About
Panagiotis Panagiotatos was born in small village on the Greek island of Kefalonia in 1926. What now has become a trendy tourist destination was a nightmarish place to grow up in the 1920s -1940s. The Mediterranean village was destroyed twice by earthquakes, was the battleground for a bloody civil war, and was occupied by Italians in World War II.
Violent anti-communist hysteria was sweeping his island and in 1955 Panagiotis left Greece to work with his uncles in Rochester, NY. He changed his name to Peter Livadas and began working as an ice cream maker and a grocer for the Livadas Bros. Grocery and Liquor store on Monroe Avenue.
Peter worked at for the Livadas Brothers for 10 years until finding a job at the cafeteria at Eastman Kodak. It was there where he made hundreds of thousands of gallons of ice cream and helped feed thousands of Kodak employees a day. In his free time Peter began making candy in his basement. He sold the surplus door to door to make extra money for his family.
Peter enjoyed making food in the cafeteria but realized he would never grow in his role at Kodak. He quit in 1967 and started his own restaurant with money he had been saving over the years. One of Peter’s favorite memories was when an upper-level Kodak manager stopped by his diner to congratulate him and offered him to the opportunity to return to Kodak if his venture did not work out.
In 1979 Peter built a new restaurant and candy store at 880 on South Clinton Avenue. In the late 1980s Peter moved his candy store out of the diner and began focusing on candy making. The diner changed names and management a few times and is presently the South Wedge Diner, and is managed by Tamm Tran. It was ranked the #2 Diner in Rochester in the 2004 City Newspaper.
Today at Peter’s Sweet Shop he still makes candy the old fashioned way – by hand. He is a steward for diligence and maintains a full work week to keep the store inventory up to his standards.
Press Archives
Democrat and Chronicle 2004- Democrat and Chronicle 1997
- City East 1973
- Upstate Magazine 1970s
- See Maid Ice Cream Ad 1960s