HER LIFE’S PORK
Without the spicy links from Lucy’s Sausage, Little Italy’s annual Feast of San Gennaro is impossible to imagine.
The pork peddler celebrates its 95th year in business this month, making it one of New York’s most iconic Italian-American businesses — just one year younger than the feast itself.
Lucy Spata, 71, a diminutive Brooklynite with big no-nonsense energy, has been running the business for just over half a century. This year, she’s getting her due. She’s been crowned the official “queen” of the festival, which runs on Mulberry Street between Grand and Hester until Sept. 25.
“It all started with my grandmother,” Spata told The Post, referring to the original Lucy. She was an immigrant from Avellino near Naples, Italy, who first set up shop two years before the Great Depression.
“San Gennaro was only one block,” Spata said. “She had a stand with two metal garbage pails filled with hot coals and topped with a steel plate. The sandwiches were only 25 cents.”
These days, Spata and her staff oversee six trucks for sausages and four that fry up crispy zeppole. During a typical feast, they’ll go through a whopping 300 pounds of ground pork.
“You’re in New York, so there are definitely some characters here,” she said, laughing. “You’ll get people who will be in front of the stand and start singing, start screaming. You can’t imagine.”
Some of those characters have included Chrissy Teigen, former President Donald Trump and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The latter wanted his sandwich topped with Tabasco.
The sausages are also movie stars. In 1989, Francis Ford Coppola depicted the Feast of San Gennaro in “The Godfather: Part III,” with Spata and her team taking part in the two-week shoot.
“Joe Mantegna shot a scene at my stand and says in the movie, ‘This saus-eetch is wonderful!’ ” said Spata. Lucy’s also appeared in 1997’s “Cop Land,” with Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro.
And the stand is also a curious part of gay history, with the queer photographer Gary Lee Boas covering his cult classic book “New York Sex” with a ’70s-era picture of a blond hustler posed outside the stand. (Interview editor Mel Ottenberg recently called it “one of the greatest photos of New York City ever, period.”)
Being a cultural touchstone doesn’t mean life has always been easy — business dried up in 2020, with festivals on hold due to the pandemic. “I had a summer to myself for the first time and didn’t like it,” Spata said.
The summer before, her husband Angelo, who she’d been running the business with for years, passed away suddenly in the middle of Brooklyn’s Giglio Feast.
“He got sick and died during the feast, but I went back to the stand after we buried him,” she recalled.
These days, Spata worries about the future of Little Italy, where the fate of longtime businesses like Alleva Dairy and E.Rossi & Company is in question.
Challenging times
“I thought about opening a store years ago, but then I’d have to cut myself two ways,” Spata mused. “The rents are getting higher and higher — it’s very hard for these people to make a living.”
As far as the stand’s longevity is concerned, however, Spata has an ace up her sleeve: her granddaughter, also named Lucy, whom she hopes will one day take over the business. Not that she’s planning on retiring anytime soon.
“As far as I’m concerned, I’ll fight to the end. As long as I’m alive, my trailer’s gonna be here,” said Spata, who’s also known for her annual display of Christmas lights in Dyker Heights. “I was brought up Italian, I’m gonna die Italian. If we don’t stick together, we’re not going to have nothing.”
Concerning her official duties as this year’s San Gennaro Queen, the seen-it-all New Yorker is unfazed.
“You’re a queen from 2 o’clock to 4 o’clock and then it’s back to work,” she said.