John's of Bleecker Street
272 Bleecker Street | also 1 Morton Street, 278 Bleecker Street | West Village | built 1904
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1903
The Polstein brothers build a six-story corner tenement to George F. Pelham's design
Joseph and Isaac Polstein put up a six-story Renaissance Revival tenement at Bleecker and Morton Streets in 1903-04, designed by George F. Pelham. Each floor was laid out for five families, with shops on the ground story. Older Federal and Greek Revival row houses nearby were then coming down for tenements to house the swelling immigrant and laboring population, and this building closely resembles Pelham's 28 Bedford Street.
“…the building was intended to house five families on each floor above a commercial ground story…”
- 1910
Twenty-three of the 25 families in the new tenement are Italian immigrants
The 1910 census found 25 families at 272-278 Bleecker Street. Twenty-three had come from Italy, and the other two from Ireland or England and from Russia. Most worked in factories that made clothing, paper boxes, hats, furniture and biscuits, and a lawyer, a druggist and a milkman lived there too. By 1930 the mix had barely changed: 21 of the 22 families were Italian-born.
- 1913
The Rossano brothers buy the tenement and run a grocery in one of its shops
Antonio and Henry Rossano bought the building in 1913 and ran a grocery from one of the storefronts until the 1930s. A booth was added to the Morton Street shop in 1915. Other commercial tenants included Mandaro & Co., a cheese dealer that stayed from the 1920s into the 1960s, and sewing-machine sellers in 1950.
- 1930
John Sasso's pizzeria moves to 278 Bleecker after losing its Sullivan Street lease
After losing its lease on Sullivan Street, John Sasso's pizzeria moved in the early 1930s to 278 Bleecker, in this tenement. The shop's neon sign still reads Port'Alba, allegedly its name before it became John's. The business is usually dated to 1929, though documents tie Sasso's Sullivan Street shop to Filippo Milone, said to have sold pies from a bakery at 175 Sullivan in 1915.
Source: Village Preservation
- 1954
John Sasso sells the pizzeria to Joe Vesce, whose brother and nephew carry it on
In 1954 Sasso sold John's to Joe Vesce, who brought in his brother Augustine, known as Chubby, after Augustine returned from military service. The brothers handed the business to their nephew Bob Vittoria in 1984, and he still owned it in 2019. By then it was one of the few survivors on a stretch of Bleecker that once held Italian cheese shops, butchers and pushcarts.
Source: Village Preservation
- 1973
Pete Castellotti, who mopped the floors as a teenager, becomes a co-owner of John's
Pete Castellotti was born at 287 Bleecker, across the street from the pizzeria's 278 address, and began mopping its floors after school when he turned 15. In 1973 he became a co-owner and went on to expand the original shop. In a 1993 New York Times profile he recalled that Mayor Ed Koch used to call him the Mayor of Bleecker Street, and said he had appeared in a few films by Woody Allen, a longtime customer.
Source: Internet Archive
- 1993
The Castellottis explain John's whole-pie rule, its no-delivery policy and its hand-judged coal oven
A June 1993 Times profile recorded the family's reasons for its rules. Madeline Castellotti said that whole pies were how pizza used to be sold and John's kept the custom, and that it did not deliver because the owners disliked seeing pizza eaten from a box, where the crust goes soft. Pete Castellotti said nothing is measured and the coal oven has no thermostat. His son recalled a company that had ten pies partly baked, packed in dry ice and shipped to Japan.
Source: Internet Archive
- 2004
John's turns 75 with coal still hauled up from the basement each morning
Marking the pizzeria's 75th birthday in August 2004, The Villager reported that workers still hauled buckets of coal up from the basement of 278 Bleecker Street every morning to feed the brick oven, which turned out a few hundred pies a day. Owner Bob Vittoria planned a "1929 night" selling soda and pizza at the original prices for a single day. He credited an oven above 800 degrees and good meat, produce and cheese for the shop's steady popularity.
Source: Internet Archive
- 2015
TripAdvisor ranks John's of Bleecker Street among America's ten best pizzerias
On July 29, 2015 CNN reported TripAdvisor's list of America's top ten pizzerias, which was based on the quality and quantity of user reviews. John's of Bleecker Street came tenth, described as turning out coal-fired brick-oven pizza. Brooklyn's Juliana's topped the list, and Keste, in Manhattan's West Village, was fourth.
Source: cnn.com
- 2016
John's of Bleecker Street starts accepting credit cards after operating cash-only
Until May 2016 John's of Bleecker Street took only cash, despite its coal-fired brick oven. It sells whole pies rather than slices, baked at about 850 degrees Fahrenheit, and is known for wooden booths on which customers carve their names. In 2015, a year before the payment change, TripAdvisor ranked it the tenth best pizzeria in the United States.
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- John's of Bleecker StreetWikipedia
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