Federal Hill

The gateway arch over Atwells Avenue holds a bronze pine cone, La Pigna in Italian, a symbol of welcome, abundance, and quality that the neighborhood's residents chose for themselves. It is an apt emblem for a neighborhood that Italian immigrants built into one of the most enduring ethnic enclaves in the American Northeast.

Italians began arriving on Federal Hill in the eighteen seventies, in numbers that kept growing through the eighteen nineties and well into the twentieth century. By the early twentieth century, the neighborhood was solidly Italian-American, with its own churches, social clubs, bakeries, and butcher shops clustered along Atwells and the surrounding blocks. The food culture that took root then is still the organizing principle of the neighborhood today, more than twenty restaurants within a quarter mile of the arch, with establishments like Angelo's Civita Farnese having operated continuously for generations.

Federal Hill was also, for thirty years, the address of one of the more consequential organized crime operations in New England. In the mid nineteen fifties, mob boss Raymond Patriarca moved his organization to a vending machine business on Atwells Avenue, running what was known internally as "the Office" until nineteen eighty-four. That chapter of the neighborhood's history has been documented extensively in federal court records and does not require embellishment.

What remains is the pine cone, the arch, DePasquale Plaza on a warm evening, and the smell of garlic from kitchens that have been open since before most of their current customers were born.