Frank LaBarba above, Nicola LaBarba below
Frank LaBarba, at age 50, sits in his family’s business, outside of business hours, and ponders which memory of his father he would like to share.
Nicola LaBarba passed away in 1997, but his enduring legacy to Newburyport “Nick’s Pizza on Merrimac Street” lives on under the care of his only child, Frank.
“I think I would say” Frank pauses, “a lot of people came in here late at night, for a few drinks (or later, from Jake’s down the street).” These guys would talk to my father and he’d give the young guys advice about life “stay in school (and other things)” and it used to happen a lot. “He’d be like a bartender; I thought it was pretty cool. They knew he was a serious guy; they looked at him as kind of a father figure. As time went by, I saw it quite a bit
it seems they all appreciated it.”
Nicola, the Nick in Nick’s, worked full-time and still ran the store three days a week, Friday to Sunday. Back then, when Frank was a boy, Nick’s served not only pizza but also Italian subs, spaghetti and meatballs and grilled cheese sandwiches.
“The spaghetti and meatballs were a big hit at the time,” Frank notes. But it became too much for his mother, Gilda (pronounced with a soft ‘G’) and they cut back to pizza only. Round and rectangular pizza, to be precise.
And so it remains today, “the way it has been since about 1958 in appearance.” The wooden booths, the old Coke and 7-Up signs and something new, which would be the dozen or so photos of Nick on the wall.
“The space, which was once an apartment, looks “almost the same as when my parents ran it,” Frank says. “People who return to town after years say it’s like coming into a time warp.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Nick’s is one of those rapidly decreasing number of places that still reflects life in Newburyport as it was when Nicola LaBarba arrived from Italy all those years ago.
