Green Cross Helping People For Over Four Decades

When Joseph Giangregorio was young and living in Naples, Italy, he wanted to be a vet.

“People did not recommend it,” he said. “I wanted to help people so I decided to become a pharmacist.”

Called “Peppy” by his friends and customers, Joseph recently explained how he came to live in this country.

“My brother (Fernando), my mother, my grandmother and my aunt moved to the North End on January 2, 1954,” he said. “From that day on, we have lived here.”

Joseph and Fernando own The Green Cross Pharmacy located at 393 Hanover Street.

“We started working at a luncheonette right here in this space while we were going to Christopher Columbus High School and then the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy on Longwood Avenue.”

Joseph graduated in 1962.

“I was working here at night as a pharmacist and also at the New England Medical Center as a pharmacist during the day,” he said. “My brother graduated in 1963 and did the same thing: he was working here as a pharmacist during the day and at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital on Huntington Avenue during the night.”

In 1964, Joseph said, the owner of the pharmacy (Antonio Amodeo) decided to sell his business.

“We bought it on January 1, 1964,” Joseph said.

The pharmacy has a wide selection of products as well as Italian magazines, CDs, greeting cards and items for the bathroom, kitchen and guestroom.

There’s also a collection of things for tourists and discontinued (or difficult to find) Italian products.

The health care products include items for feet and nails, first aid, vitamins and nutritional supplements, mouth, family planning, pain relief, women, skin, eyes and ears, smoking cessation, relief from snoring, colds, coughs, flu among many others.

The hours of Green Cross Pharmacy are Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. and Saturday from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The pharmacy is closed on Sundays.

“We are bilingual so we have a lot of Italian customers as well as Americans,” Joseph said. “We have a lot of people coming in who are tourists and we help them and they appreciate it and send us notes from all over the world.”

Joseph and his brother have noticed changes over the years.

“I’ve seen a lot of demographic change,” Joseph said. “The area has become more gentrified. The community changes very often because students rent apartments, move away and then newcomers arrive to stay for a short period of time.”

That affects the people who have lived in the community for many years, Joseph believes.

“We used to have more families but high rents have forced them out of the North End,” he said. “We want to continue working here as long as we can because we want to help everybody, especially the elderly. Our elderly customers trust us.”

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