History
Soot, salt and a hundred years
Brooklyn pizza begins in 1924, when a man left a job at Lombardi’s and opened his own place on Neptune Avenue. The line from that coal oven to the wood-fired revival, with the dates attached.
Issue 01 · Brooklyn, New York
Brooklyn,one oven
at a time.
Stories about blistered crusts, old brick ovens, corner slice counters and the neighborhoods that built them — reported from archives, documents and the record of who was actually there.
The feature
Ovens · The long read
The Oven
Two brick ovens shook themselves to pieces on the streets of New York before the third one worked. The fix was not better masonry — it was a double-walled vault of insulated 12-gauge steel wrapped around a brick hearth.
This address held that story in 2009. The original paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and it is back where it started, with an explanation of why the design was the only one that could work.
Brooklyn by neighborhood
Red Hook
Cut off by an expressway, kept cheap by the cut, and full of equipment nobody could afford to remove.
Carroll Gardens
Deep front gardens, a Court Street spine, and two pizzerias three blocks apart with opposite theories of the job.
Williamsburg & Greenpoint
Former factories with usable flues. The wood-fired revival happened here for reasons that were mostly architectural.
Bushwick
A cinder-block room with a wood oven in a neighborhood with no restaurant economy. It worked, and everything changed.
Latest
Ovens
Coal, wood, gas and deck
Four ways to get heat into dough. Why New York stopped permitting coal, why the revival ran on wood, and how to tell from a crust which oven made it.
Neighborhoods
Red Hook and the road that cut it off
An elevated expressway severed Red Hook from the rest of Brooklyn, kept it cheap for fifty years, and left a century-old bread oven sealed behind a wall on Hamilton Avenue.
Pizza
The Brooklyn pie, explained
Slice, Neapolitan, Sicilian, grandma, bar pie. What physically separates them, and why the sauce sits on top of the cheese on a Spumoni Gardens square.
History
Pizza Moto: a Brooklyn history
A hand-built oven for someone else’s wedding in 2008, seven years of markets, seven years under an expressway, and a catering company still working today.
Neighborhoods
The wood-fired north
Williamsburg and Greenpoint got the wood ovens first because that is where the chimneys were. Then, in 2026, one of the rooms that started it quietly became a bar.
History
The Brooklyn Flea
A schoolyard on Lafayette Avenue, a hundred vendors, and a model that let a cook test an idea without signing a fifteen-year lease. Why Smorgasburg had to be invented.
Pizza
The Dough
Wild yeast off the skin of a local apple, three days in the cold, and a rim that blisters before it burns. Why a long ferment is the only way to brown in ninety seconds.
From the archive
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The citation record
What the press wrote
The old site’s press page had two links on it and the words CLICK HERE twice. Fifteen years on, one of those links is the only surviving proof that a piece of coverage existed at all.
We rebuilt the record: nine pieces between 2008 and 2023, what each establishes, and which ones have since rotted off the web.
The arrangement
What this site is,
and is not
Between 2008 and 2011 this domain belonged to Pizza Moto, a mobile wood-fired pizza operation working the Brooklyn Flea. That business still trades — as a catering company, at pizzamoto.com.
This is not that company’s website. It is an editorial project about Brooklyn pizza, published on the old address, which restores the original pages where the text survived and says so where it did not. Nothing here is written from a visit; everything is built from documents and attributed.
pizzamotobklyn.com · 1 September 2009
“This oven is a vast departure from its more traditional predecessors. It has a masonry hearth that soaks up the heat of the fire to produce thin crispy bubbly crusts, but instead of the heavy fragile brick and mortar enclosure, this oven is made from a double walled vault of insulated 12 gauge diamond plate steel!”
Oven notes
Ovens
Surf Report
The strangest page on the old site was three weather widgets in a row. It was also the most practical thing on it — wind, rain and wet wood decide what a mobile oven can do.
Pizza
The Ingredients
A Margherita has four things on it, which is the whole difficulty. Why the grana and the oil go on after the bake, and never before.
Neighborhoods
Four walks
Not a ranking. Four short routes, each built around one thing it will teach you — including the three blocks where you can feel a highway change a neighborhood.
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