John’s of Bleecker Street, the historic pizzeria in Greenwich Village, has started replacing their classic benches. They’ve been a key part of the pizzeria’s identity, with the names of decades worth of customers etched into the wood. Restaurant management put off the repairs as long as possible, but customers had been reporting enough splinters to make the project a priority. The new benches are pretty much identical to the old ones and I’m sure they’ll be carved up in a matter of months.
Pizza Nerd Alert
I heard about the bench replacement when I was in Italy back in June. Apparently the Stooping NYC Instagram account posted about it and my fellow pizza nerds pizza nerds sounded the alarm. Since I was out of the coutnry, all I could do was put out a call for help. I received some incredible offers, one from Frank Pinello, owner of Best Pizza and host of The Pizza Show and Pizza With Frank. Frank has something very few New Yorkers have: a truck. He offered to help me pick up some benches and move them to a safe space.
We met up at John’s last week and carted three benches over the Williamsburg Bridge, where we tried unsuccessfully to wedge them into a space within Best Pizza. When that proved to be futile, we decided to just stick them in my pizza box storage space in Midwood, Brooklyn. They’ll share the space with my Guinness World Record pizza box collection until we find a more permanent solution. It’s likely we’ll auction at least one of them to benefit Slice Out Hunger.
So far we’ve identified one of the benches as Table 1, which was right at the window of John’s. You can see part of the bench in the background of this shot from Woody Allen’s film Manhattan. The other benches were probably on the same side of the room, possibly tables 3-4 and 5-6. We’ll keep collecting information about the benches, so stay tuned for updates.
Who Made The Old Benches?
Here’s where things get fun. John’s has been passed down from generation to generation through marriages and in-laws. I’d need a flow chart to explain how the current ownership connects back to the founder. Suffice it to say that the pizzeria moved to its current location in 1938, which is when its name changed to John’s Pizzeria. John’s son-in-law Joe Vesce sold the business to his brother Augustine “Chubby” Vesce, whose wife’s sister Kitty (Katherine) married a guy named Rudy Cascone. That’s the guy who made these benches for the main dining room in the late 1950s This is all according to current majority owner Bobby Vittoria.
The second room opened in the early 1980s, so those benches are a couple decades younger. Their design is slightly different. The end caps have a notch cut out of them, unlike the bulbous tops of the end caps in the old room. It was important to me to save the oldest benches, and that’s what I did.
