‘Always sell the best’
Leonard Labriola laid groundwork for family’s Italian markets
Dad was 16 years old when he arrived at the East Liberty train station after leaving Italy, headed to Larimer Avenue where relatives and a new life beckoned.
It was the 1920s, and the neighborhood was booming as Pittsburgh’s center of Italian commerce and culture.
“He had minimum schooling in Italy,” Leonard Labriola, 80, said about his father, also named Leonard, who lived to be 96. “He got the education of the streets.”
A key part of that education came when Leonard Labriola Sr. went to work at an Italian market on Larimer Avenue, before setting out to open his own store in 1929. “Always sell the best,” he would tell his children.
Only selling the best became the mantra for the fruit and vegetables sold in the family store, and then at the other stores they opened in later years around the city.
The patriarch died in 1989, but the family name lives on three generations later in four Labriola’s Italian Markets around Pittsburgh. Their secret to commercial survival: tailor store offerings to meet changing consumer tastes while following customers to the places where they live.
That first store got it all started.
“Dad slaughtered chickens” on Larimer Avenue, said Mr. Labriola, who began working at the store on Saturdays at age 8, sweeping floors and carrying bags. “He sold fruits and vegetables: tomatoes, lettuce, peppers. There was a small deli then.”
Larimer, located about 6 miles east of Downtown, was thriving in the 1920s as Italian immigrants flocked to the neighborhood, building brick homes with porches and manicuring front yards, and planting grapes and vegetables in backyard gardens.
Between 1880 and 1924, more than 5 million Italians arrived in the United States, with 15,000 settling in Pittsburgh and another 15,000 scattered throughout Allegheny County, according to “Paesi d’Italia to the Village of Larimer: A Study of Pittsburgh’s Forgotten Little Italy, 1920-1950,” an unpublished University of Pittsburgh paper that was written in 2001 by James Zanella.
In 1920, Larimer’s population was 6,061, many of whom worked as stonecutters, mechanics, barbers and shoemakers. Anchoring the community, Our Lady Help of Christians on Meadow Street — the first Italian church in Pittsburgh — was built in a style reminiscent of those seen in the Tuscan countryside, with its bell tower marking the village skyline.
Italian grocers sold olive oil, pasta, cheeses and meats not readily available at regular markets. Relationships between customers and merchants were “personal and friendly,” author Anthony Halterlein wrote in a 1994 book, “Raised in Paradise: A Saga of Little Italy.”
Our Lady Help of Christians wouldn’t close until 1992, but the tide had begun to turn for Larimer decades earlier, by the late 1950s.
The neighborhood began emptying out as people moved away from the city to the suburbs. Bloomfield became Pittsburgh’s new Little Italy, and the Labriolas followed their customers out of the city.
In 1969, the family moved the market to Penn Hills, then a fastgrowing municipality where many Italian families had relocated. Penn Hills, about 10 miles from Downtown, became the largest recipient of Larimer Italians, according to Mr. Zanella: 20% of
Pittsburgh’s Italians — about 5,000 people — lived in Penn Hills in 1970.
“My dad was known for produce,” Mr. Labriola said. “When we went to Penn Hills, we started the Italian deli, but we carried everything.”
Deli offerings grew in popularity for the rapidly growing families of Penn Hills, and so did pasta, olive oil, private label sauce and other Italian foods favored by the new suburban families on a budget.
“We were a chipped ham and American cheese store,” he said.
With the move to suburbia came the rise of two-parent working families, longer commutes and busier lives. At the Penn Hills store, the Labriolas expanded sales of prepared foods, including an array of sandwiches to meet evolving consumer tastes and increasingly hurried lives of their customers.
“We make traditional Italian products: chicken Parmesan, eggplant, soups,” Mr. Labriola said, “because the housewife is working and has so many other things to do.”
Prepared foods was a natural move for Rose Labriola, who manages the Penn Hills store: His daughter loves to cook, Mr. Labriola said.
Aspinwall was the next suburb for a Labriola’s Italian store, followed by Monroeville and, about 10 years ago, Marshall — that location has become among the chain’s most successful outlets, said Leonard Labriola II, 37, the store manager.
The move to the outer northern suburbs couldn’t have been better timed: A few miles from the store is Cranberry, where the exploding population more than doubled to 31,560 in 2018 from 14,816 in 1990, according to municipal figures.
“There’s tons of people moving in,” he said. “A lot of people like prepared meals.”
Shrimp with lemon garlic sauce, stuffed pasta shells and lasagna have become dinner favorites for families stopping by on the way home, Mr. Labriola said, while catering has taken off in recent years.
“My grandfather started with produce,” Mr. Labriola said. “My father created the full-line deli. Now, the focus is catering, which has grown every year.
“Whatever they want, we create.”
Labriola employs about 90 people, including siblings who manage each of the four stores, which will help smooth ownership transitions in the future, said Leanne Labriola, granddaughter of the founder. Until then, the company has secured a place in the region’s grocery shopping habits: the Monroeville store, for example, is located just across the street from a much larger Labriola’s competitor, Giant Eagle.
“For a lot of customers, it’s like a tradition,” Mr. Labriola said.
An online ordering app for busy families is among the ways the grocery chain has kept up with changing consumer preferences.
The elder Mr. Labriola looks back on a long career of meeting the needs of customers in a business that employs many of his family members.
“I’ve been very fortunate,” he said. “We are truly a family business, and family is everything to me.”