In East Harlem, Another Vestige of the Old Days Bids Farewell

Rosa Morrone, 72, and her son Anthony at the family’s bakery, which has closed after half a century on 116th Street.

By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
Published: September 18, 2007

Another morning arrived without customers and conversation, leaving Rosa Morrone feeling as empty as the coal oven and wooden shelves she saw through heavy eyes on Saturday

“It’s like having a death in the family,” said Mrs. Morrone, 72, who began to cry from behind the counter where she had held court for more than half a century. “Actually, it’s worse.”

It has been a month since Mrs. Morrone dropped several whole wheat rolls into a bag and rang up the last sale at Morrone & Sons, an Italian bakery on East 116th Street that had built an almost religious following among bread-loving New Yorkers. The closing of the bakery on Aug. 19 erased one of the few remaining storefronts from the days when East Harlem had a heavy Italian-American presence. “My mother is in Italy, and I called to tell her the news,” said Andrew Coscia, 40, who lives in East Harlem. “It spoiled her whole vacation.”

From the moment that Morrone & Sons opened in June 1956, Mrs. Morrone began selling bread with a smile on her face and a flour-stained apron around her waist. She fed the hungry masses with loaves — and rolls, and breadsticks and butter cookies, and with holiday treats that included her trademark Easter breads decorated with colored sprinkles and hard-boiled eggs skillfully nestled atop the sweetened yellow dough.

Generations of customers, many of them barely living above the poverty level, often went home to find that Mrs. Morrone — for whom a baker’s dozen always meant more than 13 — had tossed into their bags a lot more bread than they had actually bought.

As she filled orders and chatted across the counter in a booming voice that left little doubt who was in charge, Mrs. Morrone struck up new friendships. She rewarded fidgety children tugging at their parents with chocolate and cherry-topped cookies. Years later, some of those children watched as Mrs. Morrone danced at their weddings.
“Many of these people,” she said, “were like a part of my own family.”

Anthony Morrone, one of Mrs. Morrone’s seven children — she has 14 grandchildren — had been the family’s full-time bread maker since his father, Gabriele Morrone, died in 2002. But for the past year, Mr. Morrone, 46, has been suffering from a herniated disc in his back, which he said has made it impossible for him to continue to meet the demands of a trade that required him to bake from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. seven days a week.
“I know that all of this has broken my mother’s heart, and that she is in mourning,” Mr. Morrone said. “This is sad for me, too, and the rest of my family, because we were the last of the old-school bakeries in the neighborhood.”

Indeed, more than a dozen Italian bakeries in the area have closed in the last 51 years, as an enclave with an Italian accent as thick as Mrs. Morrone’s eventually gave way to Puerto Ricans and other Hispanic groups. But no matter how far her loyal customers strayed, they kept coming back, updating Mrs. Morrone with news about funerals, weddings and baptisms while she bagged their bread.
And those customers were not just her Harlem neighbors, but New Yorkers from other neighborhoods, and breadwinners from all walks of life. There was even an occasional celebrity sighting. On a summer day in the mid-1970s, Mrs. Morrone looked up from her cash register for the next in line and saw Frank Sinatra standing there.
“I was so nervous when I saw Sinatra,” she recalled. “But he was just another nice person, just like all of my customers.”
In recent weeks, anyone arriving at the store has been met by a sign at the front door telling them that the bakery has closed.
“A lot of my really early customers would get here before I opened and knock on the gate, knowing I would give them whatever I had already baked,” Mr. Morrone said. “We’ve been closed for nearly a month, and some of them are still knocking.”

As for Mrs. Morrone, who arrived in New York from Roccapiemonte, Italy, in 1956 on a ship named the Cristoforo Colombo — she had planned to leave in July that year, on the ill-fated voyage of the Andrea Doria — sailing through the rest of her life without her bakery, and her extended family, will be a difficult journey.

“I’ve been trying to go shopping and do some other things to keep my mind off of this,” said Mrs. Morrone, whose smile disappeared along with her apron. “But I keep thinking about all of those nice people. Where are they going to get their bread?”

A sign on the door says goodbye to customers.