By Albert Amateau
Clare Sabbatino, a lifelong Village resident and a teacher in the Bronxville school system for 40 years, died in her Waverly Place home on March 23 at age 91.
“She was devoted to music all her life, even though she didn’t play an instrument, and in her will she endowed a new pipe organ for St. Joseph’s Church [on Sixth Ave.],” said Parnell O’Connell, a longtime family friend.
Clare Sabbatino, the youngest of four children, was born Nov. 5, 1918, to Frank and Catherine Sabbatino and baptized at St. Anthony’s Church, on Sullivan St. Her father was a harpist who traveled with an opera company that toured the East Coast and Latin America and settled his family on Spring St. in the South Village.
Clare went to public elementary school on Sixth Ave. at Dominick St., in a building that is now home to Chelsea Campus High School. She went to junior high school at P.S. 3 on Hudson St., then attended Washington Irving High School. She earned a bachelor’s degree from New York University, and went on to Teacher’s College at Columbia University where she earned her master’s in 1942.
She taught in the New York City public school system for several years before teaching in Bronxville, commuting all the while from her Village home. She retired in 1982.
“She was very close to her brother, Dr. Joseph Sabbatino, a cardiologist at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and after she retired she worked in his private practice office,” O’Connell said. Her brother died in January 1998.
“She was the last of the family,” O’Connell said. “Her sister Helen died in 1968 and her sister Teresa died in 2001,” he said. Another sister died very young.
Perazzo Funeral Home, on Bleecker St., was in charge of arrangements. The funeral was at St. Joseph’s Church on March 26 and burial was in Calvary Cemetery in Queens.
