career as Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s chief of staff and as chief operating officer of the Rockefeller Foundation. In fact, Peter Madonia had once before left public service to steward the bakery. In 1988, his brother Mario, who had run the bakery,died in a car accident, and Peter, who had served in the Koch administration in City Hall, and then as deputy commissioner of buildings and as deputy commissioner of the Fire Department, returned to the bakery in an emergency capacity. In what seems almost like the plot of a Hallmark movie, he now appears to be back for good.
Photo courtesy of Bronx Little Italy.
2372 Arthur Avenue
Teitel Brothers was founded in 1915. In a wonderful example of New York’s immigrant synergies, this famous Italian specialty food store was started by an Austrian Jewish family. According to family lore, one of the founding brothers, Jacob Teitel, was a Yiddish speaker who learned to speak Italian before English. There is an inlaid Star of David in the entranceway, installed during the Depression as a show of resistance against the rising tide of facism and anti-Semitism in Europe.
Photo courtesy of Bronx Little Italy.
2374 Arthur Avenue
Vincent’s Meat Market was founded in 1954 and has been in its present location since 1981. It is family owned and operated, and provides high quality, fresh meat and poultry sourced from reputable farms. It appears as the butcher shop where Marty Piletti works in the film Marty. Filmed almost in a documentary style, Marty is one of the most evocative of all New York City films. Written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Delbert Mann, Marty won the 1955 Academy Award for Best Picture, as well as the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Ernest Borgnine, who starred in the title role, won the Academy Award for Best Actor. The film tells the story of a lonely, middle-aged butcher who lives in Belmont. At the time, the meat market was called Oteri’s Butcher Shop, and in the film, Marty refers to his boss as Mr. Oteri. Marty opens memorably with a shot of the Arthur Avenue Retail Market.
Photo courtesy of Bronx Little Italy.
500 East Fordham Road
1929
William H. Gompert
This stately block-long building, with its distyle-in-antis portico, raises its distinctive cupola over Fordham Road. The architect, William H. Gompert (1875-1946), succeeded the long-serving C.B.J. Snyder as the New York City Board of Education architect in 1923, and served until 1927, though several of his designs, including Theodore Roosevelt High School, were not completed until after he had resigned. (A school designed by Snyder may be seen nearby: P.S. 32, at Belmont Avenue and 182nd Street, was built in 1900.)
Gompert, a New York City native, attended Pratt Institute and worked for McKim, Mead & White and for Maynicke & Franke before forming his own firm in 1906. He designed some 170 schools in the five boroughs, including the High School of Music and Art (1924) on West 135th Street, DeWitt Clinton High School (1929) in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx, James Madison High School (1926) at 3787 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, Jamaica High School (1927) in Jamaica, Queens, Seward Park High School (1929) on Grand Street in the Lower East Side, and, possibly his masterpiece, P.S. 101 (1929) in Forest Hills Gardens.
Notable alumni of Theodore Roosevelt High School include June Allyson, once one of the most popular movie stars in the world; Rocky Colavito, the slugging right-fielder who in his major league baseball career appeared in nine All-Star Games; Ace Frehley, lead guitarist of the rock band Kiss, and Jimmie “J.J.” Walker, comedian and star of the 1970s TV show Good Times. Perhaps most notable among the school’s alumni is Chazz Palminteri (b. 1952). Palminteri’s one-man play, A Bronx Tale, premiered off-Broadway in 1989 and is set in Belmont. In 1993, Robert De Niro adapted the play into a movie and a musical version, directed by De Niro, ran on Broadway from 2016 to 2018.
Photo courtesy of NYCago.
685 East 182nd St.
1940
Eggers & Higgins
This Roman Catholic girls’ high school was established in 1939. The inventive, complexly massed U-shaped building, Romanesque in style, greets the street with strong apsidal forms attached to wings that project from a recessed central section designed to resemble a Medieval cloister. The architects Otto Eggers and Daniel Higgins had just succeeded to the practice of their late employer, John Russell Pope, and were contemporaneously at work putting the finishing touches on the National Gallery of Art and the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Photo courtesy of Aquinas High School.
441 East Fordham Road
1997
Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson & Abbott
The main library of Fordham University houses the fine Fordham Museum of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Art, comprising the collection of William D. Walsh, who majored in Greek and Latin at Fordham before embarking upon a career in law, finance, and collecting. The museum is an excellent starting point for an afternoon’s stroll through Belmont.
3051 East Tremont Avenue
ca. 1880
This prominently sited brick church, designed in the High Victorian Gothic style, boasts a distinct steeple that can be seen from blocks away. Notably, Crow Hill, on which the church sits, was the site to which General William Howe and his troops retreated after being repulsed by American forces as they attempted to cross Westchester Creek. The use of polychromatic materials, such as the contrasting white stone trim and red brick, as well as the incorporation of banded arches into the facade, is emblematic of High Victorian Gothic architecture. The First Presbyterian Church of Throggs Neck was organized in the 1850s, and during the Civil War, church parishioners offered bowls of soup to soldiers passing through Throggs Neck via train so that they would not be tempted to visit nearby taverns. The congregation’s first structure burned down in 1870, and the date of current church is unknown, although some estimates date it to around 1880.
2900 East Tremont Avenue
This marker notes the spot of a small, but important battle of the New York campaign of the Revolutionary War that occurred on October 12, 1776. After taking control of Lower Manhattan but failing to dislodge General George Washington and his troops from Harlem, British General William Howe (brother of British Admiral Richard Howe) sought to flank the Americans by landing at Throgs Neck, which was virtually an island, utilizing a bridge over the Westchester Creek. Near the point at which East Tremont Avenue currently spans the now-submerged creek, a group of Americans repelled Howe’s advance over the bridge, providing time for Washington to begin his retreat from Upper Manhattan towards White Plains. The northern reaches of the Westchester Creek were buried over time so that the stream now emerges south of the Lehman High School football field. Starting in the Dutch period, Dock Street, which now serves as a driveway for businesses on Ferris Place, was the point of disembarkation for ships approaching the village via Westchester Creek. Although the creek sees much less maritime traffic than in years past, a marina, constructed in 1957, provides recreational boaters with slips amidst the otherwise industrial environs of the canal.
