Vale Charlie of Charlie’s Pizza

There is very little left of the Footscray that I remember as a child. Growing up on Gordon Street, we were forced to move north when the hospital expanded when I was seven. That side of the street got bulldozed. Years later, the Baptist Church over the street closed down and then got redeveloped as units (my brother and I went to the kindergarten which had been located at the back of the church). The part of Gordon Street north of Ballarat Road, adjacent to our next family home, has changed radically in the past 50 years too. The ammunition factory is now Edgewater, and the Modern Maid stove factory got developed into housing in the mid 1990s. Individual houses have been redeveloped at an accelerating rate as well.

A lot of the businesses are gone too – long established ones. Ted The Toyman (est 1930s) became Ted’s Cycles and closed within the past five years, a victim of land taxes. The shop front is still vacant. Only one of the many longstanding shoe shops (Harry’s Shoes) remains (Kifts and Hicks are now just memories). The shop fronts which were Jim Wong’s Chinese restaurant (a Footscray institution) and Poon’s (an even older Chinese restaurant which recently relocated to Sunshine) remain empty. Il Paesano Pizza closed about 10 years ago when the new owners ran it into the ground, and Domenico’s Pizza changed owners about 6 years ago.

Nor should you get me started on listing all the pubs which have been redeveloped or demolished outright – although the Barkly is the one I most lament, due to time spent there with my dad on our walks to Footscray shopping centre.

It looks like another Footscray institution is likely to be gone now. Charlie’s Pizza has been at the Ballarat Road end of Droop Street since 1974. News dropped on Facebook yesterday that its owner, Charlie Morabito, died a couple of days ago.

I have not eaten in Charlie’s for quite some years, as I have not lived within home delivery range since 1996, and I never felt it quite the sort of place where I would want to dine in. My brother, however, is a regular there, and loves doing a late night steak there, and would chat regularly with Charlie about local community gossip.

Charlie also originates from my mother’s home village, Ferruzano, in Reggio Calabria. This makes him what we would call a Paesano, a fellow villager. Most of the people from Ferruzano (commonly known as Ruzani, much the way people from Melbourne are Melburnians and people from Footscray are Footscrayites) moved to Melbourne after the Second World War, so there are more of us here than there are in Italy.

He was quite a character, with his 1970s disco wog hairstyle, sideburns and moustache, all carefully dyed black, even though he was well into his 80s. He also liked to pretend that he was a decade younger than he was. You can probably surmise why – he still had an eye for the ladies.

He stubbornly stayed there on that corner of Droop Street for half a century, making his pizzas and watching Footscray shape shift into what it is now. He was one of those constants, at a time that everything around him was changing, something which we locals could rely on.

And now he too is gone, and with him, we probably see the end of his popular pizzeria too. Footscray and its community is much the poorer for this.