Chinatown, Manhattan in the context of "The Bowery"

Jane Isabel Jacobs OC OOnt (née Butzner; 4 May 1916 – 25 April 2006) was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) argued that "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" did not respect the needs of city-dwellers.

Jacobs organized grassroots efforts to protect neighborhoods from urban renewal and slum clearance, in particular plans by Robert Moses to overhaul her own Greenwich Village neighborhood. She was instrumental in the eventual cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have passed directly through the area of Manhattan that would later become known as SoHo, as well as part of Little Italy and Chinatown. She was arrested in 1968 for inciting a crowd at a public hearing on that project. After moving to Toronto in 1968, she joined the opposition to the Spadina Expressway and the associated network of expressways in Toronto that were planned and under construction.

Overseas Chinese people or the Chinese diaspora are a diaspora people of Chinese origin who reside outside Greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan). As of 2011, there were over 40.3 million overseas Chinese. As of 2023, there were 10.5 million people living outside mainland China who were born in mainland China, corresponding to 0.7 percent of China's population. Overall, China has a low percent of its population living overseas.

Little Italy (Italian: Piccola Italia) is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City, once known for its Italian American population. It is bounded on the west by Tribeca and Soho, on the south by Chinatown, on the east by the Bowery and Lower East Side, and on the north by Nolita.

The Eldridge Street Synagogue is an Orthodox Jewish synagogue at 12–16 Eldridge Street in the Chinatown and Lower East Side neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. Built in 1887 for Congregation Kahal Adath Jeshurun, the synagogue is one of the first erected in the U.S. by Eastern European Jews. The congregation, officially known as Kahal Adath Jeshurun with Anshe Lubz, still owns the synagogue and hosts weekly services there in the 21st century. The Museum at Eldridge Street, founded in 1986 as the Eldridge Street Project, also occupies the synagogue under a long-term lease. The building is a National Historic Landmark and a New York City designated landmark.

The congregation was established in 1852 as Beth Hamedrash and had congregants from across Eastern Europe. It relocated several times and was renamed Kahal Adath Jeshurun after merging with Holkhe Yosher Vizaner in 1886. Kahal Adath Jeshurun acquired a site for a new synagogue on Eldridge Street in 1886, and the building was dedicated on September 4, 1887. The congregation's membership peaked between 1890 and 1915, with up to 800 members, and the congregation merged with Anshe Lubz in 1909. Membership dwindled significantly after the 1920s, as congregants relocated and the Immigration Act of 1924 restricted new immigration. The main sanctuary was closed completely in 1954, and the remaining congregants met in the basement. Preservationists began trying to save the building in the 1970s and stabilized it in the early 1980s. The Eldridge Street Project raised money for a reconstruction of the synagogue, which was completed in 2007.

40°42′46″N 74°00′21″W / 40.71278°N 74.00583°W / 40.71278; -74.00583

The Civic Center is an area and neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City, that encompasses New York City Hall, One Police Plaza, the courthouses in Foley Square, the Metropolitan Correctional Center, and the surrounding area. The district is bound on the west by Tribeca at Broadway, on the north by Chinatown at Worth Street or Bayard Street, on the east by the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge at South Street, and on the south by the Financial District at Ann Street.

Park Row is a street located in the Financial District, Civic Center, and Chinatown neighborhoods of the New York City borough of Manhattan. The street runs east–west, sometimes called north–south because the western end bends to the south. At the north end of Park Row is the confluence of Bowery, East Broadway, St. James Place, Oliver Street, Mott Street, and Worth Street at Chatham Square. At the street's south end, Broadway, Vesey Street, Barclay Street, and Ann Street intersect. The intersection includes a bus turnaround loop designated as Millennium Park.

Park Row was once known as Chatham Street; it was renamed Park Row in 1886, a reference to the fact that it faces City Hall Park, the former New York Common.

Chinese, including Mandarin and Cantonese among other varieties, is the third most-spoken language in the United States, and is mostly spoken within Chinese-American populations and by immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, especially in California and New York. Around 2004, over 2 million Americans spoke varieties of Chinese, with Mandarin becoming increasingly common due to immigration from mainland China and to some extent Taiwan. Within this category, approximately one third of respondents described themselves as speaking Cantonese or Mandarin specifically, with the other two thirds answering "Chinese", despite the lack of mutual intelligibility between different varieties of Chinese. This phenomenon makes it more difficult to readily identify the relative prevalence of any single Chinese language in the United States.

According to data reported on the 2000 US census long-form, 259,750 people spoke "Cantonese", with 58.62% percent residing in California and the next most with 16.19% in New York. The actual number of Cantonese speakers was probably higher. In the 1982–83 school year, 29,908 students in California were reported to be using Cantonese as their primary home language. Approximately 16,000 of these students were identified as limited English proficient (LEP).

There are multiple Chinatowns in the borough of Queens in New York City. The original Queens Chinatown emerged in Flushing, initially as a satellite of the original Manhattan Chinatown, before evolving its own identity, surpassing in scale the original Manhattan Chinatown, and subsequently, in turn, spawning its own satellite Chinatowns in Elmhurst, Corona, and eastern Queens. As of 2023, illegal Chinese immigration to New York has accelerated, and its Flushing neighborhood has become the present-day global epicenter receiving Chinese immigration as well as the international control center directing such migration. As of 2024, a significant new wave of Chinese Muslims are fleeing religious persecution in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Province and seeking religious freedom in New York, and concentrating in Queens.