A 1906 invoice is the oldest document the Petri family has kept to mark the beginning of its plumbing business.
“The exact time that started, we don’t know, it probably was before that because my great grandparents both came over in the late 1800s,” said Michael Petri.
Michael’s grandfather arrived from Italy in 1913 and rented a room above the company’s first office. From then on, generations of the family continued to live and work around the business.
For more than a century, Petri Plumbing operated from its Bay Ridge headquarters at 901 Bay Ridge Ave., the company’s home since 1906. The family expanded into Gowanus in 2025, opening a second location at 355 Butler St. to make it easier for crews to reach customers throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan
Michael, now 72, entered the trade almost by chance. As a young man, he said, he would even try to avoid working.
“When I was young … I used to hide in the park so that they wouldn’t find me because they used to look for us to do certain dirty things, dirty work and carry bushels of junk,” he said.
Michael Petri spent more than five decades in the plumbing trade before passing the family business to his son Christopher.Photo by Milena Soci
What was supposed to be a temporary stop while he figured out what to do with his life instead turned into a career spanning more than half a century.
Over the course of his profession, Michael worked on some of New York’s most important construction projects, including the Battery Park Tunnel, Yankee Stadium and the control tower at JFK Airport.
Like many blue-collar fathers, however, Michael hoped his son Christopher would choose a different path. Having seen firsthand the hard work involved in working in basements, he would have preferred his son to become a doctor or lawyer, or pursue a career on Wall Street, where Christopher began working in finance but soon realized the industry was not for him.
Plumbing was familiar. He worked with his father during high school and remembered how much he enjoyed the variety of the job.
“It’s something new every day,” Christopher Petri told Brooklyn Paper.“You’re not sitting in front of a desk all day.”
The “passing of the torch” came in 2016, when Michael needed knee surgery and Christopher suddenly found himself having to run the company on his own. Michael describes the moment as a “baptism by fire,” but it became the beginning of a new phase for the business.
Petri Plumbing & Heating is a family-owned Brooklyn business that has served New Yorkers for more than a century.Photo by Milena Soci
Today, Petri Plumbing has about 44 employees and aims to continue expanding across the five boroughs. Running a plumbing company in New York, however, also means dealing every day with a city that has been built layer upon layer over generations.
“New York City is such an amazing place that they just keep having to build more to accommodate everyone,” said Michael. “You see it every single day. We have clients who sold their homes when it was just a stretch of four houses and now there’s an eight-story building in their place. You see more and more new development everywhere.”
After 120 years, Petri Plumbing continues to grow alongside the city, adapting to a New York that is constantly changing while remaining a family business passed from one generation to the next.