The Italian food trade on Arthur Avenue is still open for business, with an enclosed retail market in the middle of the strip.
What Belmont looks like
The Italian food trade on Arthur Avenue is still in business. has sold groceries on the avenue since 1915, and has served Neapolitan food at 2342 since 1919. butcher shop is a few doors up, next to .
Belmont takes its name from Belle Mont, the Lorillard family's tobacco estate along the Bronx River. Catherine Lorillard Wolfe inherited the estate in 1870 and had part of it divided into streets. She named the main one for President Chester A. Arthur, whom she admired. Construction of the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden began on former estate land in 1898, and the Italian laborers who built them settled here.
Pushcart vendors crowded the avenue until the city built the at 2344 in 1940 to move them indoors. It still operates as an enclosed market.
More of the shops are on East 187th Street, past . opened there in November 1935 and makes its ravioli and egg noodles on the premises today. The storefront sign was recreated for the set of the Broadway musical A Bronx Tale.
Albanian and Puerto Rican businesses have joined the mix on Arthur Avenue and East 187th Street, and many Mexican families have moved to the neighborhood. Belmont is often called the real Little Italy of New York.
Films shot in Belmont
Belmont has been playing itself since the 1955 film Marty. In 2002 a scene from the HBO series The Sopranos was shot inside at 2342 Arthur Avenue, whose owner had refused The Godfather a mob hit scene decades earlier. The 2019 film Bottom of the 9th shot at Catania's Pizzeria and inside the Retail Market. Its writer Robert Bruzio grew up on Arthur Avenue. Chazz Palminteri grew up in Belmont and A Bronx Tale takes place in the neighborhood, but the 1993 film was largely shot in Astoria, Queens.
Marty, 1955
Marty Piletti's job at the meat market was shot inside a real butcher shop at 2374 Arthur Avenue, which was Oteri's then. The family talked the production into renaming the screenplay's shop owner Mr. Oteri. The opening shot of the film looks along the avenue with the Retail Market in frame. The shop at 2374 changed hands around 1980 and trades as Vincent's Meat Market now.
The Seven-Ups, 1973
Roy Scheider's detective walks his old neighborhood on Arthur Avenue. A shopkeeper at 2306 waves to him. He ends up across the street from a barber shop at 603 East 186th Street. The funeral the squad stakes out was staged at a funeral home at 569 East 184th Street, with the detectives posted at 2324 Hoffman Street across the road.
What Belmont can double for
Belmont can stand in for Manhattan's Little Italy before it shrank, an Italian American main street and a working market street.
