'The Mayor Of Italian Williamsburg' Gets His Own Brooklyn Street

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN — Friends, family and neighbors of a late deli owner known as the "Italian mayor of Williamsburg" gathered over the weekend to remember the neighborhood staple and name a Brooklyn street corner in his honor.

The corner of Graham Avenue and Conselyea Street, where Cono D'Alto's Mamma Maria Salumeria once stood, was officially named "Cono D'Alto Way" after a years-long effort to get the unofficial co-name memorialized to honor D'Alto, who died in 2009.

The block has been "unofficially dedicated" to D'Alto since 2012, after the city rejected an application for the co-naming. Council Member Antonio Reynoso reintroduced the idea to the legislators this year, who passed it along with 86 other co-names for different streets and places across the city.

"After a 6 year fight to get a sign, the memory & legacy of Cono, “The Mayor of Italian Williamsburg”, will live on," Reynoso said in a Tweet from the ceremony Saturday.

D'Alto's specialty delicatessen was among the most popular of Italian-American neighborhood shops that Williamsburg residents would shop at, according to Assembly Member Joe Lentol, who joined the ceremony.

"Cono D’Alto was a successful small business owner in the neighborhood who always remembered what is important in life," he said. "...Cono’s deli was at the top of the list of places where the whole neighborhood shopped. If you were down on your luck, he wouldn’t charge you."

Lentol was one of several elected officials who recalled stories about D'Alto's years serving the neighborhood — including the time he invited Sen. Chuck Schumer to come behind the counter and make his own sandwich just the way he liked.

D'Alto also cooked and brought food to workers at the World Trade Center site after the September, 11 2001 terrorist attacks. He put up a plaque honoring those who died in the attacks at the deli that still stands there today, Lentol said.

He was also involved in the San Cono di Teggiano Catholic Association and helped maintain the history of St. Cono, the assembly member added.

"Neighborhoods constantly change, and Williamsburg is certainly no longer an exclusive Italian-American enclave, but we have justly remembered an individual who contributed so much to the North Brooklyn community," he said.

The Williamsburg corner was far from the only Brooklyn spot that got a new co-name through the council bill.

In Park Slope, 7th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues will now be known as "Joe and Flo Leopoldi Way" for the late longtime hardware store owners, whose family still runs the shop on Fifth Avenue. A corner at 6th Street and Prospect Park West will also become "Rose and Edward Dunn Way" under the bill to honor two more significant community members who volunteered with or led a number of organizations.

Also on the list was a block in Clinton Hill that will be renamed Walt Whitman Way to honor the Brooklyn poet. The intersection, on the corner of Ryserson Street and Dekalb Avenue, is just a few blocks from one of Whitman's former homes, which activists with The Walt Whitman Initiative have been trying to preserve for the last few years.