UPPER CRUST

How pizza became New Haven's calling card.

- HANNAH GOLDFIELD

Not long ago, in line at Libby’s Italian Pastry Shop, a hundred-year old bakery in New Haven, I encountered a burly middle-aged man pacing in front of the counter in a state of distress. The cannoli, he was horrified to see, were not being filled with ricotta to order but, rather, had been pre-assembled and were now growing soggy (he was sure) in a large glass display case. He slapped a palm to his forehead. I asked him if he had come to Wooster Square, New Haven’s historically Italian neighborhood, for the pizza. He certainly had not. “I don’t buy Connecticut pizza,” he said scornfully. “I’m from the Bronx. It don’t taste right.”

I beg to differ. But, of course, I would: I was born and raised in New Haven, where pizza is also known as “apizza,” pronounced “ah-beetz,” a bit of enduring Neapolitan dialect. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an influx of Italian immigrants, mostly from Naples, arrived to work at factories like Sargent & Co., a manufacturer of locks and hardware; in the nineteen-tens, New Haven had the highest per-capita Italian American population of any city in the U.S. Small, family-owned bakeries, many of them serving simple, inexpensive pizza made in brick ovens, proliferated in Wooster Square and beyond.