This is where it all began. What, you ask? A decades-long battle among some of New York's most uninspiring pizzerias for the name that should rightfully belong to this pizza place-slash-spaghetti and meatballs joint on Spring Street. The profusion of pizza spots under the banner Original Ray's (or its variants, Famous Ray's, Famous Original Ray's, Original Ray's Famous) is partly responsible for the final transformation of pizza from an ethnic niche product to an ecumenical, processed-cheese-heavy pizza culture, but in a crowd of those knockoff purveyors, this Original Ray's (actually the original) stands head and shoulders above the rest.