Goodbye to Seattle's Italian enclave, Garlic Gulch

In immigrant enclaves around the world, waves of new communities build upon the foundation left behind as the previous tenants move away. New cultures and businesses build on top of the old ones, stacking up like the layer cakes that Remo Borracchini’s Bakery in Seattle's Rainier Valley neighborhood once made more than one hundred of each day. Those cakes, bought for weddings, birthdays, and graduations for generations, came out of the area once known as the Garlic Gulch, but served all of the neighborhood’s diverse communities.

“We had several Italian grocery stores at Atlantic Street, Italian pharmacy, Italian barbershop. The residents were mainly east and west of Rainier Avenue, going all the way up to Beacon Hill, as far south as – oh, a little south of McClellan Street,” Remo Borracchini described in the book “Rainier Valley Food Stories.”

None of that remains, so when his three daughters announced the bakery’s permanent closing this week just days after another classic Garlic Gulch brand, Oberto, announced it would be shutting its factory in the neighborhood, it felt like the end of an era.

When the Italian community first arrived in Seattle in the first decade of the 20th century, they came for coal mining jobs. The area Borracchini describes appealed to the mainly rural immigrants because of the available space for farming. Then, as quickly as the neighborhood became known as Italian, they were joined by Japanese residents, then the Black community spread south from the Central District. In the late 1970s, refugees from the Vietnam War moved in, along with Latino immigrants and newly arrived people from East Africa. By the early 2000s, Borracchini’s and Oberto shared the streets with pho shops, taco trucks, teriyaki counters, and Ethiopian restaurants, reflecting similar populations as the neighborhood just to the south, which was then considered among the most diverse in the country.

In 1987, the Weekly ran a 10-page story with a headline that feels equally appropriate for this week: “Good-by to the Garlic Gulch.” Author Eric Scigliano declared that the neighborhood “suffered its final indignity last year when the old, abandoned New Italian Cafe was leveled.” The city had been knocking down the neighborhood since it built the first floating bridge across Lake Washington, which opened in 1940, and the article printed at the halfway mark of the Mount Baker Tunnel and Interstate 90 bridge expansion project.

The only exception to his insistence that nothing remained of the “once-humming” Italian commercial district was Borracchini’s, which he described as still having the “real goods,” but complained that the people behind the counter were “decidedly non-Italian, and just stare dumbly when you say ‘capocolla’ or ‘provolone.’”

But when Borracchini’s and Oberto each first opened, they catered mainly to their own community. Italian immigrant Constantino Oberto started selling his sausage to small stores in Seattle in 1918 – a few years before Remo Borracchini’s father opened his first bakery. The first Oberto Sausage Company store opened at Dearborn and Rainier, but by 1953, Constantino had passed away and his son Art moved the factory south to its current location. The company stayed in the family even as it expanded around the Northwest, until 2018, when it was sold to a Canadian conglomerate called Premium Brand Holdings. Though the factory remained in operation until this week, the Rainier Valley factory was actually sold just after the company, in 2019.

Like Oberto before its 2018 sale, Borracchini’s Bakery was in the hands of the third generation of the family, far removed from their Italian immigrant grandparents. Despite Scigliano’s scathing description of it as “latter generation,” Remo Borracchini’s father Mario, an immigrant from Tuscany, opened the bakery 100 years ago in the basement of his house, and it survived – though under various names and with a location change early on – until the pandemic shut it down.

By the 1980s, when Scigliano said goodbye to the Garlic Gulch, Boracchini’s bakery survived because it sold cakes to everyone around. They always had cakes available, so businesses could pick one up for a last-minute office party; they offered endless options, so parents could get custom birthday cakes featuring a kid’s favorite color or cartoon; and they were priced affordably enough for everyone. Borracchini’s came out of the Italian community, but it catered to everyone, making it easy for even newer immigrants to help their families join the grand American tradition of overly sweet, brightly colored cake for every occasion. “It wasn’t like the cake was particularly great,” Knute Berger of Crosscut noted on KUOW this week. “But it satisfied everyone.”

Though the Oberto move and Borracchini’s closure seem sudden – and, in combination, shocking – Berger also notes that these kinds of things happen all the time, even not in a pandemic. Just a few years ago, to far less fanfare, Mondo & Sons meats – a fourth generation Garlic Gulch food business – moved its operations to Tukwila. In its place, one time employee Erasto Jackson opened Lil Red’s Takeout and Catering, blessing the neighborhood with his unique brand of BBQ and soul food and replacing the Tricolore with the black, green, and gold of the Jamaican flag. It serves as a reminder that the neighborhood’s greatness comes not from the departure of the century-old businesses, but from the hope that someday Seattle will celebrate similar longevity for Lil Red’s, or of nearby businesses already in their second generation like Mi La Cay and Pho Bac, or on their third generation, like Mutual Fish.

But don’t finish your “arrivederci” for the area quite yet: there’s still one last family-owned food business in the Garlic Gulch. “Big John” Croce grew up working at his parents’ store there – The Atlantic Street Grocery – in 1940s and 50s. In 1971, Croce started selling olive oil from his car, eventually developing into the wholesale company Pacific Food Importers, and setting up shop at Dearborn and Rainier. The warehouse eventually moved to Kent, and when he later returned to Seattle with his retail shop, Big John’s PFI, he opened in Seattle's Sodo District. Croce’s daughters and granddaughter took over the business in 2012, just before Croce passed away in 2015. Last year, they moved the store to a new location, which happens to be at the corner of Dearborn and Rainier, just two blocks west of its original location (and that of the first Oberto Sausage Company store), right on top of Seattle’s original Italian enclave, the Garlic Gulch.