And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street and Hester Street

[193 Hester Street/129 Mulberry Street, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I was looking for Chinatown when I found myself in Little Italy. I saw this corner as 193 Hester Street at 1940s.nyc. But it’s also known as 129 Mulberry Street. Hester Street is Chinatown, and Mulberry Street runs through Little Italy, so one can imagine the 129 address as granting this corner greater Italian-American cachet.

I chose this photograph for the laundry — was it a Monday? — and then noticed the Coca-Cola sign and the two youngsters walking in tandem. And that must be a restaurant on the ground floor. A pleasant photograph. And then I looked up the building’s two addresses and realized what I had hit on.

This Mulberry Street address was once the home of Umbertos Clam House, now in business at 132 Mulberry, still without an apostrophe. The 129 address is where the mobster “Crazy Joe” Gallo was shot to death in 1972, weeks after the restaurant’s opening. Here’s one New York Times article on the murder’s aftermath (gift link). I’m not interested in rehearsing the details. But I must note that the Gallo name points back to a previous tax post, about the College Restaurant in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn.

In 2023, the ground floor of 129 Mulberry is home to another restaurant, Da Gennaro. Mulberry Street remains the home of the yearly Feast of San Gennaro.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)