The South Side — Where Sausage Was Sacred

1601 South Union Street

There is a building on South Union Street that has been selling Italian sausage since 1912. Not since the 1910s. Since 1912 — the specific year, the specific address, the specific family. Graziano Brothers is not a restaurant that trades on nostalgia. It is a grocery store, a meat counter, and a sandwich shop that has occupied the same spot for over a century because what it does has never gone out of style.

Frank and Louis Graziano were Calabrese immigrants — brothers from the southern tip of Italy who arrived in Des Moines at the turn of the twentieth century and did what Italian immigrants everywhere did: they opened a grocery. The location they chose, South Union Street, was already becoming the center of what would be known as Little Italy.

The sausage came first. Then the meats, the cheeses, the olive oils, the pastas. Graziano Brothers became the place where the South Side shopped, and shopping at Graziano's was not a transaction — it was a social event. You went for the sausage and stayed for the conversation.

"On the South Side, food was never just food. It was how you said hello, how you said I love you, and how you said goodbye."

The Families Who Fed Des Moines

The Grazianos were not alone. The South Side of Des Moines was home to dozens of Italian families who built businesses that became institutions. Baratta's Restaurant, a south side staple for over 50 years, served traditional Italian-American food with the kind of generous portions that made dieting impossible and happiness inevitable.

And then there was Babe.

Alphonse "Babe" Bisignano was born in 1913 and grew up on the South Side. His early life was, by all accounts, colorful — a polite way of saying that Babe knew people, and people knew Babe, and not all of those people were in the grocery business. But what Babe built with his restaurant was legitimate, beloved, and legendary. Babe's Restaurant became a Des Moines institution — the kind of place where governors ate alongside truck drivers, where the walls were covered in photographs of everyone who mattered and quite a few who didn't, and where Babe himself held court like a benevolent king of the South Side.

He passed away on April 18, 2005, and Des Moines lost something it has never fully replaced: a character. Not a personality — Des Moines has plenty of those. A character. The kind of person who could not exist anywhere else, because he was made by this specific place, this specific neighborhood, this specific combination of Italian pride and Iowa stubbornness.

Between Prohibition and Kennedy

The South Side Italians did not limit themselves to groceries and restaurants. Between Prohibition and the 1960s, they dominated the club and restaurant businesses across Des Moines. This was partly entrepreneurial talent, partly cultural confidence, and partly the simple fact that Italians understood hospitality in a way that the Scandinavian and German families who made up most of Iowa's population did not.

The clubs they ran became the places where Des Moines went on Saturday night. Not the East Village — that neighborhood wouldn't find its identity for another half century. The South Side. That is where the music was, where the food was, where the energy was.

The Legacy That Simmers

The Italian-American Cultural Center of Iowa is currently relocating from its longtime home on the South Side — a move that represents both loss and evolution. The old neighborhood is changing, as all neighborhoods do. But the culture is not disappearing. It is spreading.

The Italian American Heritage Festival of Iowa draws thousands every year. Graziano Brothers still sells sausage at 1601 South Union Street. Baratta's still serves plates that could feed a family of four to a single hungry customer.

The South Side taught Des Moines something that the rest of the city is still learning: that the best things in life are made by hand, served with generosity, and shared with people you love. That lesson started with sausage. It ended up being about everything.