The little green shack at the corner of 4th and High Street in Elizabeth stands silent now. After 107 years of serving up the finest Italian ice in New Jersey, DiCosmo’s has closed its doors for the final time, and the bulldozers are coming. For those of us whose families emigrated from the same hillside villages of southern Italy, this isn’t just the end of a business—it’s the closing of a chapter in our shared American story.

My family, the La Vecchias and the Cornacchios, arrived in Elizabeth from Vallata, Italy, in the late 1950s, part of that second great wave of Italian immigration that transformed American cities. We came seeking opportunity, carrying nothing but hope and the recipes of our ancestors.