Nina Balducci

Mrs. Balducci, who infused Balducci’s with a sense of style and stabilized the family during an operatic public battle over ownership of what would become a multimillion-dollar business, died on April 12 2020 at her home in East Williston, N.Y., on Long Island. She was 91. Her niece Emily Balducci said the cause was colon cancer. Nina Marie D’Amelio was born on July 2, 1928, on Long Island to Michael and Marta D’Amelio. Her father was a stonemason, and mother was a couture fashion designer who instilled in Nina and her sister, Chris, a love of fashion and music. Nina D’Amelio graduated from Simmons College in Boston in 1949 with a degree in business and retail and began working in high-end women’s boutiques on Long Island. she met Andrew Balducci, a World War II veteran, in 1952. Mr. Balducci’s father, Louis, an immigrant from the Southern Italian city of Bari, began his career selling fruit and vegetables from a rented pushcart in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 1918. He opened a storefront grocery at Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street in Manhattan in 1946, and Andrew, whom everyone called Andy, went to work for him. Shortly after he married, Andy Balducci left the store for a job at his father-in-law’s business on Long Island, North Shore Mason Supply Corp., in Great Neck. Nina Balducci worked there, too, part-time. The couple went back to the market in 1968. Four years later, they moved it into a 5,000-square-foot store across the street at Avenue of the Americas and Ninth Street. As the store’s popularity grew, so did a rift over control among her husband and his two siblings. Andy and Nina Balducci eventually bought out his sister Grace and her husband, Joe Doria, who left the business with his wife to open Grace’s Marketplace on the Upper East Side in 1985. In 1999, the Balduccis sold their store to Sutton Place Gourmet, a Maryland-based company, for $26.5 million. Mrs. Balducci is survived by two children, Andrea and Marta Balducci; six grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. Her husband died at 92 in 2018. A daughter, Maria Murphy, who was called Ria, died of lung cancer in 2006, and another daughter, Dena Balducci, died in a car accident in 1991.