At Mangialardo and Sons (1317 Pennsylvania Ave. SE) you'll often see police cruisers, firetrucks and ambulances double-parked on the street out front during lunchtime. Inside the shop, there's usually a standing crowd of people waiting with numbered tickets in their hands: construction crews in blue hard hats, painters in speckled pants and Smithsonian employees in rumpled khakis. You might also see Tom Lindberg, a Southeast resident who works on D.C. Water's D.C. Clean Rivers Project, hovering in the back, listening for his number. "The sandwiches remind me of home," Tom says. "This [is] a little taste of the Italian neighborhood in Boston - without the gold chains."
Mangialardo's, which has been in business for more than 60 years, serves some of the most honest hard-roll sandwiches in Washington. The large, fresh creations - Italian cold cuts, hot peppers and oils packed in hard or soft bread rolls - inspire devotion. The shop's customers are almost exclusively nearby workers and residents, thanks to its limited hours (weekdays from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.).
The shop is in a major traffic corridor that, according to some, is also the southernmost boundary of Hill East, a nebulously defined neighborhood flanked by Capitol Hill and the Anacostia River. As the city's march of redevelopment presses forward, pockets of Hill East are undergoing transformation, with renovated homes, modern condo and apartment buildings, and trendy businesses replacing older homes and empty lots. Yet even as the gentrification continues, Mangialardo's is committed to maintaining
the way things were.
"I don't think I worry, but, I mean, I have to work, so you just gotta keep doing things the same way," says Tony Mangialardo, 52, the third-generation owner of the sandwich shop. "We don't change anything, you know. I make the subs the same way my dad started doing it. ... I take care of the customers." Adding to the old fangled charm of the shop is that, on any given day, you'll see at least one of Tony's four adult children taking orders or wrapping sandwiches in paper. There's no seating, so there's always a steady drift of customers in and out.
Mangialardo's optimism is admirable, since his shop is on a street poised for considerable redevelopment. Two doors down, a property has been gutted and fenced off for more than a year. Developers plan to build office space above ground-floor retail that might include a grocery store and restaurant. Across the street, Fanatix Nails & Spa opened in April, and Jade Fitness gym and juice bar debuted signage for its grand opening in September. But Mangialardo says he doesn't notice. "I don't ever look out the window," he says. "My older children are working their way through school, and they have ideas. One of the scenarios is they get a real job after college, [stay] there for 20 years, get retirement, and come back, and I'll be fading away, and they might make [this] into a real good business. You never know."
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