Little Italy, Manhattan in the context of "Mean Streets"

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.

Manhattan's Chinatown is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City, bordering the Lower East Side to its east, Little Italy to its north, Civic Center to its south, and Tribeca to its west. With an estimated population of 90,000 to 100,000 people, Chinatown is home to the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere. Manhattan's Chinatown is also one of the oldest Chinese ethnic enclaves. The Manhattan Chinatown is one of nine Chinatown neighborhoods in New York City, as well as one of twelve in the New York metropolitan area, which contains the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, comprising an estimated 924,619 uniracial individuals in 2024.

Chinatown is also a densely populated neighborhood, with over 141,000 residents living in its vicinity encompassing 1.7 square miles, "of which 28.1% identified as Asian" in 2023. Historically, Chinatown was primarily populated by Cantonese speakers. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, large numbers of Fuzhounese-speaking immigrants also arrived and formed a sub-neighborhood annexed to the eastern portion of Chinatown east of The Bowery, which has become known as Little Fuzhou subdivided away from the primarily Cantonese populated original longtime established Chinatown of Manhattan from the proximity of The Bowery going west, known as Little Hong Kong/Guangdong. As many Fuzhounese and Cantonese speakers now speak Mandarin—the official language in Mainland China and Taiwan—in addition to their native languages, this has made it more important for Chinatown residents to learn and speak Mandarin. Although now overtaken in size by the rapidly growing Flushing Chinatown (located in the New York City borough of Queens) and Brooklyn Chinatown, the Manhattan Chinatown remains a dominant cultural force for the Chinese diaspora, as home to the Museum of Chinese in America and as the headquarters of numerous publications based both in the U.S. and China that are geared to overseas Chinese.

The Ravenite Social Club was an Italian American heritage club at 247 Mulberry Street, in Little Italy, New York City. It was used as a mob hangout and the storefront later became a shoe store, and as of 2022 is a men's clothing store.

The Ravenite is sometimes identified as the successor to the Alto Knights Social Club, however, the latter was two blocks away from the Ravenite at 86 Kenmare Street. The two clubs existed concurrently.

The Bowery (/ˈbaʊəri/) is a street and neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City, New York. The street runs from Chatham Square at Park Row, Worth Street, and Mott Street in the south to Cooper Square at 4th Street in the north. The eponymous neighborhood runs roughly from the Bowery east to Allen Street and First Avenue, and from Canal Street north to Cooper Square/East Fourth Street. The neighborhood roughly overlaps with Little Australia. To the south is Chinatown, to the east are the Lower East Side and the East Village, and to the west are Little Italy and NoHo. It has historically been considered a part of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

In the 17th century, the road branched off Broadway north of Fort Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan to the homestead of Peter Stuyvesant, director-general of New Netherland. The street was known as Bowery Lane prior to 1807. "Bowery" is an anglicization of the Dutch bouwerie, derived from an antiquated Dutch word for "farm": In the 17th century the area contained many large farms.

40°43′21″N 73°59′43″W / 40.722542°N 73.9951515°W / 40.722542; -73.9951515

Nolita, sometimes written as NoLIta and deriving from "Northern Little Italy", is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. Nolita is situated in Lower Manhattan, bounded on the north by Houston Street, on the east by the Bowery, on the south roughly by Broome Street, and on the west by Lafayette Street. It lies east of SoHo, south of NoHo, west of the Lower East Side, and north of Little Italy and Chinatown.

Canal Street (Chinese: 堅尼街) is a major east–west street in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States, running over 1 mile (1.6 km) from East Broadway between Essex and Jefferson Streets in the east, to West Street between Watts and Spring Streets in the west. It runs through the neighborhood of Chinatown, and forms the southern boundaries of SoHo and Little Italy as well as the northern boundary of Tribeca. The street acts as a major connector between Jersey City, New Jersey, via the Holland Tunnel (I-78), and Brooklyn in New York City via the Manhattan Bridge. It is a two-way street for most of its length, with two unidirectional stretches between Forsyth Street and the Manhattan Bridge.

Canal Street follows the path of underground waterworks that had been built in the early 19th century to drain a series of marshy and eventually sewage-filed ponds, including Collect Pond.

The Manhattan Community Board 2 is a New York City community board encompassing the neighborhoods of Greenwich Village, West Village, South Village, NoHo, SoHo, Little Italy, NoLIta, and a portion of Chinatown in the borough of Manhattan. It is bounded by the Bowery, Canal Street, the Hudson River, and 14th Street on the east, south, west, and north, respectively. The district covers three city council districts and four police precincts, and encompasses one of the largest landmark districts in New York City.

Due to overwhelming disgust with the impending overdevelopment of Greenwich Village during the late 1950s and early 1960s, residents organized to fight further destruction of historic buildings and townhouses within the village. These residents made up the first members of what was then called a "Community Planning Board." CB2 was one of the first of these "Community Planning Boards."

Centre Street is a north–south street in the New York City borough of Manhattan, running through the Civic Center, Chinatown, and Little Italy neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan. It connects Park Row to the south with Cleveland Place to the north. Centre Street carries northbound traffic north of Reade Street and two-way traffic between Reade Street and the Brooklyn Bridge.

In the early 19th century there was no Centre Street. The area was previously occupied by the Collect Pond, a body of fresh water that was the nascent city's primary supply of drinking water, covering approximately 48 acres (190,000 m) and running as deep as 50 feet (15 m). The pond was located just north of today's Foley Square and just west of modern Chinatown. It had been drained and the new street grid built over it a decade earlier. However, there was no street built between Pearl and Reade Streets. Cross Street (which came over from the nearby area that would several years later be dubbed the "Five Points") ran all the way through to Reade, and a single block ran from Reade to Chambers, and afterwards turned east and ran into Chatham Street (future Park Row). In the previous century, this block, then ending at the Collect Pond, was labeled "Potter's Hill". North of Pearl Street, a separate street occupying the alignment was called "Collect Street". By 1828, it would be renamed Centre Street, but still end at Pearl from the north. As late as 1836, one map would still show this arrangement, but in another the full alignment would be in place.