Church kept
people
connected in St.
Paul’s ‘little Italy’
By Julie Carroll
The Catholic Spirit
Cousins Jim and Louie Morelli remember a time when they could
tell you who lived in every house in their east St. Paul
neighborhood. Women spent their days chatting in Italian with
neighbors. Aromas of homemade spaghetti sauce, spicy
sausage and crusty bread drifted into the streets. On hot summer
afternoons, oldtimers gathered with young men in the
lot across from the Morellis’ grocery store on Tedesco Street to
play bocce and swig a few beers after a hard day’s work.
Parents didn’t worry about their children playing in the streets
because the entire neighborhood looked after them.
“Everybody knew everybody,” Jim said. “We didn’t need our
parents to discipline us. We had a lot of surrogate
mothers and fathers. If we got out of line, our neighbors called”
— a fate every child feared, he said. “We had a real feeling of
neighborhood and belonging, that you were known and loved.”
During the 1950s, lower east St. Paul was home to Italian
immigrant families, many of them first-generation
Americans. Merchants, shopkeepers, artists and artisans, they
came to the United States in search of a better life.
Though many lacked a formal education, they worked hard to
support their families. United by language, tradition and
struggles, they were a close-knit community — and the
neighborhood Catholic church was the center.
“The church was their support system,” said Father Thomas
Brioschi, whose grandparents emigrated to St. Paul from Italy in
the 1930s. “Everything revolved around the church,” said the
pastor of St. Thomas Becket in Eagan. And when the Italian
community began to disperse in the 1960s, the church kept
them connected, he said. As early as 1874, a small Italian
community gathered for Mass in the basement of the old
Cathedral church in St. Paul until 1916, when Holy Redeemer,
the archdiocese’s first Italian Catholic church, was established in
east St. Paul. The parish also had a mission church, St.
Ambrose, on Payne Avenue. The late Msgr. Louis Pioletti was
pastor of both churches until 1954, when St. Ambrose
was upgraded to a parish to serve the growing Italian community
in St. Paul. In the late 1950s, a new St. Ambrose church building
was constructed at the same location. Father Thomas Pingatore
was St. Ambrose’s first, and only, pastor until 1998, when the
church closed. “Father Pingatore was the don,” Father
Brioschi said with a hearty laugh.
Jim Morelli remembers his dad serving as chairman of the St.
Ambrose building committee. “What stood out in my mind is they
wanted to pay for the church; they didn’t want a mortgage,” Jim
said. “The Old World mentality was if you can’t pay for it, you
shouldn’t have it. I remember their slogan: ‘We need a day’s pay
a month from everybody.’” Every Sunday was a family reunion
for the Morellis.
“You went to church as a family and you sat with cousins,” said
Jim. “You didn’t see a family scattered like you do today. The
family was more of a unit.” Jim recalled the parish festivals he
attended as a youth, where on St. Joseph’s Day the men carried
statues through the streets while people pinned money on
them. The feast day of St. Anthony, a patron saint of Italy, also
was important, he said, as were Marian feast days. Holiday
celebrations included extended family members — and feast days
were taken literally, Jim said. On Christmas eve, the Morellis
gathered for a traditional Italian meal of salted codfish,
spaghetti with anchovies, calamari, lupini beans and roasted
chestnuts. On Easter, they had Easter pizza. “And no matter what
my mother would cook for Thanksgiving,” said Louie, shaking
his head, “my father or grandfather would always want macaroni
of some kind.” Food was a major part of every celebration,
said Father Brioschi. “In the church, everything was done with a
spirit of reverence, but community too. Celebrations revolved
around red wine and salami, and your spaghetti sauce was
the mark of who you were.” What sticks out in Father Brioschi’s
memory from his childhood years were the festivals and funerals,
he said. “Weddings went on for two days, and funerals
were also very important. There was a lot of outreach through
prayer, worship — and the dinner that followed.”
During the 1960s, construction of the interstate highway
through the center of east St. Paul brought about significant
changes, including the demolition of Holy Redeemer in 1968.
Though the old neighborhood has changed dramatically as Italian
families moved to other parts of the Twin Cities and other ethnic
groups took their place, Morelli’s store remains a fixture in the
neighborhood. Jim’s grandfather, who was born in Italy, opened
Morelli’s in 1915. When Louie’s father moved to St. Paul from
Italy, he also went to work at the store. Jim, 52, and Louie, 61,
have worked at the store since the 1960s. Now some of
their children have joined them in the family business.
Today, people of every ethnic background go to the little
neighborhood store in search of spicy sausage, cheeses
and other authentic Italian delicacies — a taste of how life used to
be in east St. Paul’s little Italy.
Dave Hrbacek / The Catholic Spirit
Cousins Jim, left, and Louie Morelli
own and operate Morelli’s liquor and
grocery store on the east side of St.
Paul, a remnant of the old Italian
neighborhood.
Minnesota Historical Society
First
Communicants
stand in front of
St. Ambrose on
Payne Avenue
in St. Paul in
1925.