Joseph Gazza, commercial landlord, dies

Joseph Gazza, a child of Depression-era cucumber farmers in Farmingdale who went on to become one of the largest commercial landlords on Long Island, died Feb. 28 in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. He was 93.

The cause was complications of a heart attack, said his oldest son, also named Joseph Gazza.

At its height, Gazza's empire comprised more than 125 commercial and industrial buildings, many clustered around Route 110, none of them beautiful. Gazza built cheap, squat and strong buildings with concrete blocks and rented them to tradesmen and small- to mid-scale manufacturers. He did not dabble in the glass and steel lately in vogue.

"He never did the fancy high-tech offices," said his son, 60, of Quogue. "He never got into that because he did the work himself. He was hands on: overalls in winter, work pants in the summer, with no shirt. You wanted to find him on a job, you looked for a guy in a trench with a shovel."

Gazza's parents were Italian immigrants who owned a small farm on South Main Street in Farmingdale and sold cucumbers to a plant near what is now the Bethpage Golf Course. The farm was foreclosed on when Gazza was 4.

His youth was hardscrabble. He made and sold birdhouses and delivered newspapers to contribute to the family income. He dropped out of high school and drove to California to find work, returning in the early days of World War II to work for the Liberty Aircraft Corp. as a machinist.

There he met his future wife, Dorothy Yanker. She provided the capital and some of the labor for one of his first buildings and was his partner in a parts-production company they ran until after the war's end.

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During rush times at the machine company, he sometimes worked 20 hours at a stretch. The pace eased as he aged but the ethic did not. He had no hobbies to speak of, took few vacations and did not retire until January of this year. "He went to Florida for a month," said his son. "And then he had a heart attack."

On one recent occasion, his son recalled, Gazza told him "Don't do what I did: don't work all the time."

But even when Gazza was in Florida, his son said, "he would tell me he wanted to get back to New York, back to the office, where people would come in to get advice."

Besides his oldest son, Gazza is survived by his wife, 93, of Port Washington; his daughter, Darcy, also of Port Washington; another son, John, of Farmingdale; his sister, Helen Fisher, 92, of Farmingdale; and four grandchildren.

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Mass is Saturday at St. Kilian Roman Catholic Church, 485 Conklin St., Farmingdale, with a private burial to follow.