At its largest, Little Italy used to occupy a space in lower Manhattan bound by Lafayette Street to the west and Bowery to the east, Kenmare Street to the north and Worth Street to the south.[3] It is now only five blocks on Mulberry Street north of Canal St.[4] Little Italy originated at Mulberry Bend south of Canal, in what had formerly been the Five Points area but is now the heart of Chinatown. Jacob Riis described Mulberry Bend as "the foul core of New York's slums".[5] During this time period "Immigrants of the late 19th century usually settled in ethnic neighborhoods".[6] Therefore, the "mass immigration from Italy during the 1880s"[7] led to the large settlement of Italian immigrants in lower Manhattan. The results of such migration had created an "influx of Italian immigrants" which had "led to the commercial gathering of their dwelling and business".[8][9]
Bill Tonelli from New York magazine said, "Once, Little Italy was like an insular Neapolitan village re-created on these shores, with its own language, customs, and financial and cultural institutions."[5] Little Italy was not the largest Italian neighborhood in New York City, as East Harlem (or Italian Harlem) had a larger Italian population. Tonelli said that Little Italy "was perhaps the city's poorest Italian neighborhood".[5]
In 1910 Little Italy had almost 10,000 Italians; that was the peak of the community's Italian population. At the turn of the 20th century, over 90% of the residents of the Fourteenth Ward were of Italian birth or origins.[5] Tonelli said that it meant "that residents began moving out to more spacious digs almost as soon as they arrived".[5] Such a vastly growing community impacted the "U.S. labor movement in the 20th century" by making up much of the labor population in the garment industry.[7]
Before 2004, several upscale businesses entered the northern portion of the area between Houston and Kenmare Street. Tonelli said, "Real-estate prices zoomed, making it even tougher for the old-timers—residents and businesspeople alike—to hang on."[5] After the September 11 attacks in 2001, areas below Houston Street were cut off for the rest of the fall of 2001. The San Gennaro feast, scheduled for September 13, was postponed. Business from the Financial District dropped severely, due to the closure of Park Row, which connected Chinatown and the Civic Center; as a result, residents in Little Italy and Chinatown suffered. Tonelli said the post-9/11 events "strangely enough, ended up motivating all these newfangled efforts to save what's left of the old neighborhood".[5]
Mulberry Street, Little Italy, in 2023
In 2004 Tonelli said, "Today, Little Italy is a veneer—50 or so restaurants and cafés catering to tourists, covering a dense neighborhood of tenements shared by recent Chinese immigrants, young Americans who can't afford Soho, and a few remaining real live Italians."[5] This sentiment has also been echoed by Italian culture and heritage website ItalianAware. The site has called the dominance of Italians in the area "relatively short-lived". It attributes this to the quick financial prosperity many Italians achieved, which allowed them to leave the cramped neighborhood for areas in Brooklyn and Queens. The site also goes on to state that the area is currently referred to as Little Italy more out of nostalgia than as a reflection of a true ethnic population.[10]
The New York Times sent its reporters to characterize the Little Italy/Mulberry neighborhood in May 1896:
They are laborers; toilers in all grades of manual work; they are artisans, they are junkman, and here, too, dwell the rag pickers. ... There is a monster colony of Italians who might be termed the commercial or shop keeping community of the Latins. Here are all sorts of stores, pensions, groceries, fruit emporiums, tailors, shoemakers, wine merchants, importers, musical instrument makers. ... There are notaries, lawyers, doctors, apothecaries, undertakers. ... There are more bankers among the Italians than among any other foreigners except the Germans in the city.[12]
Since the late 1960s, when the United States allowed immigration from China, Chinatown's traditional boundary at Canal Street has inched northward into Little Italy. By the 1990s, while many Italian business remained, the blocks between Canal and Kenmare Streets had taken on a feel of Chinatown, though locals continue to refer to the area (including Nolita) as Little Italy.[13]
As of the 2000 census, 1,211 residents claiming Italian ancestry lived in the three census tracts that make up Little Italy. Those residents comprised 8.25% of the population in the community, which is similar to the proportion of those of Italian ancestry throughout New York City as a whole. Bill Tonelli of New York magazine contrasted Little Italy with the Manhattan Chinatown; in 2000, of the residents of the portions of Chinatown south of Grand Street, 81% were of Chinese origins.[5]
In 2004, Tonelli revisited the issue, saying, "Little Italy may always endure as an open-air theme park of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European immigration to the Lower East Side ... But you'll spend a long time in the neighborhood before you hear anyone speak Italian, and then the speaker will be a tourist from Milan."[14] Tonelli added, "You have to slow your gaze to find the neighbors in this neighborhood, because they're so overwhelmed and outnumbered by the tourists. But once you focus, you can see them, standing (or sitting) in the interstices, taking in the scene, like the group of men, mostly senior citizens, loitering contentedly under an awning on Mulberry Street."[14]
By 2010 the U.S. Community Survey found that none of the people living in Little Italy were born in Italy, and 5% of residents identified as Italian American.[15]
The Feast of San Gennaro is an annual celebration of Italian culture and the Italian-American community.[5] The feast began in 1926 as a one-day religious commemoration established by Italian immigrants from Naples to celebrate their patron saint, San Gennaro. The modern feast is celebrated as a large street fair, lasting 11 days, that takes place along Mulberry Street.[16]
The Feast of the Seven Fishes, an Italian-American Christmas Eve tradition, is thought to have originated in Little Italy in the late 1800s.[17]
↑Berry, Hannah. "The Feast of San Gennaro — A Legacy of Early 20th-Century Neapolitan Immigrants", Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, September 16, 2024. "The Feast of San Gennaro, named after Saint Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples, has been a staple tradition for the city’s Italian-American community for nearly 100 years. What began in 1926 as a one-day block party on Mulberry Street has grown into an 11-day festival featuring food vendors, performances, cultural attractions, religious processions, and even a Ferris wheel."
↑Larsen, Alexis. "Local seafood dishes to make a classic Italian feast", Dayton Daily News, December 22, 2019. Accessed January 3, 2024, via Newspapers.com. "If you have never heard of the Feast of the Seven Fishes (Festa dei Sette Pesci), it’s an Italian-Amer- ican Christmas Eve cele- bration steeped in history. Thought to have been introduced in the United States in the late 1800s by southern Italian immigrants in New York City’s Little Italy, it’s a incredible feast inspired by the flavors of the sea."
↑Vitello, Paul. "Matthew Ianniello, the Mafia Boss Known as ‘Matty the Horse,’ Dies at 92", The New York Times, August 22, 2012. Accessed December 23, 2017. "His stake in one restaurant, Umberto's Clam House, in Little Italy, placed him at the scene of an infamous and legendary gangland murder on April 7, 1972, when the reputed Colombo crime familyunderboss Joey Gallo was riddled with bullets between courses of a late-night meal by four gunmen, in an intrafamily gang war. Mr. Ianniello, who then owned a hidden interest in Umberto's, was working in the kitchen at the time and was initially suspected of having some involvement in the hit. But he was never charged."
↑Rabb, Selwyn. "John Gotti Running The Mob", The New York Times, April 2, 1989. Accessed December 23, 2017. "On Christmas Eve, a week after the double slaying, detectives concealed in a van in Little Italy witnessed a striking scene outside the Ravenite Social Club, Dellacroce's old headquarters, that confirmed what investigators had heard from informers: John Gotti was the new boss of the Gambino family."
↑Wong, Edward. "Little Italy Journal; Reliving 'Mean Streets' In Open-Air Screenings", The New York Times, July 16, 2000. Accessed July 30, 2016. "For a taste of the old neighborhood, he had to walk over to the playground at Spring and Mulberry Streets to watch films like Mean Streets, the 1973 Martin Scorsese opus in which Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro play small-time wiseguys in Little Italy."
↑Breihan, Tom. "The Professional Is Deeply Problematic, Profoundly Cool, And Very '90s", Deadspin, May 15, 2015. Accessed December 23, 2017. "The movie opens with a camera flying over Central Park, turning into a fisheye zoom-in on the Little Italy restaurant where Reno gets his contracts. When he's on a job, Reno's face emerges from shadows, then disappears again when he's made his point."
↑Staley, Willy. "Why Is Every Young Person in America Watching The Sopranos?", The New York Times Magazine, September 29, 2021. Accessed December 1, 2022. "Italian American neighborhoods have emptied out — as Jacobs writes, 'radically diminishing the pool of tough teenagers with Cosa Nostra potential'; this is dramatized brilliantly in the final episode of the series, when a mobster from a New York family hurries through Little Italy on an important phone call and, when the call ends, looks around to see he's wandered into an encroaching and vibrant Chinatown."
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