
Events only last for a limited time and allow you to bake delicious holiday themed treats.

” is a feature that explores favorite haunts of the past and revisits the headlines of yesteryear. It was quite a profession that we preserved.”Īlan Morell is a Rochester-based freelance writer. “We really did it the old way,” Dave Veltre said. The memories created there also remain intact, even if the wonderful aromas are gone. The place has been used for storage in recent years, Sonny Veltre said. The family sold the building, which is still standing with the brick oven still intact. Dave Veltre followed a new career opportunity and Veltre’s Bakery ended its nearly 70-year run.
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Tour groups stopped in, and a movie was partially filmed there in the 1980s. Veltre’s continued as a neighborhood landmark. Crime was rampant, and many of the old Italian families had moved to places like Gates. It was a different time.”īy the time Dave Veltre took over about 1990, it was a different neighborhood than the one the Veltres had known. On Sundays, they were all boiling water for macaroni. Off Parkway, where he grew up, Sonny Veltre remembered, “That street was all Italians. Veltre’s Bakery became an institution that fit in perfectly with Rochester’s version of Little Italy. Those shops also closed before the flagship operation on Parkway, which continued to be the heart of the business. Those shops all had stone-lined gas ovens, Dave Veltre said. Pizza shops opened on West Ridge Road in Greece, on Dewey Avenue near Ridgeway Avenue in Rochester, on East River Road in Henrietta and in Churchville. The Veltre Bakery business got bigger, too. The pizzas got bigger sometime after World War II. “People would come out and get 'em for lunch.” Brides and grooms regularly ordered pizza for their wedding receptions then, Sonny said. “We used to bring 100 small pizzas … and park in front of Hickey Freeman at lunch time,” he said. Veltre’s would stock up pizza pies in a truck and set up shop around town, Sonny said.
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They became so popular that Sonny’s dad brought them around to neighborhood taverns and sold them for 10 cents apiece. Veltre’s at first called them tomato pies or tomato kuchen. They soon found out and came back for more. “People didn’t even know what pizza was,” he said.

Sonny Veltre said the early ones were small and simple, topped with nothing more than sauce, grated cheese and oregano. Basilian house at Aquinas?Īh yes, the pizza. (Then, it was) back at supper for more bread. “You could smell the wonderful bread all over the neighborhood. “At 1 p.m., the bread would come out of the ovens,” Zicari wrote. As she noted in a Facebook post, she went to Veltre’s three times a day in the early 1960s. Theresa Zicari, of Webster, was one of those regulars. Our oven was part of the building - it was built in.” His brother, John, described it as “big as a garage” and said, “It was an Italian neighborhood, and a lot of people came right from Italy. “The pores of the brick gave it that crispy taste.
