The Feast of San Gennaro returns to Little Italy

The Feast of San Gennaro is back for its 97th year and hundreds of thousands of people are expected to descend on Mulberry Street to celebrate a slice of Italian-American culture.

While most attendees know the street festival for its traditional Neapolitan sausages, zeppoles and the Ferris wheel that takes riders right up to a fourth-floor apartment, the event is more of a homecoming for others.

John Fratta, a spry fourth-generation Little Italy resident with salt-and-pepper hair and eyeglasses, is one of the feast’s organizers.

On a recent Tuesday, he was building a booth for the festival. Fratta explained that his great-grandfather was the first president of the feast, which started as a one-day block party in 1926.

As Italian immigrants settled across the Lower East Side, the Neapolitans concentrated on Mulberry Street and brought along their tradition of commemorating the martyr San Gennaro of Naples.

These days, only 8% of Little Italy’s residents are of Italian ancestry according to one 2019 report, as rising rents have forced residents and businesses to other boroughs over the years.

Fratta has seen many of his childhood friends move out over the decades he’s lived in the neighborhood. Today they are scattered across New York and New Jersey.

“A one-bedroom was going for $3,500 a month,” said Fratta. “Shoot me first.”

For Fratta and many others, the Feast of San Gennaro is a homecoming during its 11 day-run and even in the days leading up to it. Many of the vendors and attendees grew up in Little Italy and have since moved across the tristate area.

“It’s a family reunion,” says Fratta.

As vendors — including local restaurants — started building out their structures on Tuesday afternoon, longtime resident Vinny Gione, a.k.a. “Skinny Vinny,” bumped into a childhood friend, Eugene Leong, known as “Crazy Eugene,” from Chinatown, on the…