New York City, like most major metropolitan areas, has its Little Italy. In fact, New York has several Italian neighborhoods. We'll explore them all in this series of articles. The first and most famous area is the part of lower Manhattan centered on Mulberry Street, north of Canal Street.
The best-known Italian neighborhood in New York that once covered about 50 blocks of Lower Manhattan. Nowadays it is surrounded by Chinatown, which is constantly expanding, and by the modern and no longer so Italian Nolita (north of Little Italy). The neighborhood is now just five blocks from Mulberry Street, between Canal %26 Spring and a little bit of the intersecting streets. According to a recent census, only about 5 percent of the neighborhood's residents are of Italian descent.
However, for those looking to experience “authentic Little Italy”, there are still some businesses run by founding families where they can try the old neighborhood. To learn about inedible Italian culture, the Scuola Italiana in Greenwich Village teaches classes in Italian and presents a list of events focusing on Italian culture and history. Many claim that Arthur Avenue, in the Belmont area of the Bronx, is the “real Little Italy” of New York. The shopping center of this Italian neighborhood is Arthur Avenue, which is full of restaurants and stores offering great food, household items and Italian gifts.
A section of East Harlem that was home to a huge community of immigrants from southern Italy in the late 19th century %26 of the 20th century. In fact, it was the first neighborhood in New York to be labeled “Little Italy”. Italians began leaving East Harlem in the 1950s and the area became “Spanish Harlem” when newcomers from Latin America moved to the neighborhood. Rao's and Patsy's Pizzeria restaurants are still famous and popular, and there's Claudio's Barbershop (which was recently saved from eviction by popular demand).
Finally, there is the community's spiritual home, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which now offers services in English and Spanish. However, one weekend every summer, Italian Harlem comes back to life when residents of the old neighborhood return to see the Giglio di Sant Antonio. The culmination of the three-day festival is the Baile del Giglio, an 80-foot tour. Tower that runs through the streets in honor of the saint.
Between the restaurants and shops for tourists selling cheap souvenirs and the kitsch of “The Sopranos”, there are some old school family-run Italian restaurants. Italian companies located in Italian enclaves suffer due to the dispersion of the people who frequent them and inevitably close when most or all of the Italian inhabitants of the enclave emigrate. New York City welcomed millions of Italian immigrants in the late 19th and 20th centuries, becoming home to the largest Italian population in the country. Unconditionally, Italian enclaves see how their young people are increasingly dispersed from generation to generation until, finally, a neighborhood is completely passed on to one or more new ethnic groups; hence the nature of the change that exists in all societies, for the most part.
The neighborhood also has great Italian restaurants and pizzerias along Cross Bay Boulevard, such as Gino's Pizzeria, Bruno Ristorante, Prima Pasta and Cafe, Matteo's and Divino Pizzeria. According to the 2000 census, 692,739 New Yorkers reported Italian descent, making them the largest European ethnic group in the city. Although most Italian immigrant families have abandoned the old neighborhoods, there are still remnants of the original culture of Italian immigrants. Like other Italian-American communities in the Big Apple, people gather around Columbus Day to represent their Italian heritage, in the annual parade on the boulevard, organized by the Howard Beach Columbus Day Foundation.
The first Italian to reside in New York was Pietro Cesare Alberti, a Venetian sailor who, in 1635, settled in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, which would eventually become New York. Below the body of the text, there is a collection of maps showing houses for sale in many of New York City's Italian neighborhoods, except Manhattan. Before March of this year, about eight years earlier, I began documenting Italian neighborhoods throughout the United States with photographs in an effort to create a photographic archive of Italian companies, churches and visual characters in general. This figure was slightly lower than the concentration of Italian Americans in Little Italy on the Lower East Side, at 88 percent; however, the total population of Italian Harlem was three times larger than that of Little Italy.
New York is home to the third largest Italian population outside of Italy, behind Buenos Aires, Argentina (first) and São Paulo, Brazil (second). The Italian-American Calandra Institute, founded in 1979 and located in the center of Manhattan, is an academic institute that studies topics related to the history of Italians in the United States. .
