HILLSDALE—Villa Gianazza was a countryside restaurant with attached boarding rooms at Clinton Avenue and Evergreen Street in Hillsdale. Active during the 1910s and 1920s, the establishment was owned by Italian immigrants Frank and Argentina Gianazza and was run by the couple and other family members.
Recently, the Pascack Historical Society received an email from the Gianazzas’ great-grandson Mr. Edward Roell of Hillsdale.
“For some unexplained reason, Villa Gianazza has been saddled as a ‘bordello’ with the expected residential ‘madame,’” Roell said.
The reality, he insists, was much less salacious.
“It was a countryside restaurant with boarding rooms when the weather permitted. In the wintertime, the boarding rooms were closed and the second floor became the indoor restaurant,” explains Roell. “I’d like to set the record straight about what I consider a rather disingenuous portrayal of my late relatives and their enterprise.”
The Pascack Historical Society was happy to oblige. Based on contemporary accounts, census records, and information passed down in Roell’s family, this is what we know about Villa Gianazza.
Hillsdale’s Manor Section
Situated in the Manor section of Hillsdale, the Villa Gianazza at 179 Evergreen St. was well located to receive summer vacationers. It might be difficult to envision from a 21st-century perspective, but the Pascack Valley, in its agrarian past, was a resort destination for those seeking to escape the stifling heat of larger cities like New York, Paterson, and Newark.
Hillsdale Manor, thriving from the late 1880s to the 1910s, was a popular summer retreat for the city’s wealthy. Isolated from greater Hillsdale by untouched forest, Hillsdale Manor had its own distinct personality—a town within a town, with its own train station, stores, hotels, and newspaper.
The Manor encompassed lands in northeastern Hillsdale, between Lincoln Avenue to the north, Knickerbocker and Piermont avenues to the south, Broadway to the west, and St. Mary’s and Raymond streets to the east. In modern times, this is the neighborhood behind ShopRite on Broadway. The fieldstone construction once prevalent in the Manor can still be found on some buildings in the area.
U.S. Census records tell us that Frank and Argentina Gianazza came to America from Northern Italy, specifically Milan, in the early 20th century. Frank was in his mid-30s and Argentina in her mid-20s. He was a carpenter by trade. By the 1910s, they had moved to Hillsdale Manor. A land division map from 1923 shows that their large property was equivalent to 22 building lots.
The 1915 New Jersey State Census records Frank and Argentina with a full house. They were a complex family.
Joseph, age 24, the couple’s only biological child, lived there with his wife, Theresa (nОe Barbero). Also in the household was Frank’s sister, 28-year-old Giuseppina (Josephine). Then there were 11-year-old Ernesta (Ernestine) and 18-year-old Louis, Frank and Josephine’s half-siblings from their father’s third marriage. Being 30 years older than Louis and 37 years older than Ernesta, Frank was more of a father figure to them. In fact, Frank and Argentina had raised Ernesta since infancy.
Finally, rounding out the household was a handyman, 24-year-old Pasquale Columbo.
Everyone under the roof at 179 Evergreen had varying degrees of English fluency, depending on the age at which they came to America.
At the time, Hillsdale had 1,444 residents, of which about 80 percent were American-born. There were also 33 from England, 19 from Ireland, 86 from Germany, 24 from Italy, and 114 from other countries. The vast majority of immigrants to the U.S. in those days came from Europe. Records indicate that the Gianazza family originated in Cerro Maggiore, in the Milan region.
A Hard Time to Be Italian
While Italian-American influence is ubiquitous in today’s Pascack Valley, it was a far different scene in the early 20th century. Until then, the region’s population had historically been Dutch, with an assortment of other northern and central European ethnicities. An influx of Catholic Italians at the beginning of the 1900s was met with disdain.
Just a decade earlier, construction of the Woodcliff Reservoir had brought in a workforce of Italians. News reports from the time reflected the cultural friction.
One Bergen Record article from April 1904 reported that as the water company’s 400 Italian laborers roamed about the village of Hillsdale when not at work, the Township Council appointed constables to keep an eye on them. Reports chastised the workers for being too loud, contaminating the water supply as they washed their clothes, and “committing other nuisances.”
The Record reported in December 1904, “Hillsdale’s Constable Rawson saw a Dago with a dead rabbit last Sunday. The officer chased the gunner, but the fellow dodged into his bungaloo in which were about 40 of the same tribe of foreigners. As all Italians look alike to Rawson, he was unable to pick out the poacher.”
In October 1909, another report stated: “The residents of the fashionable section of Hillsdale are breathing easy now. Their fears that an Italian colony was to be established near them by the Italians employed on the road improvement in the vicinity have been quieted, for the large barn-like dwelling has been removed. It is understood that a financial consideration caused the padrone to agree to the removal.”
Such was the climate in Hillsdale Manor when the Gianazzas moved there, but it would get worse before it got better. By the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had an active presence in town, counting many white Protestant community members among its ranks. The Klan’s hooded members intimidated Jewish, Italian, and Irish residents, holding cross burnings at several sites across Hillsdale.
What is now a cul-de-sac at the end of Parkview Drive, near Church Road and the Woodcliff Reservoir, was the Klan’s base in the 1920s. Back then, it was a wooded clearing where the Klan held meetings, burned crosses, and kept horses they rode around town in full hood and robe regalia.
A short distance away, a sand and gravel pit at Piermont Avenue and Kinderkamack Road provided a hilltop that was a preferred site for cross burnings. The sight of the fiery cross atop the hill created a frightening and unforgettable vision for Hillsdale’s Jewish and Catholic residents—just three blocks, a quarter of a mile, from Villa Gianazza.
‘Checking In, Per Favore’
Villa Gianazza was a combination of a boarding house and hotel. Business was especially busy in the summertime, when the area was frequented by vacationers, but there were also long-term renters—sometimes for years. The Gianazza family members worked together to run the place, handling tasks that ranged from the pleasant (checking in guests and serving meals) to the mundane (cleaning rooms and commodes).
The main Gianazza house had four floors. On the first floor was a kitchen with a dumbwaiter for lifting dishes up to the second-floor restaurant. The third floor had four bedrooms, and the fourth floor contained a private apartment. Boarding rooms were built as an extension to the second floor of the main house. The restaurant also had a bar where beer and liquor were served.
During the warmer months, dining was al fresco under the boarding rooms, shaded by thick grapevines that provided relief from the sun. On rainy days, the second-floor restaurant was reopened.
Family Affairs
As mentioned earlier, living in the Gianazza family home in 1915 were Joseph Gianazza and his wife, Theresa. The couple had been married about five years when Joseph fathered a child, a daughter, in an extramarital affair in 1920.
Argentina Assunta Gianazza, named for her paternal grandmother, was kept in the family but not raised by Joseph and Theresa. Instead, she grew up in the household of Josephine and her common-law husband, Corrado Marcucci. The child was raised as their own; she never knew she was adopted until adulthood, when she applied for a marriage certificate.
Frank Gianazza died in August 1921 at just 53 years old. He was buried at St. Andrew’s Cemetery in River Vale. His son, Joseph Gianazza, father of Argentina Assunta Gianazza, died just a few years later, on February 21, 1925.
By 1930, we see widowed Argentina living alone at Villa Gianazza. A search of the Hillsdale Herald newspaper from that era shows her name in the classified advertisements in 1930 and 1931, offering the rental of a five-room house at $35 per month.
Sometime in the late 1930s, Argentina Gianazza had the boarding rooms knocked down, according to Roell. The last time he was in the house was on his 14th birthday in 1967.
The year of Argentina Gianazza’s death and the place of her burial remain a mystery. She appears to have died in the late 1930s, as no records place her in the 1940 U.S. Federal Census.
Villa Gianazza Changes Hands
According to Roell, Argentina Gianazza owed her husband’s sister, Giuseppina, money and either sold or gave 179 Evergreen to her as repayment. By 1940, Giuseppina and Corrado were living there with their 19-year-old daughter Argentina Assunta (Sue) and a boarder, 53-year-old Luigi Piergrossi.
Giuseppina sold the old Villa Gianazza in 1943. From the proceeds, she bought a house at 198 Broadway in Hillsdale for $4,000. Luigi, having become part of the family, continued to live with them for years, even after they moved. Later, he returned to Italy in April 1961.
Argentina Assunta grew up to marry Wilbert R. Roell. They raised a family in Hillsdale that included four children: Michael, Susan, Edward, and Ronald. She was a Gold Star Mother of PFC Michael C. Roell, “KIA” in Vietnam on May 26, 1967.
For Edward Roell, one mystery that might never be solved is the burial place of his great-grandmother, Argentina. While it is believed she died in the 1930s, records of her death and burial have proven elusive.
“Frank, his son Joseph, and my parents are all buried in St. Andrew’s Cemetery, River Vale,” Roell explains, “but the whereabouts of Argentina Gianazza remains a mystery. However, there is an unidentified casket atop her son’s casket with no identification on the gravestone.”
On the backside of Frank Gianazza’s pedestal is engraved the death of his son, but no one else. The top burial is unidentified.
While the boarding rooms were demolished in the 1930s, the Gianazza family home at 179 Evergreen St. is still standing. Today it is a multi-family rental.
Editor’s note: Read the story on PDF, too, and get the whole issue! This feature appeared in the July 2024 edition of the Pascack Historical Society’s quarterly newsletter, Relics. If you enjoy your weekly local history feature in Pascack Press, consider becoming a PHS member so you can receive Relics—Kristin Beuscher writes both!