Click the button below to register to bid virtually or onsite at F&F Pizzeria on July 21 (F&F Pizza Sessions featuring Wylie Dufresne & Sally's Apizza)

John’s of Bleecker Street, the historic pizzeria in Greenwich Village, replaced their classic benches in 2024 and donated two of the orignal benches to Slice Out Hunger. They’ve been a key part of the pizzeria’s identity, with the names of decades worth of customers etched into the wood. Restaurant management put off the repairs as long as possible, but customers had been reporting enough splinters to make the project a priority. The new benches are pretty much identical to the old ones and we're sure they’ll be carved up in a matter of months.

John’s has been passed down from generation to generation through marriages and in-laws. we'd need a flow chart to explain how the current ownership connects back to the founder. Suffice it to say that the pizzeria moved to its current location in 1938, which is when its name changed to John’s Pizzeria. John’s son-in-law Joe Vesce sold the business to his brother Augustine “Chubby” Vesce, whose wife’s sister Kitty (Katherine) married a guy named Rudy Cascone. That’s the guy who made these benches for the main dining room in the late 1950s This is all according to current majority owner Bobby Vittoria.