The airiest tiramisu. The foamiest cappuccino. Preferably paired. Preferably at a sidewalk table where the waitress makes a point of leaving you alone and you can while away the afternoon like a European.
Based on that scant evidence alone, Little Italy, the Bronx edition, is alive and well. Truncated, not entirely what it once was? Maybe so. Still, should you stroll Arthur Avenue from the Fordham University campus down just five blocks, as far as the D’Auria-Murphy Triangle, a kind of pocket park with a bust of Christopher Columbus in the middle of it, there’s a lot of head-turning involved, not just for the sake of the chockablock eateries and sidewalk dining, but the piled-high bakeries, the pastry shops, the fish market where sloshing buckets of reeking leftovers were being dragged in plastic buckets out curbside, and on to the butcher with, say what you will, what appeared to be a stack of pink, freshly skinned rabbits in the window.
As for the bars, this was homecoming weekend — the doors were flung wide, the interiors were at a dull roar, and the drinkers outstripped capacity to the point of rendering sidewalks nearly impassable.
But this is no travelogue. Rather, a question arises, should you be a thoughtful sort, and more to the point, a parent. What’s preferable, college in stimulating, citified surroundings, in which you hope all the action isn’t a distraction, or college somewhere quaint, or bucolic, or just small, on the theory that the calm is conducive to cracking the books?
As someone who more or less lived both, starting at Boston U., an urban non-campus of concrete buildings bisected by the transit system’s Green Line, then dropping out of there and finishing later at Beloit College in south-central Wisconsin, enrollment a mere 1,100, I’ve long thought it a puzzlement.
And then Pugsley Pizza put me over the edge. Hidden away in a residential section of row houses, weirdly set back from the street like a garden center or a junk dealer, with a crazy quilt of a broken-tile floor that in part spells out the joint’s approximate birth date (1985), decades of graffiti scrawl covering one entire dining alcove wall, a gong that’s banged with each new pie from the oven, oregano and garlic salt front and center in repurposed Gatorade bottles, memorabilia and yellowed newspaper clippings and thumbtacked photos of patrons past — it defines funky.
Its popularity among Fordham students is a no-brainer. Just one more example of how “interesting things,” busyness, the odd and the unexpected, places marked by a discernible difference from the norm, will never fail to get the synapses firing.
The pizza’s pretty good, too.