The Mysterious Pork Stores of Staten Island

I was watching a movie from the early 70s the other day, not especially good, but like so many movies from that era it was shot on location and thus offers a wonderful time capsule of urban blight, of 50s and 60s storefronts falling apart, of period sign typography-- I tell you, I can just watch the backgrounds all day long in a movie like The French Connection.

So in one scene, which the movie says is set on Staten Island (and I have no reason to doubt that), I happen to glimpse a storefront with an arresting title:

The Pork Store

A catchy name. I instantly wish, the next time I needed pork shoulders to smoke, that I could go not to a mere butcher shop, but to The Pork Store.

Of course, I immediately do the next best thing, which is check Google for references to The Pork Store, hey, it could still be around, it's not that long ago, businesses like that are as likely to still be here as not. And my search reveals:

Local results for pork store near Staten Island, NY

Novelli's Pork Store - 1.6 miles SE - 3161 Amboy Rd - (718) 351-0790
Valentino's Pork Store - 1.7 miles SE - 101 Guyon Ave - (718) 667-4392
Soriano's Pork Store Inc - 2.0 miles S - 150 Greaves LN - (718) 948-1538

And, as you'll see if you look at the whole Google page I link to, those aren't the only ones. Apparently this is an entire category on Staten Island-- either dedicated pig-only shops, or else "Pork Store" is somehow a general term for butcher shop, meat market. Yo, I'm gonna run to the Pork Store and get some hamburga. (This piece uses "pork store" in the context of providing beef, for instance.)

So. Anybody know? Is this a Staten Island-specific thing, the term "Pork Store," or a New York thing, or an East Coast thing? How did meat markets get tagged specifically as "pork stores"? What is the secret of the Pork Stores of Staten Island?

I remember reading once where the name came from. It has something to do with differentiating it from a dry goods store I believe. I do know it's not just a Staten Island thing but I don't know how far it reaches beyond NYC. Stores with that name still exist today in every borough and one is featured quite prominently on The Sopranos.

There is still a pretty well known pork store in Greenwich Village. Faicco's Pork Store is located on Bleecker right where Cornelia intersects (just half a block from Mario Batali's first place in New York).

A pork store is a different breed than a traditional butcher shop because you can buy some red sauce basics there too in addition to meat and sausage. I don't ever recall seeing chicken in Faicco's. Just braciole pre-made and tied, meatballs, sausage, pork chops and veal.There are usually several options of dried pasta, tinned tomatoes and herbs to purchase.

Faicco's used to make these incredible frozen entrees of old italian classics that, in my days in New York, largely contributed to making me the physical specimen that I am today.

CMC is right, Satriani's (which in reality is a vacant building) from the Soprano's is indeed a pork store.

I once asked a very good Italian American friend where the name came from. She said that in leaner times, it was where one went to get a cheap piece of pork to simmer in your red sauce.

YourPalWill wrote:A pork store is a different breed than a traditional butcher shop because you can buy some red sauce basics there too in addition to meat and sausage. I don't ever recall seeing chicken in Faicco's. Just braciole pre-made and tied, meatballs, sausage, pork chops and veal. There are usually several options of dried pasta, tinned tomatoes and herbs to purchase...

My understanding of these things is the following: In the old days, butcher shops generally specialised in beef or lamb or pork or poultry. Over time, such specialisation surely became economically unfeasible and they broadened their business in various ways. Note that in Chicago, there is still Chiappetti's (an old business), which specialises in veal and lamb (though for all I know, maybe they sell everything now). In New York and New Jersey, still vestigially when I was a kid, there were German pork stores and Italian pork stores; nowadays, if there are any that are still fairly narrowly specialised, I would guess that they are Polish pork stores. For Italian pork stores, the natural way to broaden the business is to specialise in Italian meats and groceries, as exemplified by the place YPWill describes above.

In South Philly, near the main cluster of shops of the Italian market, is a particularly well preserved old pork store, with the big old scale in the main room on which they weighed the pig carcasses as they came in. The last time I was there, a decade or so ago, they still just sold pork and pork products.

The separation of meats in butcher shops was the old way of doing things (brought over from Europe) and so more traces of it are to be seen still on the east coast. Such specialised butcher shops I've seen in Germany, France, Italy.... probably elsewhere too. When I lived in Leuven, Belgium, back in the previous century, there were many general butcher shops but they were more just little neighbourhood convenience butcher shops, as it were, and had relatively limited offerings. In the centre of town, the top-of-the-line butcher shops all specialised to a great degree or completely: one store sold only lamb, several specialised in beef, several others in pork, one in game, and one in... well... horse. It's tasty.

Antonius

I believe Schaller and Webber still has a german style pork store in what used to be Yorktown on the Upper East Side.

Ah, but why did Pork Store become the term for meat market, rather than Beef Store? If there must have been Beef Stores at one time (and after all, we just had a Scorsese movie about old New York in which a butcher and beef figured prominently), not to mention Chicken Stores, Mutton Stores, Horse Stores, etc. Was pork just so dominant then that it took over other functions more easily than the other kinds of meat took over selling pork?

YourPalWill wrote:I believe Schaller and Webber still has a german style pork store in what used to be Yorktown on the Upper East Side.

Will,

That's "Yorkville", the old upper eastside German neighbourhood. That used to be an amazingly dense and very real German neighbourhood. Lots of stuff beyond the Konditoreien and Bierstuben... even a German department store... I believe almost everything is gone now but it was a really cool neighbourhood in the day.

A

Mike G wrote:Ah, but why did Pork Store become the term for meat market, rather than Beef Store? If there must have been Beef Stores at one time (and after all, we just had a Scorsese movie about old New York in which a butcher and beef figured prominently), not to mention Chicken Stores, Mutton Stores, Horse Stores, etc. Was pork just so dominant then that it took over other functions more easily than the other kinds of meat took over selling pork?

Well, insofar as you're talking about things Italian, it's presumably for the simple reason that (southern) Italians traditionally didn't eat much beef, had very little of a beef eating culture. Once they got to the US and Argentina, that changed, but pork butchery and the making of fresh sausages and salume were central tasks for communities in the old country that continued on to be equally important here. I would guess that once upon a time, there were lots of Italian run pork stores and fish stores along with some poultry markets, but not too many Italian-run butcher shops that specialised in beef.

Antonius

Alas, I read recently that Paprikas Weiss is gone.

As to pork v beef, it is I think simply a matter of scale. Pigs do not require as much forage, and can (like chickens) consume some of the waste stream. Cattle take more room. Sheep are somewhere in between, but can be (deliciously) consumed as lamb.

This hierarchy is really noticeable in Spain, where forage is sparse. Pigs are plentiful (and the best hams come from the pigs that roam in the cork-producing oak forests, a double bonus). Cattle are confined primarily to the greener northern parts of the peninsula. And you would have a hard time finding an equivalent to what the Spanish call lamb here (although Bismallah on Devon comes close).

Another parallel comparison might be China, where pork is ubiquitous, and I am just guessing here that the efficiencies related to its production are a contributing factor. Others more knowledgeable please chime in.

I did just read that 14 of the largest (criteria undefined) Chinese cities are self-sufficient in food production. And I'm again just guessing that pigs are somewhere in that food chain.

In southern Italy, cattle were raised in areas where possible but used then for the most part as work animals or for dairy production. As you say, pigs don't need much space and can be fed almost anything; they taste pretty good too.

Basic southern Italian treatments of beef reflect the rather marginal place it had in the basic diet. Sliced thin and pounded, stewed or braised for long periods of time, or ground up: those are the things you can do with a steer (or a horse) that's been pulling a plough for a long time or a cow that's been supplying milk for the production of cheese for years.

Just as pork is the basic meat of China, it is also the basic meat of Europe, at least historically speaking. In some areas, cattle raising was on sufficient scale to make beef a common meat and in some places sheep or goats were the more common source of meat. But over the largest part of western and central Europe, pork was the white meat. Tasty and a little goes a long way.

Antonius

As to pork v beef, it is I think simply a matter of scale. Pigs do not require as much forage, and can (like chickens) consume some of the waste stream. Cattle take more room. Sheep are somewhere in between, but can be (deliciously) consumed as lamb.

Well, that was my first thought too, and if we were talking about 1840 then clearly the reason pork would be the top selling meat would be because it was easiest to raise within a reasonable distance of the city. But if it was actually 1890 to 1920 when the institution of the Pork Store became so established, which is what immigration patterns would imply if the stores were mostly Italian, Polish, whatever, then clearly beef from the midwest/west was being shipped all over the country and sold at competitive prices by that point.

I suppose there could still have been a residual preference for pork as a result of 1) preexisting German pork stores which did date back to the pre-railroad era and 2) the preexisting preference of new immigrants for pork (for the kind of reasons Antonius mentions-- in most cultures a cow or steer was too useful to be lunch until it stopped being useful), which still kept pork #1 even well after an era when beef was widely available. Somewhere I suppose there's a chart that shows how much of each animal was eaten, and I would be very surprised if the general trend for the 20th century wasn't beef and chicken, way up, pork steadily down (and salmon up, mutton way, way down etc.)

I don't have a better explanation offhand, so that one might do....

That's "Yorkville", the old upper eastside German neighbourhood.

Silly me. The Yorktown is an aircraft carrier. One more sign I'm getting old. I cannot remember the correct name of a neighborhood I lived in for two years.

YourPalWill wrote:Silly me. The Yorktown is an aircraft carrier.

And a mall

Wow, as a recent immigrant to Chicago from back east, a topic I can contribute to.

I grew up in Northern New Jersey about 20 miles from Staten Island and fondly remember as a kid going to local pork stores, although in my area they were German, not Italian. I also grew up not too far from the Italian pork store featured in the Sopranos. My recollection is that these were called "pork" stores because they specialized in salumi, wursts and sausages, and smoked meat products, that given their European heritage were primarily pork based. And these could only be found in speciality stores, unlike chicken or steaks which could be bought in a supermarket, which is why there are not "chicken" or "beef" stores.

Rickster,

I too am a native of Jersey but have been here a long time. Thanks for the support; I offered the same view, albeit in a more verbose way, above. When I was a kid, German and Italian Pork stores were still to be found throughout the area. There were also a lot of Italian "cheese stores", which specialised in fresh ricotta and mozzarella but also sold all kinds of Italian and basic cheeses, home-made pasta, some dry goods... Now, salumerie do the work of both but I remember Saturday or Sunday mornings typically involved trips to both a cheese store and a pork store... And then the bakery.

I think the 'mystererious' part stemmed from the fact that in a number of cases, the name has lived on but the business has broadened.

It's good to have some folks from the old country out here... Now that you started, keep posting!

Antonius

Faicco's Pork Store in NYC reviewed @ Roadfood

E.M.