Gary Bimonte, the face of Pepe’s pizza restaurants for his generation of the nearly century-old New Haven pizza dynasty,died April 7 of a heart attack. It was Bimonte’s grandfather, Frank Pepe, who started the business on New Haven’s Wooster Street in 1925.

By the 1950s, Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, which now regularly tops rankings of the country’s best pizza, was such an institution that when half of Wooster Street was bulldozed to build a highway, the other half was spared largely due to the importance of the pizza restaurants there.