Our neighborhood, then and still
A community record from Pitta & Baione LLP — how this neighborhood remembers, and how the firm keeps showing up for it.
One street, and a family that never really left it
Vincent Pitta spent the first nine months of his life on the fifth floor above what is now Grotta Azzurra — and his grandfather’s fruit and vegetable store, at the corner of Mulberry and Broome. The family moved to Brooklyn before he could walk, but they never really left.
His grandmother and aunts stayed on Mulberry Street into his late teens, which meant every holiday, every Sunday, and every September brought him back.
The corner still sells fruit and vegetables. Some things on this street don’t move.
Every September, back on Mulberry Street
1926 — still going
The Feast has returned to this street since 1926, and so have we. Pitta & Baione LLP is a proud sponsor of the feast and the stage — standards, opera, jazz, and voices direct from Italy.
The Feast that never opened
The 2001 Feast was set to begin on September 12. When it was canceled and the streets below Houston were sealed, the booths stood unfinished and the kitchens sat stocked for crowds that would never arrive — so the neighborhood turned all of it toward first responders and recovery workers instead.
A new documentary gathers the restaurant families and residents who were there. The screening will be followed by an event hosted at Umberto’s Clam House on Mulberry Street.
A Living Testimony of Life and Loss on 9/11
It began as a poem partner Matthew Baione kept to himself — the last minutes of an ordinary morning, and everyone who never got to say goodbye. It became a short film scored by Ginger Winn, closer to a film score than a song, and it never names what happened because it never has to. It was shot at the St. George Theatre on Staten Island, down the block from the Postcards memorial where the poem began. Read the New York Post’s feature on 8:48.
Spotify 
YouTube 
Words by Matthew Baione · Music by Ginger Winn
The story that stayed underwater
Over the past 25 years, coverage of the toxins released due to the events on September 11, 2001 mostly concerned those that were present in the air. Far less has been said about the waters surrounding the towers, where the volume of debris and dust that entered the Hudson and New York Harbor in the weeks after the towers fell had a significant effect on the water quality and the wildlife that lived in those waters.
Pitta & Baione LLP has partnered with the Billion Oyster Project, which is restoring oyster reefs across New York Harbor. That restoration runs on discarded shells — and it now runs partly through Mulberry Street. Umberto’s Clam House, owned by longtime client and neighborhood fixture Robert Iannello, has become an official Billion Oyster shell-collection partner — the first and only in Little Italy. Shells that come out of Umberto’s kitchen no longer go to landfill; they go back into the harbor to seed new reefs.
This type of work is slow and measured over decades, which is something this firm well understands. We represent people whose illnesses took decades to surface and often the rest of their lives to manage. The harm of September 11th did not end in 2001. It is still working its way through this city, and through the water around it – and we are here to help.
a single adult oyster filters up to fifty gallons of water a day
We were here then, and we are here now.
This neighborhood has never needed to be told how to take care of its own. In 2001, kitchens stocked for a festival started cooking for firefighters, and kept cooking for months, because that was what there was to do.
All these years later, people who simply lived, worked, or went to school below Houston Street are still getting sick — many never connecting it back. That’s the part the firm can help with. Consultations are free.
