Pizza in America

[Horatio_Hellpop]

The Staff Report on who invented pizza straight-facedly claimed that Americans were first introduced to this wonderful food in 1950. Didn’t Pizzeria Uno open shop in Chicao over 50m years before that?

When I broached a similar question in alt.fan.cecil-adams about 7 years ago, one correspondent cited a 1937 movie called “The Radio Pizza Show” (No longer available; the last copies, on nitrate film stock, fell apart years ago). Supposedly, this movie featured the screen debut of Leo Gorcey, and is possibly the first American film to feature pizza in it.Who invented pizza?

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Edited to fix link. – CK Dexter Haven, Moderator

[Horatio_Hellpop]

(Cough) That should have read “50 years,” not “50m years.” And the url is http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mpizza.html

[Kat]

According to Pizzeria Uno’s site (see http://www.pizzeriauno.com/legend.html for details), they opened in 1943, before Cecil’s date of 1950, but nowhere near 50 years before.

[RiverRunner]

*Originally posted by Kat *
**According to Pizzeria Uno’s site (see http://www.pizzeriauno.com/legend.html for details), they opened in 1943, before Cecil’s date of 1950, but nowhere near 50 years before. **

<quibble on>
Well, keep in mind that it wasn’t Cecil who gave the date in the article in question. It was a mailbag question that was answered by (I think) CK Dexter Haven.

There is therefore a slight but perceptible difference in the level of omniscience displayed.
<quibble off>

Carry on.
RR

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

Aw shoot, I kinda liked the mental image of a Pizzeria Uno opening in Chicago 50 million years ago…

There’s such a thing as being too precise, you know…

[Chronos]

Aw shoot, I kinda liked the mental image of a Pizzeria Uno opening in Chicago 50 million years ago…

No, no… That would be 50M years. 50m years would be approximately 8 hours, 45 minutes, 57 seconds.

[cdhostage]

50m years is 8 hours? Oh, fifty milliyears…

Actually, pizza-like stuff has been found in Greek legends. The pizza guy, Montoni is it?, says it to Funky Winkerbean.

[yabob]

Hmmm. Post WWII is when pizza was introduced to the American mainstream, no doubt about that. But most sources put the advent of pizzerias in immigrant Italian neighborhoods back around the turn of the 20th century:

http://www.ghgcorp.com/coyej/history.htm

Pizza migrated to America with the Italians in the latter half of the 19th century. By the turn of the century, the Italian immigrants had begun to open their own bakeries and were selling groceries as well as pizza. Gennaro Lombardi opened the first true U.S. pizzeria in 1905 in New York City at 53 1/3 Spring Street (Lombardi’s is reopened today at 32 Spring Street). Neapolitan Totonno Pero immigrated to New York from Naples and as a teenager worked for Lombardi. Pero opened Totonno’s, a coal-oven pizzeria in Brooklyn, in 1924 originally on West 15th Street in Coney Island and now on West 16th Street. (Totonno’s holds the record for the oldest continuous pizzeria in business in the U.S.)

That makes me quibble a little bit with Dex’es wording:

Italian immigrants brought pizza to the United States, where it caught on quickly in the 1950s and became an international food, now found in every country.

which makes it sound like the popularization and the influx of Italian immigrants BOTH happened in 1950.

[C_K_Dexter_Haven]

The Staff Report was deliberately trying to be vague in terms of years. Italian immigrants brought pizza to the U.S., and every other family* claims to have started the first pizzaria, whether in 1905 or 1943. I didn’t want to try to sort that out.

Pizza did not become wildly popular outside the Italian-American community, however, until the 1950s. That’s when pizza could be found in every small-town, even if there were no Italian immigrants in that town.

I think the Staff Report is correct, but I can see how that line could be misinterpreted, so I will have it revised to be more clear.

• Exaggeration for the sake of emphasis.