Wooster Square: How New Haven Became America's Pizza Capital
Near New Haven, Connecticut
By the early twentieth century, New Haven had become one of the most heavily Italian American cities in the country. Most of them landed in Wooster Square, drawn by Sargent and Company, a lock manufacturer said to route Southern Italian immigrants straight from Ellis Island to its factory floor.
In nineteen twenty-five, a baker from the Amalfi coast named Frank Pepe opened a small shop at one sixty-three Wooster Street. He sold coal-fired flatbreads he called tomato pies. Prohibition repeal in nineteen thirty-three brought more pizzerias. Sally's Apizza opened in nineteen thirty-eight.
New Haven's coal-fired apizza, thin-crusted and slightly charred, is now considered one of the three or four great American pizza traditions. Wooster Square is still the center of it, one hundred years on.
