Placido Mori, South Village Restaurateur to Opera Stars and Architects

The growth of the Italian-American community in the South Village in the late 19th and early 20th centuries can often be traced through the rise of Italian restaurants in the neighborhood and their acceptance with a wider audience beyond its borders. One of the leading restaurant owners of that period, from its earliest days through the 1920s, was Placido Mori.

Mori arrived in New York City from Florence, Italy, in 1883 and founded his eponymous establishment the following year at 144 Bleecker Street, starting as “a small bar and eating place” according to The New York Times. The “picturesque resort” he built and the bohemian atmosphere he cultivated was a model for Italian restaurants throughout the neighborhood, appealing to diners who craved a very particular perspective of Italy with their meals. Owners also “insisted on a homelike atmosphere for their restaurants to exploit the image of the ‘one-family trattoria, where mama cooked, papa served, one always found homemade red wine served in coffee cups and homely advice on how to bear life’s burden,” noted Simone Cinotto in The Italian American Table. 

The popularity of Mori’s grew throughout the decades, as “many distinguished New Yorkers, attracted by the Italian cooking and the hospitality of the management,” became regular patrons, the Times noted. One such diner was famed opera star Enrico Caruso, often seen as the celebrity most closely linked with the immigrant Italian character of the day. “His Italian exuberance was as renowned as his talent, wealth, and intimacy with the city’s artistic, economic, and political elites,” Cinotto wrote. The singer’s popularity further contributed to the growth of Italian restaurants in the first decades of the 20th century. He dined at Mori’s often to help attract customers, and most likely invested in the restaurant as well.

In 1920, Mori expanded by purchasing 146 Bleecker Street next door (as well as a home at 21 Washington Square North). Around the same time, he became friends with Raymond Hood, then a 40-year-old still-novice architect a few years away from his greatest achievements, including the American Radiator Building in Midtown (1926) and Rockefeller Center (1932-1940), the McGraw Hill Building (1930), and the Daily News Building (1931), among his many iconic New York City landmarks. The restaurateur “ let him have his meals on the cuff when his pocket proved empty,” wrote Hood biographer Walter H. Kilham, Jr. “Mori had picked him as a winner. As he said at the time, ‘He must be a genius — he eats so much.’”

Mori gave Hood the job of combining the Bleecker Street row houses, designing a new facade, and adding a row of Doric columns across the ground floor, imitation Federal lintels, and a setback penthouse studio, per historian Christopher Gray. The restaurateur also let him live in a small apartment on the site. Every Friday, according to Kilham, the “Four Hour Lunch Club” met there, eventually becoming an institution among architects, drawing in regulars Hood, Joseph Urban, Ely Jacques Kahn, and Ralph Walker, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright, artist Tony Sarg, and other guests.

Mori passed away on July 17, 1927, with funeral services held three days later at St. Joseph’s Church on Sixth Avenue and Washington Place; his gravesite in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx features an elegant marker designed by his “house architect” Hood and Charles Keck. The restaurant — famously photographed in 1935 as part of Berenice Abbott’s “Changing New York” — survived Prohibition and the Great Depression, but ultimately succumbed to bankruptcy in January 1938.