Pizza maker rises to restore glory to Facer Street
Roberto Vergalito has big dreams for Facer Street in St. Catharines.
The pizzaiolo who throws dough at Roberto’s Pizza Passion on Facer envisions a piazza — cobblestones, fountain and all — near the Boys and Girls Club at the foot of the street. He imagines specialty clothing and gift boutiques, bakeries selling fresh bread and fine pastries, gelaterias and the hum of conversation on busy patios as the soundtrack for it all.
Really, Vergalito visualizes the thriving Facer Street neighbourhood of his youth, but even better.
“The street was packed. There were grocery stores and other stores, and people of all European descents. There were mom and pop shops. Everybody knew everybody,” Vergalito recalled. “It was like living in Italy but with Polish and Ukrainian people, too. Everybody knew you and knew where you belonged.”
And where he belonged, back in the glory days he hopes to reinstate to this storied but tired neighbourhood that was established by Italian and Eastern European immigrants, was with his parents, Vilma and Pasquale.
The Italian couple put $500 and roots down in a Facer Street triplex with commercial space when they settled in St. Catharines in the mid-1960s. Vilma ran a gift shop in the building and Pasquale worked in his tailor shop until a fabric allergy inspired him to open a travel agency instead. The couple, and their two children, Vergalito and his sister Nadia, were fixtures on the street that saw traffic from all over the city beckoned by specialty shops and reminders of the old country.
But the tightly woven European fabric of Facer Street began to unravel by the mid- to late 1980s when the cornerstone Italian meat market, now a convenience store, shuttered after the owner died, Vergalito said.
“That’s really when things started to fall apart in the neighbourhood. Little shops started closing down. The only reason people were coming here was to go to the bakery across the street or to my mom’s,” he said recently while making dough at his restaurant.
The European families who established the area had realized the Canadian dream and started moving to new subdivisions and proverbial greener pastures.
The advent of the box store didn’t help, either. Knowing shopkeepers on a first-name basis, as was the way on Facer, didn’t have the appeal of onestop shopping in cookie-cutter monoliths springing up on the city’s outskirts.
The building now housing Vergalito’s pizzeria was a high-end Italian restaurant in the neighbourhood’s heyday. By the late 1990s, it was a bar that didn’t always attract respectful clientele.
Windows at Vilma’s business were smashed one night after last call. Litter was a problem and vandalism seemed the new pastime on the street.
By 2005, the watering hole closed and the building was put up for sale. Pasquale, who was importing Italian coffee at the time, bought it to open a café that his daughter Nadia would run.
Vergalito had, by this point, long since moved on from the neighbourhood that reared him. He established a busy pizzeria off Martindale Road and made a name for himself as “The Pizza Dude.”
When Pasquale died in 2008, however, Vergalito stepped as the family patriarch. The duties eventually compelled him to sell his west St. Catharines operation and partner with Nadia, who was struggling with the café with her father gone.
The business rebranded as Roberto’s Pizza Passion in 2013. Together the brother-sister team turned out pies and espresso, and became an anchor on the street alongside Your Deli and St. Joseph’s Bakery.
It wasn’t long after his return that Vergalito began hearing a common refrain: The Facer Street neighbourhood was a bad part of town. He investigated for himself and started brainstorming ideas to change perceptions.
Recreating that “bustling” European quarter was top of mind.
“Being the businessman my father taught me to be, I started thinking about what we could do to bring back that European feel,” he said. “A lot of people who grew up here had fond memories of it so that’s what I wanted to do.”
In January 2015, he put a call out to residents and merchants on the street. Vergalito wanted to beautify Facer and needed help. Forty people showed up.
He tossed out the idea of a festival, similar to the Blessed Virgin Feast held by St. Alfred Church on Vine Street. It drew thousands every spring with its Italian singers, food and fireworks. A Facer Street event could raise money that would be reinvested in the neighbourhood.
Joe Kedzierski from St. Joseph’s Bakery was the first to step up to make it happen. Henry Ostaszewicz from the Canadian Polish Society joined soon after to help organize the event.
And with that, the Facer European Festival was born.
Thousands came to the inaugural event in 2016. They returned in 2017, filling up on history during walking tours, dancing a polka, eating perogies out of church halls, and watching Vergalito shell out pizza on the sidewalk.
When the festival returns on the Civic Holiday this August, Vergalito will turn his parking lot into a Naples alleyway with a trattoria and entertainment — an example of what could be in this neighbourhood.
Music stages will be spread throughout the street and cultural experiences will abound. For one afternoon, Facer Street will look and feel like it once did. And if Vergalito gets his wish, it will boom like that every day again.
“I was born and raised here. I love this area of town,” Vergalito said. “(Change) isn’t going to happen right away, but in the years ahead, it will all grow.”
“The street was packed. There were grocery stores and other stores, and people of all European descents.”
ROBERTO VERGALITO
ROBERTO’S PIZZA PASSION