Little Italy in New York City is a district in Lower Manhattan. The district stretches from Mulberry Street extends to Canal Street in the south, to the Bowery in the east, Bleeker in the north and Lafayette to the west of the city. The area is referred to as little Italy because it was where many Italian immigrants settled and it is still a largely Italian neighbourhood with plenty of Italian owned shops and restaurants. The area has been a major setting for organised crime since the early 1800s and powerful Italian mobsters operated in the area right up until the nineteen nineties when a crackdown on crime severely limited their activities.
To a large extent, much of little Italy has been overtaken by Chinatown. Little Italy is no longer a vast Italian neigbourhood and over the years has been reduced to just one street with Italian inhabitants and a restaurant area. As of 2010 Little Italy and Chinatown became merged as one neighbourhood on the National Register of Historic Places. In the past Italians all congregated on Mulberry Street to celebrate the Festival of San Gennaro from September 1926. The festival is a large street fair that lasts eleven days it has become a celebration of Italian culture within the Italian American community.
There are other Italian neighbourhoods dotted around the city, including parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. The famous Roman Catholic St. Patrick’s Cathedral is situated on Mulberry Street, and the Church of the Most Precious Blood holds a shrine to San Genero and gets crowded around the time of the festival, while there is more to Little Italy than its annual festival, the feast of San Genaro attracts more than one million people every year. The festival includes parades, music, a candle lit procession and a Mass.
The area known as little Italy is full of nineteenth century tenements with fire escapes up the sides of the buildings. The area is famous for its street cafes, Italian restaurants and speciality grocery stores. Unlike Chinatown that has continued in much the same way for more than a hundred years, Little Italy has changed as fewer Italian immigrants came to America’s shores after the nineteen twenties. The area is lively with plenty of shops and is now part of the ever expanding area of Chinatown.
The area known as Little Italy still carries a certain old world charm for its visitors but the actual Italian population is now down to only a few thousand as people move to other areas of the city and other areas of the US. At festival time the streets around Little Italy are closed to traffic and this often extends to most of the summer months. The area from Canal Street to Broome Street is closed to traffic at weekends as scores of street vendors sell their wares. Even though the face of Little Italy has changed dramatically in recent years, it is still an area that attracts lots of interest and thousands of tourists each year.