Vesuvio Bakery (now Birdbath)

Few hints remain that Prince Street, now in the heart of the trendy SoHo district, was once an Italian shopping street. The Vesuvio Bakery is a lone survivor–its bread has been a neighborhood staple since 1920.

With a layer of cracked green paint on the trim around its big display window, the Vesuvio Bakery storefront is still an unapologetic antique amidst SoHo’s glossy boutiques, galleries and upscale restaurants. And, until its 2003 transformation to a bakery-café, the simple store contained only a counter, a scale, and a long-discontinued model cash register. A shuttered, swinging door led to the baking facilities in the back.

Anthony Dapolito, whose parents founded the bakery, recalled a time when every apartment building in this neighborhood had a storefront–usually Italian–at its base. He worked at his father’s bakery most of his life, since the days when he woke up on cold mornings at five o’clock to deliver bread from a horse-drawn wagon. In those days, Vesuvio’s was in the midst of a largely Italian neighborhood that stretched along the western edge of SoHo, near to the even larger Little Italy that lay east of Broadway.

Millions of southern Italians arrived in this country, particularly in the early 1900s, and many were still migrating to New York when Dapolito’s father established his bakery in 1920. Often these immigrants sought temporary work that would ideally enable them to return to Italy. Small urban businesses became a practical livelihood for many of them. At the same time they were establishing a foothold in this country, the Italian immigrants were exerting their cultural influence in many ways. As Dapolito pointed out, “Italians have really changed the eating habits of America,” with products like his bakery’s fresh breads and rolls.

Vesuvio Bakery now lies well outside the boundaries of a shrinking Little Italy. Tourists tend to come to SoHo for handbags or sculpture, not groceries, and most regulars don’t speak Italian anymore. In 2003, ready to retire, Dapolito sold the bakery to his friends Lisa and Christine Gigante. They converted it to a bakery-café, but kept much of the feel of the original store including the tradition of storing bread in the large front window. Mr. Dapolito died in July of 2003, soon after the new bakery-café opened.