They called it the Italian Quarter. Not officially. But for forty years on either side of 1900, if you came up out of the subway at Canal and turned north onto Mulberry Street, you were in Naples. The bread came out of brick ovens at dawn. The accents were Calabrian and Sicilian and Basilicatese, almost never Tuscan or Milanese. At its peak in 1910, the fourteenth ward was over ninety per cent Italian by birth or descent, around ten thousand people packed into a few square blocks of tenement.
The Place
Little Italy sits in lower Manhattan, wedged between Chinatown to the south and NoLIta and SoHo to the north and west. The historic core ran from Canal Street up toward Houston, hemmed in by Lafayette to the west and the Bowery to the east. The 6 train at Canal or Spring Street drops you on its doorstep. The housing is mostly five and six storey brick tenements from the late nineteenth century, narrow lots stacked deep, fire escapes pinned to the facades like rusted lace.
Today the identifiably Italian stretch has contracted to a few blocks of Mulberry Street between Canal and Broome, with a thinner spine continuing north toward Houston. The neighbourhood is small enough now to walk end to end in fifteen minutes.
How It Became Italian
Before the Italians
Before it was Italian, this corner of lower Manhattan was Irish, and before that it was the Five Points: a notoriously rough district of freed Black New Yorkers, Irish famine refugees, and the working poor of a dozen origins. The tenements that the Italians inherited had already housed three or four waves before them. The streets were narrow, the air thick, the rents low. That last detail mattered most.
The Italians Arrive
The first significant Italian arrivals came in the 1880s, then turned into a flood. Between 1880 and 1920, more than four million Italians crossed the Atlantic for the United States. The overwhelming majority came from the Mezzogiorno, the impoverished south of a newly unified Italy: Naples and the Campanian hinterland, Sicily, Calabria, Basilicata, Abruzzo, Puglia.
They were farmers, day labourers, fishermen, masons, shoemakers. They were leaving a south where the land had been consolidated into estates they could not own, where cholera and malaria visited every summer, where the new Italian state taxed them and conscripted their sons and gave back almost nothing. New York harbour, Ellis Island, and a cousin already sleeping on a tenement floor on Mulberry Street were a better bet than another season under the Bourbon dust.
Mulberry Street at Its Peak
By 1910 the colony was at its densest. Around ten thousand Italians lived inside the fourteenth ward boundaries, and the streets sorted themselves by paese, by hometown. Mulberry between Canal and Houston was largely Neapolitan. Mott Street was heavily Sicilian. Elizabeth Street drew people from the inland villages of Basilicata and Campania. A man newly off the boat from a Calabrian hill town would not look for “Italians” in New York. He would look for someone from his own village, because that was the person who would feed him, get him a job, and tell him where to send his rent home.
Chain migration did the rest. One man crossed, found work on the subway tunnels or the docks, sent for a brother, then a wife, then a cousin. Within a generation an entire mountain village in Avellino province might have a second self stitched into three tenements on Mulberry Street. Coffee, salami, dried sausage, anchovies, and bushels of artichokes moved through ground floor shops that doubled as informal banks, post offices, and labour exchanges.
The work was hard. Italian men dug the IRT subway tunnels, paved the streets, hauled the granite for the East River bridges, and unloaded the docks. Italian women took piecework into the tenements: sewing, beading, finishing ladies’ garments by lamp at the kitchen table while their daughters minded the youngest. The infant mortality rates in the ward were among the highest in the city.
The Change
Three things ended the Italian Quarter as a residential neighbourhood. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act slammed the immigration door, capping arrivals from Italy at a tiny fraction of what they had been. The supply of new villagers stopped. Meanwhile the Italians already in the ward worked their way up, and as soon as they could afford it they moved out, to Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, to the Bronx, to Astoria and Corona in Queens, eventually to Staten Island and New Jersey. After the Second World War the exodus accelerated. By 1970 the residential Italian population of Little Italy was a shadow of its 1910 high.
At the same time, Chinatown was growing. The Immigration Act of 1965 removed the national-origin quotas that had throttled Asian immigration for decades, and new arrivals from Hong Kong, Guangdong, and later Fujian moved into the tenements the Italians were leaving. The old dividing line at Canal Street dissolved. By the 1990s Chinatown’s footprint stretched well north of Canal, taking in streets that had been solidly Italian within living memory.
The Landmarks
Most Precious Blood Church, 113 Baxter Street (entrance also on Mulberry). Founded by the Scalabrini Fathers in the late nineteenth century and finished by the Franciscans, this is the National Shrine of San Gennaro. Inside, in a side chapel, sits the statue of the patron saint of Naples that is carried in procession down Mulberry Street every September. It is the spiritual anchor of the neighbourhood and the reason the feast has a home at all.
Ferrara Bakery and Cafe, 195 Grand Street. Opened in 1892 by Antonio Ferrara as a small caffe where Neapolitan opera-goers could linger after a performance, Ferrara is still run by the family’s fifth generation. The cannoli, the sfogliatelle, the granita, the espresso bar that arguably introduced espresso culture to America: it is the oldest continuously operating Italian establishment in the neighbourhood, and on most afternoons it is the busiest.
Lombardi’s Pizza, 32 Spring Street. Lombardi’s claims 1905 as its founding year, the title of America’s first pizzeria, and a coal-fired oven built into the bones of the building. The story has been complicated by recent research suggesting that Filippo Milone, not Gennaro Lombardi, may have opened the original pizzeria at 53 1/2 Spring Street. Lombardi’s closed in 1984 and reopened in 1994 a block away at its present address, run by Gennaro Lombardi III and the family friend John Brescio. Whoever owns the founding myth, the pies are the closest thing in Manhattan to a Neapolitan margherita made the way the immigrants would have eaten it.
Mulberry Street itself, Canal to Houston. For one week every September the street closes to traffic for the Feast of San Gennaro, and for the other fifty-one weeks of the year it is the spine of the surviving neighbourhood. Italian flags hang in a long colonnade overhead. The restaurants spill chairs onto the pavement. It is the most photographed Italian street in America.
The Feast of San Gennaro, Mulberry Street, every September since 1926. The festival began as a one-day block party organised by a group of Neapolitan cafe owners led by Alexander Tisi in September 1926. They roasted chickens on the street, built a small wooden chapel for a statue of the saint, and pinned dollar bills to ribbons hung from the statue’s apron, with the money distributed afterward to the neighbourhood’s poor. Today it runs for eleven days, draws around a million visitors, and remains the largest sustained piece of Italian-American street culture in the country.
The tenement blocks of Mott, Mulberry, and Elizabeth Streets. The buildings themselves are landmarks. Most predate 1901 and were built before the New York Tenement House Act required interior windows and proper sanitation. Inside many of these brick boxes, three generations of an Italian family once shared two rooms; today the same rooms house Chinese garment workers, NYU graduate students, and the occasional fourth-generation Italian who never left.
Where They Came From
Almost none of Mulberry Street came from the north of Italy. The villages and small cities that sent people to this neighbourhood sit in a band running south from Rome through the Apennines and out to the islands. Naples and its hinterland, the Campanian provinces of Avellino, Benevento, Caserta, and Salerno. Calabria, especially the inland towns of Cosenza and Catanzaro. Basilicata, the rocky interior between the two coasts. Sicily, every province, but especially Palermo and Agrigento on the western half of the island. Smaller streams came from Abruzzo, Molise, and Puglia.
For a single Mulberry Street tenement you could often draw a precise origin map. Numbers 22 through 28 might be largely from Avellino province. The next building over might be three quarters from a single comune in Caltanissetta. People crossed because their cousin had crossed, and they slept where their cousin slept, and they worked alongside men they had known since they were boys cutting hay on the same hillside.
Mulberry Street Today
The honest truth is that Little Italy is no longer Italian as a residential neighbourhood. The few blocks of Mulberry Street between Canal and Broome remain visibly, recognisably Italian, but the Italian-Americans who run the restaurants and bakeries mostly commute in from Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey. They go home at night. The apartments above the trattorias are largely occupied by Chinese families, young professionals priced out of nearby SoHo, and a thinning census of elderly Italians who never moved.
Chinatown has absorbed most of what was the historic Italian Quarter. The neighbourhood that once stretched from Worth Street to Houston now consists of a tourist economy on a few blocks of Mulberry, a parish church, a pair of historic bakeries and pizzerias, and a feast every September. The 2010 census counted only a few hundred Italian-born residents in the area. By any honest measure, Little Italy has become a Sunday neighbourhood: a place people come back to, not a place people live.
And yet it keeps going. The feast still pulls a million visitors. Ferrara still pours espresso from the same address it has held since 1892. The statue of San Gennaro still leaves the chapel in Most Precious Blood on the third Sunday of September and walks the same blocks his first devotees walked in 1926. The neighbourhood became a backdrop, but the backdrop is still doing the work it was built to do. Somewhere in Staten Island this morning, a great-grandson is on the BQE, on his way back to the street to open the shop his great-grandfather rented.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle on Mulberry Street?
Italians settled on Mulberry Street and the surrounding tenement blocks of lower Manhattan starting in the 1880s because the rents were the cheapest in the city, the docks and construction work were nearby, and earlier Italian arrivals were already there to anchor chain migration. By 1910 the fourteenth ward was over ninety per cent Italian, with around ten thousand people packed into a few square blocks.
Is Little Italy still Italian today?
Only barely, and only as a commercial strip. The few blocks of Mulberry Street between Canal and Broome remain visibly Italian, with restaurants, bakeries, and the annual Feast of San Gennaro, but most of the historic Italian Quarter has been absorbed by Chinatown’s expansion since the 1970s. Almost no Italians live there anymore; the community moved to Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and New Jersey decades ago.
What are the most famous Italian landmarks on Mulberry Street?
The Shrine Church of the Most Precious Blood (113 Baxter Street, with an entrance on Mulberry) is the National Shrine of San Gennaro. Ferrara Bakery and Cafe at 195 Grand Street has been open since 1892. Lombardi’s Pizza at 32 Spring Street claims to be America’s first pizzeria, dating its founding to 1905. The Feast of San Gennaro, held every September since 1926, runs along Mulberry Street itself.
Where in Italy did the Mulberry Street Italians come from?
Almost all of them came from the Italian south, the Mezzogiorno. Naples and the wider Campania region (Avellino, Benevento, Caserta, Salerno), Sicily, Calabria, Basilicata, with smaller contingents from Abruzzo, Molise, and Puglia. Each tenement building often drew from a single province or even a single village, with chain migration pulling family after family across the Atlantic.
When did Italians first arrive on Mulberry Street?
The first significant Italian arrivals came in the 1880s, replacing earlier Irish and Five Points populations. Mass migration peaked between 1900 and 1914, with the community reaching its largest extent and density around 1910. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act sharply restricted further Italian immigration and the long contraction began from there.
What happened to the Italian community on Mulberry Street?
It moved out and Chinatown moved in. After the 1924 immigration cap stopped the supply of new arrivals, the Italians already in the neighbourhood gradually worked their way into the middle class and left the tenements for Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, and the suburbs. The 1965 Immigration Act opened the door for Chinese arrivals from Hong Kong, Guangdong, and Fujian, who moved into the same buildings. The Italian commercial strip on Mulberry survives largely as a destination.
If your family’s story passed through Mulberry Street, or any of the places Italians made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hill town in Avellino to a tenement on Elizabeth Street, to wherever you are now.