Statue of Frank Rizzo in front of the Municipal Servies Building in the center of Philadelphia
Mural of Frank Rizzo on the side of a shop in the 9th Street Italian Market
Women in Philadelphia before the 2000s loved their three Franks: Frank Sinatra, Frankie Avalon and Frank Rizzo. One of the most popular sites for Italian-Americans, entertainment lovers, politicos and Mafiosi was the old Palumbo's nightclub and Nostalgia Room restaurant in the Italian Market. Nostalgia's walls were lined with framed, autographed b&w photographs of all the great lounge singers who had entertained at Palumbo's: Sinatra, Jimmy Durante, Patti Page, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr, Rosemary Clooney, Al Martino, Connie Francis, Peggy Lee, Louis Armstrong, Louis Prima, Frankie Avalon, on and on.
Nostalgia served the best Neapolitan-Sicilian food and absolutely scrumptious Italian bread hot from Sarcone's bakery ovens several doors up 9th street. Linguini and clams, mussels, sausage and spaghetti, baked ziti, rigatoni with meatballs, scungilli, calamari, lasagne, eggplant parmesan... Throughout his political career, Frank Rizzo used to pop in for lunch or dinner, and usually walked amongst all the tables and along the bar, shaking hands with every patron of the restaurant before he departed.
In 1994, Palumbo's and Nostalgia were destroyed by arson. Just when the fire appeared to have died down, someone relit it -- three times. It was the passing of an era.
You know that my tastes are far more complex...like a neighborhood Pizza Steak and a Greenman's Eyetalian Hoagie...
“Philadelphia, for example, has not had a Republican mayor since the Truman administration. It did enjoy the services of Mayor Frank Rizzo, a Democrat who endorsed Nixon in exchange for federal handouts and who governed in the progressive style: He converted a private utility into a public one and promptly turned it into a patronage machine, he was close with the labor unions and raised the citys wage tax to fund spending on transportation and infrastructure projects, worked for economic benefits for the elderly, etc. He was a classic welfare-statist Democrat and a man who, as police commissioner, famously promised to make Attila the Hun look like a fag.”
I post this quote from the article I posted above. For my money guys like him were the worst of the worst hacks. He and his contemporaries through there union and public sector cronyism is what started the slide into destruction. He might not have finished the job, but he was key in starting it.