NEW YORK — Long before the New York food emporiums Fairway, Citarella, Dean & Deluca, Grace’s Marketplace, and Eataly, there was Balducci’s.

It began a century ago as a rented pushcart in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, operated by Louis Balducci, an immigrant from southeastern Italy. But it began growing thanks to his son Andrew, who, on his return from World War II, persuaded his father to leave the pushcart behind and move across the East River to open a modest sidewalk greengrocery in Greenwich Village.

Soon Andy, as everyone called him, had even bigger ambitions for the business.

“I always thought the store should be a little more sophisticated,’’ he told The New York Times in 2000. “So I put up a sign, ‘Balducci Produce,’ not fruit and vegetable.’’

His father was skeptical about the fancy phraseology, but Andy Balducci’s energy and diligence would transform an Italian immigrant’s humble mobile market into an epicurean mecca that would pioneer specialty-foods retailing in New York and dominate that business for decades.

Mr. Balducci died March 22 at 92 in a hospital in Roslyn, on Long Island. The cause was acute leukemia, his wife, Nina, said.

Mr. Balducci’s flagship store, across the street from the original, opened in 1972 at West Ninth Street and Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. Word-of-mouth made it a destination of choice for gastronomes in an era when tracking down what today is standard fare, like Italian parsley, would have required a dragnet of the city’s markets.

Culinarians could find red chicory there, five kinds of eggplant, direct imports of prosciutto di Parma, custom-grown broccoli from Italy, and, later, from California, pitahaya (a sweet pink fruit shaped like a mango) and trevigiano (a variety of radicchio) — to say nothing of arugula.

James Beard lived around the corner and shopped there for extra-virgin olive oil and Italian bread. Lou Reed bought linguine; Anna Wintour, pecorino; Uma Thurman, pesto. The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, another regular for a time, once spotted Greta Garbo there.

Andrew Balducci was born in Greenpoint in 1925. His mother was the former Maria Miscioscia. His father, Louis Balducci, arrived from Bari, Italy, in 1914 and began selling fruits and vegetables from his pushcart two years later, earning $5 a week.

His parents returned to Italy with Andy when he was 2 months old, remaining there until 1939, when they went back to New York on the eve of World War II. Andy was 14.

He later took courses at the State Institute of Agriculture at Farmingdale on Long Island (now Farmingdale State College) and, not yet 20, enlisted in the Navy. He was injured during the Normandy invasion and hospitalized for six months.

After his discharge, he joined his father, who had lately been selling fish and delivering ice, in a new sidewalk fruit and vegetable stall at Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street (with a bathtub out back for rinsing the produce as it was delivered).

In 1952, Mr. Balducci married the former Nina D’Amelio, who survives him, along with two of his four daughters, Marta and Andrea Balducci; his sister, Grace Doria; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Mr. Balducci took a hiatus from the food business in the mid-1950s to work for his father-in-law’s Long Island masonry contracting firm, in Great Neck. He returned to his father’s store in 1968. In 1972, when the rent was about to be quadrupled, they opened a 5,000-square-foot market across the street.

The kitchen was staffed by Andy Balducci’s sister and his mother, who conceived a mail order catalog that soon thrived. Despite their booming business, though, the Balducci clan was mismatched.

Rancor between Andy and the store’s co-owners — his sister, Grace, and her husband, Joe Doria — as well as between Andy and his father and his older brother, Charles, a physician who was known in the family as The Doctor, eventually boiled over in the 1990s, leading to lawsuits.

Andy was accused by his father, by Charles, and by the Dorias of cheating them out of their fair share of the ownership. When the Dorias opened their own market on the Upper East Side and called it Grace Balducci’s, Andy countersued.

The family eventually reached a financial settlement.

In 1999, Mr. Balducci sold the store for $26.5 million.

The new owners closed it in 2003.