Italian Immigrant Hotels
- John Doll
- Apr 2
- 5 min read
Updated: Apr 7
In the early twentieth century, there were small hotels catering to recent Italian immigrants in San Jose. These were clustered around an area now known as Little Italy on the perimeter of downtown. One prominent example was the Hotel Torino at the corner of W. St. John (formerly San Augustine) and Pleasant Streets.
A 1988 California Historic Resources Inventory described the Hotel Torino as a “two-story wood framed structure was originally used as a hotel. The Italianate-style structure was constructed around 1900 and historically functioned as a home for Italian immigrants. Its long, narrow building measures about 35 feet by 40 feet. Featured in a San Jose Mercury article, Henry Puckett recalled that “it was built like an orange crate.”
The hotel occupied the second floor that was divided into seventeen small rooms with “a single light-bulb socket and cord dangle from the ceiling in each of the seventeen rooms strung along a narrow hallway like so many berths in a Pullman car. The toilets—with primitive pull-chains and pump boxed eight feet above the floor—are at both ends of the hallway.” Plunkett described that the rooms were only a place to “hang your hat, sleep and eat.”
The first floor included a restaurant, bar and kitchen with an angled corner entrance served as “kind of social hall for Italian immigrants, serving inexpensive Italian food, providing a bocce ball court and generally serving as a gathering spot for the neighborhood until well into the 1920s.” The former City of San Jose historian, Clyde Arbuckle, wrote that “during the Depression of the 1930s the Torino served great big kettles of ravioli for fifty cents. You could feed a family all day.”
Northern Italian immigrants worked the orchards and picked the fruit and paid a monthly nominal fee for room and board “until they got a wife or citizen papers and settled down.” However, Plunkett noted that there were rumors, but no proof that “there were delights besides those offered by the kitchen.”
At the beginning, the property was known as the Piedmont Hotel in 1911 and the New Progress Hotel in 1913. In 1915 Bartolomeo Vinassa purchased the building and renamed it the Hotel Torino and operated it as an immigrant hotel and restaurant until he died in 1938.
During Prohibition, the San Jose Mercury-Herald reported repeated liquor violations. For instance in 1918, Bartolomeo Vinassa was arrested for supplying liquor to guests but then released under own recognizance only to be later re-arrested later that evening when police returned and confiscated several bottles of wine and arrested him again. According to the newspaper, Vinassa claimed that he was not attempting to evade the laws but acting within his rights as he did not furnish the wine for gain or sell the liquor to anyone. He was fined $100.
Little else has been reported about Bartolomeo Vinassa other than he brought his family from Italy to San Jose in 1903. He started out as a cook at the La Molle House, a building still standing at San Pedro and Santa Clara Streets. In Italy, he married Carolina Moglia Vinassa. They had three children: Gemma, Victoria and Gene, one-time San Jose Mercury-Herald sports editor. His brother, Eugene, at one point, managed the nearby St. Charles and Costa hotels.
On July 19, 1938, at the age of 74, Bartolomeo became despondent “over a long illness” and shot himself at his home at 277 San Augustine Street. As recounted by the Mercury-Herald, two weeks after Bartolomeo’s death, “despondency caused by brooding over the recent suicide of an old friend was believed to responsible for the suicide by hanging of Joseph Conti in the garage at his home at 141 Santa Teresa Street.” Bartolomeo and Joseph had been boys together in the same village, Moncucco, in Italy and had been friends ever since.
His daughter, Victoria, re-opened the Hotel Torino in 1943 and she operated the premises until 1957. The Hotel Torino was a popular restaurant in the 1940s until sometime in the 1950s. The San Jose Mercury posted weekly advertisements for her Italian suppers. Victoria owned and managed the Torino Hotel until she sold the place in 1957. Victoria died in 1973 at the age of seventy-four. Her mother, Carolina, was sister to my great grandmother, Angela Caterina. I knew her as Aunt Victoria.
By 1959, the hotel was abandoned. Henry Puckett purchased the building in 1960 and re-opened it as Henry’s Hi-Life. It still remains as an on-going restaurant. Calling Henry’s “San Jose’s most-loved steakhouse,” the San Jose Spotlight asserts that “there is a sense that the style and atmosphere have not changed much since Henry Puckett founded the place more than 60 years ago. There is no pretense: the bar area, which also serves as the waiting room, has walls covered with bits of framed nostalgia, from a portrait of Henry himself to the $1 receipt he paid for his first liquor license…”
The Hotel Torino is the sole survivor of the immigrant hotels that were built in the “Little Italy” neighborhood. The aforementioned St. Charles Hotel at 41 Market Street and the Costa Hotel at 119 Market Street as well as others, notably the Genova, the Swiss and the New York Exchange all on Market Street, served the immigrant community until they were deemed blighted properties.
The Costa Hotel was remembered for its well-known Fior d’Italia restaurant as it advertised its “booths for ladies.” Next door was the Italian Benevolent Society Hall, a prominent meeting place for Italians around the turn of the century.
The St. Charles was demolished and replaced by a parking lot in the late 1940s, while the Costa and the Italian Benevolent Society Hall were razed in 1960 to make way for newer structures: the Community Bank building and the Market Street and San Pedro Square parking garage.
Although not built as an immigrant hotel, another nearby building is 175 W. Saint John Street. Thomas Fallon, then mayor, built his personal residence in 1855 after hoisting the American flag over San Jose and stayed there until 1876.
The residence was reportedly vacant until 1900 when it was remodeled as the Italia Hotel catering to Italian immigrants. In the San Jose Mercury, Leonard McKay reminisced that the owners, Al Franzino and Al Visca, affectionately were known as “Big Al” and “Little Al.” Little Al would rise at 3:30 every morning and make the ravioli, while Big Al served polenta.
Trying to drum up business, Big Al changed the name to Italian Cellar and brought in opera singers every Saturday night.
Sometime around 1960, the business was sold to Manny Peirera and the establishment was then known as Manny’s Cellar. McKay noted that “made a great success of it. Manny was a good operator, greeted everyone by name, and managed to get a remarkable turnover of seats.” Manny’s Cellar was a very well-known downtown lunch spot offering excellent food and stiff drinks for decades. Manny Peirera ran the restaurant while Tom Taylor managed the bar.
By 1990, the building was in sad shape. The City bought the property, restored the building to its original use as the Fallon House and opened in 1994 as a museum.
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