Has Angelo’s become too big for Bella Vista?

South Ninth Street has long been a food destination, particularly the stretch between South Street and Passyunk Avenue. On weekends, its sidewalks are swarmed with locals and out-of-towners alike shopping for groceries in the Italian Market, hoping to snag a seat at Mawn, or buying a slice or a sandwich to-go from Nannie Franco’s, Lorenzo’s, or George’s.

No other Ninth Street institution, however, commands lines like Angelo’s Pizzeria, which has risen to national (perhaps international) renown since it opened in 2019, with plaudits from the New York Times, the New Yorker, Bon Appetit, and Barstool Sports. Wednesday through Sunday, customers start queuing up before it opens at 11 a.m., determined to get a taste of cheesesteaks, hoagies, and pizza crafted by bread-savant owner Danny DiGiampietro, who encourages employees to cook “like it’s your mother’s last meal on earth.” The Angelo’s line ebbs and flows, often wrapping around the corner of Fitzwater Street.

The crowd doesn’t disperse after they’ve placed their orders. Most folks hang around outside to wait for their food — Angelo’s is a takeout shop set up in a 17-foot-wide rowhouse. It has no seating or public bathrooms, and there’s hardly room for more than a handful of people to wait inside by the counter.

A sign that’s been posted on Angelo’s door for over a year reads: “Please be respectful of our neighbors and the neighborhood and do not sit on other peoples [sic] steps. Thank you!!!!” In spite of this, plenty of customers choose to eat right then and there: on the hood of their cars, on nearby stoops, in parks, or in parking lots.

Some might romanticize this experience as a South Philly ritual, but not all neighbors agree.

A contingent of Bella Vistans are fed up with the crush of Angelo’s customers — one neighbor estimates it to be 100 to 300 people a day — that descends on their neighborhood day in and day out. They cite an influx of trash, noise, blocked streets, and rowdy patrons who relieve themselves in the small residential side streets around the pizza shop.

Tensions are set to come to a head at a community meeting this week at the nearby Palumbo Recreation Center. City Councilmember Mark Squilla said he has been working with Angelo’s for about six months on addressing neighbors’ issues, but “we’re hoping to be able to get more concerns addressed through this following meeting.”

“I’ve gotten maybe a dozen neighbors at least emailing me separately about how they can’t get their kids to Palumbo Rec Center safely because there are cars obstructing the ADA ramps,” said Bella Vista Neighbors Association board president Eugene Desyatnik, who lives around the corner from Angelo’s. Some neighbors closer to the shop have reported property damage to their stoops and cellar doors, he said.

Since a prior community meeting Squilla held in the fall, some changes have been made. The city installed several plastic bollards at each corner of the intersection at Ninth and Fitzwater to deter cars from parking illegally. They’re not aesthetically pleasing or 100% effective, but they have cut down on cars blocking the crosswalks, Desyatnik said.

Desyatnik has explored more permanent traffic solutions — including bike corrals and planters — but they’re pricier to install and require ongoing maintenance and insurance. That would necessitate even more fundraising on top of what BVNA already does; the association tries to raise about $25,000 annually to pay for a monthly, neighborhood-wide sidewalk sweeping.

Squilla said the city is looking at adding a loading zone nearby to allow traffic to flow even as the shop receives deliveries, and that it has asked Angelo’s to look into a pizza box recycler that could be stationed in the neighborhood.

One potential solution — adding seating to the upstairs space at Angelo’s — would likely require a zoning variance, Squilla said. That would be a challenge in itself due to the lengthy process and various approvals required, including the community’s. “When people are angry, it’s hard to get support for things,” Squilla said.

Evan Lechtman and Peter Kelsen, two attorneys representing Angelo’s, said that the shop’s ownership “understands and is aware of certain concerns raised by some neighbors” and has worked to address whatever concerns have been brought to their attention to the extent possible. Angelo’s has placed additional trash cans outside and empties them throughout the day. DiGiampietro has asked the shop’s trash hauler to change which street and what time it picks up in order to accommodate neighbors’ requests.

“Angelo’s strives to be a great community partner and is always willing to engage in productive conversations with its neighbors,” Lechtman and Kelsen said in a statement, adding the business is working with Squilla’s office to respond to concerns.

Angelo’s has been making big-picture moves that both Squilla and Angelo’s attorneys point to as efforts to cut down on foot traffic to the Ninth Street shop. The shop opened a ghost kitchen in North Philly last October, partnering with UberEats to deliver in a 3- to 5-mile radius of 13th and Girard. (Its delivery cheesesteaks are said to hold up quite well.) DiGiampietro has also taken over the former Conshohocken Italian Bakery to bake bread for the ghost kitchen as well as Uncle Gus’ Steaks, an Angelo’s-affiliated cheesesteak supergroup stall in the Reading Terminal; he hopes to open a retail outpost in the Montco suburb and possibly elsewhere.

Squilla said that while some Bella Vista residents have been appreciative of the efforts made thus far, “there’s some that are still very upset, because not everything has been accomplished... Hopefully we’ll get to that point where both sides [can] live harmoniously.”

Desyatnik sees irony in Angelo’s predicament. It’s celebrated far and wide, yet somewhat unwelcome at home. “To summarize it in one sentence, it’s a victim of its own success,” he said.

At this point, even the line has been lionized, as in a recent Philadelphia Magazine story: Waiting has become part of the experience.

“That’s something that’s kind of in [Angelo’s] culture now,” said Bella Vista resident John McKenzie, who helped facilitate the first community meeting.

“People come here thinking, ‘Oh, we know we’ve got to wait for 45 minutes, but we’re just going to hang out. We’re going to listen to music in our car. We’re going to have a beer,’” he said. “It’s a party atmosphere, like a carnival-type thing.”

McKenzie lives on one of most tucked-away of Bella Vista’s small side streets, but he said people peeing outside his house is a weekly occurrence. “It’s very easy for them to find this little secluded area as a place to use the bathroom,” he said. It’s what prompted him to reach out to Squilla, who arranged a meeting in November for residents to air their grievances.

“There were neighbors that lived right there [on the 700 block of South Ninth] saying, ‘My sidewalk, my stoop, my space is being used as this restaurant’s,’” McKenzie recalled. “The people that are ground zero, I feel really bad for them.”

Even farther-afield neighbors feel the effects. “There’s people parked everywhere. There’s people beeping their horn because people are blocking stuff,” McKenzie said, acknowledging the improvement the city’s delineator posts have made in clearing the crosswalks.

But it doesn’t solve the traffic headache completely: Sysco delivery trucks routinely block Fitzwater Street on days Angelo’s is open, a widely shared complaint. “They’ll put their cone up and park there for like 45 minutes,” McKenzie said. He’s asked the Philadelphia Parking Authority to intervene before but was told the agency can’t ticket the truck unless it’s unattended.

Some fear the parking situation will get worse once the Rite-Aid that’s limping along at Ninth and Catharine closes; developer Ori Feibush owns the property, and they’re betting that it will be converted into apartments. The Rite Aid’s parking lot currently serves as de facto Angelo’s parking, and if it’s gone or designated for tenants, spots are bound to get even tighter.

Joel Palmer lives just north of Angelo’s and said he has seen a noticeable surge in the trash that the rec center has to collect — “I’ll say it’s two-thirds coming from Angelo’s,” he said — plus its attendant effects. “What [customers] don’t pick up is the pizza pie crust, the bits and pieces of food that they drop,” Palmer said. “That’s just food for the rats.”

Palmer recognizes that common decency isn’t enforceable. “Catching people littering in Philadelphia? Good luck with that,” he said. But he points to other restaurants in the neighborhood as models of stewardship, including the Saloon and Angelo’s predecessor, Sarcone’s Deli. (DiGiampetro, Angelo’s owner, is married to one of Louis Sarcone Sr.’s granddaughters.) “People would go in, go out. It was never crowded. There were no lines,” Palmer said.

Palmer plans to attend the meeting to hear what solutions Angelo’s might offer to troubled neighbors. “It’s really not up to us to fix the problem for them. It’s up to them to say, ‘Oops, we put our foot through a Rembrandt here. We’ll see what we can do to fix it.’”

Many neighbors aren’t anti-Angelo’s. “I want them to do well,” said McKenzie, who likes the pizza. “I just wish that they were like Jim’s Steaks down on South Street, where it is a business area, or Pat’s and Geno’s. This is rowhouses,” he said. “This pizza place in this rowhouse has now become a huge business around other rowhouses.”

Some neighbors indicated they’d be happy if Angelo’s made an effort to be part of the broader neighborhood — contributing to the sidewalk-sweeping fund, picking up trash from the rec center, or attending community cleanup days. Desyatnik said Angelo’s might take a page from John’s Water Ice, which donates water ice to park cleanups. (The Bella Vista Neighbors Association hasn’t had direct contact with Angelo’s, he said.)

Peter Kelsen, Angelo’s attorney, said that the restaurant “frequently provides free food in support of community and charitable events and groups. I do not have the specifics but can tell you that this has been their way of giving back to the community both local and beyond.”

Others hope some leverage might be gained in pressing on the variance granted to 736 S. Ninth St. (Angelo’s current address) in 2007, when Sarcone’s Deli first moved in. A Bella Vista community organization approved the variance request at the time after stipulating the deli operate between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. and that there be “no grilling” on premises. Others still would like to see Angelo’s relocate entirely, to a more commercially dense corridor.

McKenzie hopes the tenor of this week’s meeting, which Kelsen and an Angelo’s representative will attend, is constructive. “I don’t want to be negative,” he said. “I just want to get the problems out there — which I think we know — and then get solutions to that.”

In the meantime, the crew at Angelo’s will continue on, picking off the line one customer a time. On a recent Friday afternoon, clusters of people lingered on every corner of Ninth and Fitzwater, with several tucking into cheesesteaks from a perch on the concrete curb at the base of Palumbo’s chain-link fence. The four trash cans by Angelo’s — three around the southwest corner, one on the southeast — had plenty of room left.

Fitzwater was closed to traffic west of Ninth as an 18-wheeler stopped to unload food deliveries to the pizzeria. A postman who’s been working this beat for 22 years paused on his route to comment. “It’s all tourists,” he said of the line, which had swelled to over a dozen people. “It’s bordering on the ridiculous side.”

On a walk down Ninth, there was a gaggle of young women eating on the steps of the rowhouse two doors down from Angelo’s. In the Rite Aid parking lot, a couple ate pizza out of their trunk as two college-age kids stashed 30 sandwiches in a cooler in the back of their car.

The scene is “kind of iconic,” grants Desyatnik. “People in their sports gear just standing around, the skyline in the background, eating off their hoods — there’s something to it.

“We’re proud of our neighborhood being featured in the national food scene,” he said. “That’s not to be missed in all of this. We just have to make it work for everybody.”

Staff writer Jake Blumgart contributed reporting to this article.