"Guvalade" will be presented at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Egg´erts Crossing Village Community Room, 175 Johnson Ave.
By Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
For Frederick Olessi, the Eldridge Park of his youth in the 1930s and 1940s remains a mythical place, peopled by characters such as Guvalade Iorio, Barney and Jean, and Mrs. Blair.
On Saturday night, Mr. Olessi will share those memories in “Guvalade,” his poetic memoir written 40 years ago and later transformed into a play of the same name. The play was first produced in 1997 as part of Lawrence Township’s tricentennial celebration.
The production, which stars six adult narrators and two children, will be performed at 8 p.m. Saturday in the Eggerts Crossing Village Community Room at 175 Johnson Ave.
Mr. Olessi’s grandfather, Anthony Colavita, immigrated to the United States as a teenager and settled in the Eldridge Park neighborhood in the early 1900s. He helped build the Johnson Trolley Co. trolley line and also operated Colavita’s Bar, on the corner of Rolfe and Tulane avenues. The building that housed the bar is now a residence.
”It was a most fabulous place when I was growing up,” Mr. Olessi, 73, said of the Eldridge Park neighborhood and the adjacent Eggerts Crossing neighborhood. “We had just about every ethnic group (living in the neighborhoods). I was blessed by the human richness of these people.”
”Guvalade” took about a month to write, he said, adding that he sat down every morning to work on it. Two images were central to him — Eldridge Park and the play’s namesake, Italian immigrant Guvalade Iorio.
”I was at a point in my life when the memories began to recede and I wanted to preserve them,” he said of the inspiration to write “Guvalade” 40 years ago. “I doubt that I could conjure them up today. I was 8 or 9 or 10 years old (when the events happened).”
One of the memories immortalized in “Guvalade” is the couple, Barney and Jean, who rented a house from Mr. Olessi’s grandfather. The couple did not pay the rent, and Mr. Colavita evicted them from the house.
Barney and Jean had nowhere to go, so they pitched a tent in the Lawrence Township landfill — the spot where the Eggerts Crossing Village development was built in the 1970s. Mr. Olessi and his sister brought them food and water, but after a few days, the couple disappeared. Although he never saw them again, he said, they remained firmly planted in his memory.
Then, there was Mrs. Blair and her friend, Mrs. Reiter, who frequented Colavita’s Bar and Rossi’s Bar, down the street from his grandfather’s bar. Mrs. Blair, who he described as an “Ethiopian beauty,” was rumored to have been the madam of a bordello on Sweets Avenue in Trenton. Mrs. Reiter “looked and sounded like she just got off the boat from Dublin,” he said.
But Mr. Olessi said he was most impressed by Guvalade Iorio. While not a resident of the neighborhood, Mr. Iorio often patronized Colavita’s Bar. He would often dance the tarantella, a lively, whirling traditional Italian dance.
”One day, I was sitting on my front steps,” Mr. Olessi said. “(Mr. Iorio) was a little tipsy. He was dancing the tarantella, and he suddenly stopped. I was 8 or 9 or 10 years old. I saw his shoulders heave. He was crying.”
”I went over to him,” Mr. Olessi continued. “He clasped me to him and gave me a big hug. He said, in Italian, ‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing, little son. It’s Italy.’”
Mr. Iorio first was dancing for joy, but then he was overcome by his memories of the Italy of his youth, Mr. Olessi said. He said he remembered that moment, and he thought it would be good to name the poem for Mr. Iorio and for his own lost youth in Eldridge Park.
”These people are all gone now, they are lost to us,” Mr. Olessi said. “I tried to make them all live in this work. They certainly live on in my memory and in my works.”
Tickets for the event, a fundraiser for the after-school reading and writing programs for children at Eggerts Crossing Village, are $20. Tickets may be purchased by calling the Eggerts Crossing Village office at (609) 883-7111.

