Lombardi's 1905: How Italian Pizza Became American

For decades, histories of American pizza started in the same place. Gennaro Lombardi, a Neapolitan immigrant, gets a license in 1905 and opens the country’s first pizzeria at 53½ Spring Street in Manhattan, and his workers go on to found New York’s other famous pizzerias. That made Lombardi, in the phrase Modernist Pizza quotes, the “father of American pizza.”

The research of the last decade, mostly by the Modernist Pizza team and by Peter Regas, an independent researcher from Chicago, tells a different story. It’s less about one man than about a community of Neapolitan bakers and pizzaioli in lower Manhattan, several of whom ran the Spring Street shop before Lombardi did.

How the story was told

Modernist Pizza traces the claim to at least 1953, when the journalist Herbert Mitgang wrote in Collier’s: “Probably the first pizzeria in America was established at 53½ Spring Street, New York City, about 1895.” He added that Lombardi had apprenticed there at 13 and bought the place in 1905. The story hardened as it was repeated. In 1998 The New York Times wrote that “New York pizza did not exist before 1905, when Gennaro Lombardi, a Neapolitan immigrant, began to sell pies in his grocery store in Little Italy,” and the 1905 date and a first pizzeria license became standard.

Lombardi’s still tells it that way. Its website, checked October 14, 2026, says the restaurant was “Est. 1905” and credits Lombardi with “making Lombardi’s the first pizzeria in the United States.”

What the records show

Two research efforts went back to directories, newspapers, immigration records and draft cards. They agree on the main points and differ on some details.

Lombardi himself. Immigration records show Gennaro Lombardi arriving in New York in November 1904, aged 17, his occupation listed as “laborer,” going to live with an older brother at 89 Mulberry Street. Modernist Pizza found that the 1910 census lists him as a baker and that his 1917 draft card describes him as a self-employed baker at 234 North 5th Street in Brooklyn, not Spring Street.

The shop before him. Regas’s account of 53½ Spring Street, published in 2021, runs like this:

• 1898–1900: Filippo Milone, listed in directories as a grocer, delicatessen owner or baker, who Regas says very likely started a pizzeria and grocery there in the summer of 1898. Modernist Pizza found Milone, under the spelling “Philip Milon,” listed there in 1899, with an application for an oven permit that July, and calls him “the strongest contender for the first pizza maker at 53½ Spring.”
• About 1901 to 1908: Giovanni Santillo, listed under “Bakers, Pie” in the 1902 Trow’s directory. From August 1904, months before Lombardi arrived, his ads in the Italian-language paper Il Telegrafo call the shop Antica Pizzeria Napoletana. Regas has Agostino Perera and Giuseppe Amabile, a nephew of Santillo’s wife, running it while Santillo was in Naples in 1906–1907. That was temporary management: after Santillo returned in October 1907, Perera, who believed he owned a share, fell out with him and left in 1908.
• 1908: Gennaro Lombardi buys the shop from Santillo, in Regas’s reconstruction, which rests mainly on his dating of the shop photograph described below.
• 1909 to about 1918: Francesco D’Errico, a baker and Lombardi’s in-law, listed as the owner in 1909. Regas suggests the two swapped businesses, since Lombardi appears as owner of the Brooklyn bakery in 1912.
• About 1918 to 1958: Lombardi again, until his death. Regas dates the change between two draft registrations in 1917 and 1918.

Modernist Pizza is more cautious about Lombardi’s early involvement. Its timeline calls a 1918 draft card listing him as the “employer” the earliest definitive evidence linking him to 53½ Spring Street, with directories naming him as proprietor by 1919–1920. Its map of the address still lists Lombardi for both 1908 and 1918.

The photograph. A well-known photo shows Lombardi and Antonio Pero in front of the shop, and the family dates it to 1905. Modernist Pizza points out that a poster in the window advertises an event on Wednesday, November 25, which fell on a Wednesday in 1903, 1908, 1914 and 1925; 1903 is before Lombardi arrived, and changes to the building’s façade in 1912 rule out the later years. That leaves 1908. Regas also dates it to the fall of 1908.

The license. No one has produced it. Modernist Pizza’s team found no records of Lombardi owning a pizzeria in 1905, and both research efforts put other people in charge of the shop that year.

The first pizzerias in New York

If Lombardi’s wasn’t first, what was? Modernist Pizza’s earliest documented pizzeria in the United States is a tiny listing in the 1894 Trow’s Business Directory, under “Bakers”: “Pizzeria Forno E.,” at 59½ Mulberry Street. Directories were usually compiled by canvassing the year before, so it was likely open by 1893. A John Albana is listed as a baker at the same address in 1895, and the authors believe he was a Giovanni Albano who had run a bakery in Naples and asked for a license to sell pizza there in 1889 or 1890. The block was demolished in 1895 to make way for what is now Columbus Park. The authors suspect pizza was sold even earlier, in bakeries and as part of saloon “free lunch” spreads, and say they’d welcome evidence.

After that, the record fills in. Milone alone ran pizzerias at several addresses, including a “Pizzeria Napoletana” at a West 26th Street hotel in 1901 and an Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba on Grand Street in 1903. An 1898 ad in the Italian-language L’Araldo Italiano was for a Pizzeria alla Napoletana on Union Street in Brooklyn. By 1905 The Sun was sending readers to an unnamed spot on Spring Street to try “pizze cavuie,” and its Italian guide complained that only two places in the city made “real, genuine Neapolitan pizza.” As Modernist Pizza puts it, the story of the earliest US pizza “isn’t about one man and one pizzeria. It’s a story of community.”

The community was large. More than 4 million Italians came to the United States between 1880 and 1924, most of them from southern Italy, and by 1894 at least 40,000 lived in New York.

What the pizza was like

Nobody wrote down a recipe, and the earliest photographs of American pizza that Modernist Pizza found date from the 1920s. The written descriptions are suggestive:

• The oven. Naples baked in wood-fired ovens, but in American cities wood was expensive, so early pizzaioli used coal or coke, or gas. Coal ovens took hours to heat, needed constant tending and had hot and cool zones, which made pizza making skilled work.
• The pie. A 1903 New-York Tribune piece describes “pomidore pizza,” dough rolled out, scattered with tomatoes and red pepper, then baked. A Boston paper the same year describes customers folding a piece over and eating it from the hand.
• The cheese. Mozzarella was available: Alleva Dairy, founded by Neapolitan immigrants, was selling cow’s-milk mozzarella and ricotta near Grand and Mulberry Streets by 1892.
• The crust. Modernist Pizza’s authors believe 19th-century Neapolitan pizza was thicker and denser than today’s, and that pizzerias like Totonno’s in Coney Island and the New Haven originals preserve something close to it.

The Spring Street family tree

The shop’s reputation as a training ground has more support than its founding date. Antonio “Totonno” Pero, who stands next to Lombardi in the 1908 photograph, opened Totonno’s in Coney Island in 1924; it still operates at 1524 Neptune Avenue and describes itself as “Family Owned Since 1924.” Milone’s influence ran further: Modernist Pizza’s map of his businesses traces John’s of Bleecker Street to 175 Sullivan Street, where Milone is listed in 1915 followed by John Sasso, and Pop’s in Brooklyn to 120 Van Brunt Street. Regas calls Milone a long-lost forefather of American pizza.

After Spring Street

Pizza spread with Italian immigrants and then far beyond them. A few dates from Modernist Pizza show the pattern; each style has its own guide on this site, and the Pizza Style Atlas maps them.

• New Haven, 1925. Frank Pepe, from Maiori, rents a bakery with a coke-fired brick oven and adds pizza; Camposano’s Apizza had opened in 1924. See New Haven apizza.
• Trenton. Papa’s Tomato Pies claims to have been open since 1912, which would make it the oldest continuously operating pizzeria in the United States. Modernist Pizza’s own research dates Joe’s Tomato Pies to 1914–1915 and has Joe Papa leaving it to found Papa’s in 1923.
• Chicago, 1943. Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo open The Pizzeria, later Pizzeria Uno. Modernist Pizza thinks the deep-dish crust is more likely the work of their cook Alice Mae Redmond than of the owners. See Chicago deep dish and tavern.
• Detroit, 1942–1946. Gus Guerra starts baking square pizzas at his bar, Buddy’s Rendezvous, in blue steel pans made to hold small auto parts; sources differ on the year. See Detroit-style pizza.
• St. Louis, 1945. Amedeo Fiore opens Melrose Pizzeria and cuts thin pizza into squares. See St. Louis-style pizza.
• The chains. Shakey’s, in 1954, was the first franchised pizzeria, followed by Pizza Hut (1958, Wichita), Little Caesars (1959, Garden City, Michigan) and the Ypsilanti pizzeria that became Domino’s (1960).
• California, 1982. Wolfgang Puck and Barbara Lazaroff open Spago in West Hollywood, with Ed LaDou making wood-fired pizzas with chef-driven toppings.

Why the 1905 story lasted

Modernist Pizza doesn’t blame anyone in particular. Mitgang said “probably,” and later writers dropped the hedge; whether the story was “fueled by savvy marketing or lax fact-checking is unclear.” The authors also stress what is true: an immigrant arrived with a few dollars, learned a trade, built a restaurant and passed it down, and people who worked there shaped New York pizza. Lombardi’s original shop closed in 1984, reopened down the street in 1994, and is still a pilgrimage site, partly for the story.

The same pattern turns up in Naples, where the founding legend of the Margherita rests on a letter judged to be a forgery. See the 1889 Margherita legend.

To make the descendant of these early pies at home, start with New York-style pizza.

Sources

• Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1: page 22 (emigration from Campania), page 14 (mozzarella and Alleva Dairy), pages 25–33 (“Pizza Arrives in America,” Mulberry Bend, the 1894 directory listing, the history of 53½ Spring Street, “The True Story of Lombardi’s”), pages 34–36 (early US pizza timeline, Filippo Milone and the map of his businesses, including Peter Regas’s research), page 37 (Trenton), pages 38–39 (early descriptions, ovens, ancestral pizza), page 50 (New Haven), page 59 (coal and gas ovens), pages 62–66 (Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis), pages 79–82 (chains, Spago), page 104 (Papa’s claim) and page 105 (Melrose Pizzeria, 1945).
• Peter Regas, “Who Established the Famous Pizzeria at 53 Spring Street?,” pizzahistorybook.com, September 30, 2021, updated October 7, 2021. Checked October 14, 2026.
• Lombardi’s: home page and New York’s original pizza page. Checked October 14, 2026.
• Totonno’s: home page. Checked October 14, 2026.