At 40 Kenmare Street, in the Little Italy of the 1930s, John D’Angelico worked in a shop small enough that visiting musicians could watch the guitars being made. Bucky Pizzarelli remembered the smell of sawdust, the tops being carved, necks being shaped and shelves of wood marked by year and left to age. D’Angelico was usually at the bench: he made only a few dozen instruments a year, and if one didn’t sound right, he would take it back and start again.
Born in New York in 1905 to Neapolitan immigrants, D’Angelico grew up on Mott Street, where his father worked as a tailor. By about nine, he was already helping his great-uncle Raphael Ciani, an Italian luthier with a workshop nearby on Kenmare Street, making the violins and bowlback mandolins familiar to immigrant musicians. Ciani died in 1923, and the eighteen-year-old D’Angelico appears to have taken over the shop.
