BUSINESS HISTORY
WATERTOWN DAILY TIMES ARCHIVES
The original Morgia’s Restaurant at 603 W. Prospect St., a popular local hangout known for its quality Italian food and vibrant conversations, burned down in 1956. It re-opened nine months later, but closed permanently in 1978. The family’s legacy lives on today through Morgia’s Pasta, a family-run business in Watertown.
A famed watering hole
n Morgia’s Restaurant: Where ‘everyone went’ for food, conversation By LEAH BULETTI
R NNY Business
elax and enjoy the finest Italian American foods—in Northern New York’s Most Modern Restaurant” read the headline of a full-page ad in the Watertown Daily Times heralding the re-opening of the famed Morgia’s Restaurant in Oct. 1956. Nine months prior, Morgia’s Restaurant, a popular spot for family dinners, wedding receptions, cocktails and dancing for 44 years, had burned to the ground on the bitterly cold night of Jan. 21, 1956. The restaurant’s founders, Cataldo Morgia, his wife, the former Ida Spaziani, and their granddaughter, nine-year-old Barbara J. Dupee, narrowly escaped the blaze that killed a family dog and demolished nearly all of the restaurant’s contents. Mr. Morgia founded the original restaurant, at 603 W. Prospect St., in 1934, on the site of what was previously a grocery store and meat market operated by his
60 |
NNY Business | July 2013
family. Mr. Morgia and his wife, both born in Italy, previously owned and operated the Central House boarding establishment, a restaurant and grocery store at 956 W. Main St., which they discontinued in 1918. The decision to open a restaurant was allegedly the result of the stack of unpaid bills owed to the store owners during the Great Depression accumulating to the point that Mr. Morgia and his son gathered them up one day, burned them in the furnace and decided to get into a different business—sowing the seeds of what would become one of Watertown’s most well-known gathering places. “It was part of growing up in Watertown,” Anthony C. Malara, a CBS Television executive, said of the original Morgia’s in a July 24, 1987 article in the Watertown Daily Times. Morgia’s was “the first singles bar in Watertown,” Mr. Malara added in the article. “It was really the place everybody went.” A Watertown attorney, John D. Stenard, agreed with this assessment of the restaurant’s popularity, calling it a “great hang
out for people 18 to 22” in the 1987 article and fondly recalling the days during the Great Depression when heaping plates of spaghetti were just 35 cents. An apartment attached to the new restaurant housed Mr. Morgia and his wife, who worked in the kitchen. Mr. Morgia passed away in 1957 and Mrs. Morgia in 1969. For several years before and after their deaths, the restaurant was run by three of the couple’s sons—Silverio, Angelo and Theodore—who incorporated the business under the name Morgia’s Inc. when Cataldo Morgia retired in 1955. Silverio Morgia, who died in 1999, was president. While Morgia’s last decade of operation was filled with characteristic revelry and family communion, notably “Morgia’s After Dark” where Watertown residents spent late Friday nights eating pizza and dancing to the sounds of Moon Dance, it was not to be for very long. In 1977, George Sarkisian of Binghamton purchased the interest of the late Frank Morgia, another brother who had been