SAN GENNARO FESTIVAL, LITTLE ITALY - MANHATTAN

It used to extend north and south from Canal Street to Houston Street and east and west from Broadway to the Bowery.  Now the realtors have created “Nolita” (North of Little Italy, meaning north of Broome Street), and Chinatown has expanded north of Canal Street, so Little Italy is shaved down to just a few blocks near the intersection of Mulberry and Hester Streets.  But what blocks these are!

The old tenement architecture with exterior fire escapes has not been replaced, and there’s a reason for that – geology.  At the Wall Street district there’s bedrock under the soil that can sustain large, heavy skyscrapers.  Same with midtown where the Empire State Building is located.  That’s why Manhattan has such a strange skyline – tall buildings, lower buildings, tall buildings again.  So, even though realtors are tearing down tenements in the area between Wall Street and midtown, they can only build those glass and steel structures so high (about 6 stories)..

Anyway, for me, the sidewalk cafes along Mulberry Street are the only place to eat Italian food in Manhattan.  I used to love the old deli Manganero’s in Hell’s Kitchen with its original floors and equipment little booths, and tons of historic pictures on the walls – but it closed when the last generation (of  4) to own it just didn’t want to work there anymore.

I like my own cooking, so pretty much the only reason I eat out is for the service.  For the price of a meal in a chain diner, I could eat lunch at any of a number of sidewalk restaurants on Mulberry and the tables had a white tablecloth and impeccable, friendly service too.  The lunch food was good, not extraordinary, but the desserts always were and it was a great place to rest up and people watch.  Dinners were more pricey, but the food was better.  I recommend Angelo's.  And Umberto's Clam House - no tablecloths, but great clam dishes.

At the corner of Broome and Mulberry Streets is Café Roma.  This was my favorite place to get a cup of tea (not much of a coffee drinker) and have some quiet time in Little Italy.  I’ve only been there in the late afternoon or late evening when it wasn’t crowded.  It has a corner door and old windows that look onto the sidewalk and the old-style one-inch octagon tile and café tables, a high ceiling, lots of wood.  It feels as old as it is and I like it.  Apparently, in the 1970s the Genovese crime family ran a numbers game from this café.  The government took that over, calling it the New York Lottery.

Wimpy Boy's Social Club 247 Mulberry

There are a few interesting historic buildings in Little Italy.  At 247 Mulberry there used to be an Italian social club where John Gotti spent a lot of time.  Note the high windows in the photo - no drive-by shootings for the members of the Wimpy Boy's Social Club.  Since this photo was taken, the brick has been knocked out to make display windows for the new tenant - a high-end shoe store (opens at noon so don’t go there before lunch).   

Farther up Mulberry at Prince Street is the gothic Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral – the original.  Built in 1809, it now holds mass in English,

Spanish and Chinese.  That could be interesting.

Old Police HQ, 240 Center St.

The Old Police Headquarters is at 240 Centre Street (at Grand St.).  Just two blocks west of Mulberry, it’s worth seeing  – a massive beaux-arts building a block long made of solid limestone.  The first time I went there, I thought it was a real police station – it was turned into  lux condominiums – and the doorman directed me to the police station in Chinatown (fyi NYPD headquarters is now at 1 Police Plaza near the Brooklyn Bridge).

When you look at the Old Police Headquarters, you’ll notice that there are bars on the half-windows at street level.  These were for the 75 basement jail cells, and as New York realtors waste no space, these too are probably condos (I was never invited inside).  This gives cause to ponder what it’s like living in that building considering leftover vibes.  

 I once stayed in a Caritas hostel that was a former KGB interrogation building in Prague, Czech Republic.  The nuns hadn’t completely renovated the place, keeping the hard tile floor, and the echo of footsteps that must have put the fear of God into those waiting to be interrogated kept waking me in the night along with the slamming doors.  The basement of that hostel still had the thick, heavy prison doors and little square windows inside the rooms near the ceiling that barely gave a look out onto humanity.  So, I don’t think I’d want to own a condo in a former police station.  Too much to think about.

As you walk along Grand Street from Centre Street back toward Mulberry, you’ll pass the John Jovino Gun Shop which has been located at 183 Grand Street since 1911.  You can’t miss it because it has a big revolver hanging outside over the sidewalk.  It’s a tiny store and they sell mostly to NYPD.  They don’t like strangers browsing around - I know because I went inside to look at all the weapons.  It was weird..

On Grand St. just east of Mulberry is the famous Ferrara Bakery.  People line up to buy coffee and pastry here – long, long waits for a table at certain times and impossible waits during the San Gennaro Festival.  I had ice cream there once late at night before I even moved to Brooklyn.  It was nice, but not something I would wait in line for.    

And then there’s the San Gennaro Festival which is held every year during the week of September 19.  The Church of the Most Precious Blood on Mulberry just south of Grand Street hosts the shrine of San Gennaro and is open long hours during the festival. 

San Gennaro (St. Januaris) was a bishop in Naples, Italy who was beheaded by Diocletian in 305 a.d. and when the body was carried away, a woman mopped up his blood and saved it in two vials.   Not sure why this occurred to her, but the vials were reserved in a vault in Naples and in 1382 a.d. the dried blood liquefied on September 19.  That miracle generated the festival of San Gennaro. 

When a large number Neopolitans moved to Manhattan in the 19^th century, they brought their festivals with them.  The fete days of San Gennaro spilled out from the church onto the sidewalks of Little Italy in 1928 when three men who owned café/bakeries put tables and chairs onto the sidewalk a few days before September 19.  A statue of San Gennaro was carried up and down Mulberry Street and people pinned money to the statue which was intended to be distributed to the poor (or poorer).  The festival has grown from there, and now several blocks of Mulberry Street are blocked off for the festival and filled with all kinds of vendors.  There’s music and strings of lights and loads of people.  It’s free to pass through.

Because it’s well attended and religious, the festival continues in the face of heavy complaints from the residents living in Little Italy and Nolita who are no longer Italian working-class immigrants.  And there has been some criminal activity – at one time members of the Genovese crime family stole the money off the statue.  Really? 

Post by Alana Cash

CHINATOWN - MANHATTAN

Photo by Hu Totya

You exit the subway on Canal Street to immediate noise – car engines, diesel engines, honking, screeching, sirens, yelling, talking, and the general din of New York.   Canal Street leads to the Manhattan Bridge (the Brooklyn Bridge knockoff that carries the subways out of and into Brooklyn as well as cars and busses) so there's loads of traffic.  Chinatown may not have more people crowding the sidewalks than other parts of Manhattan, but it feels like it because the sidewalks and streets off Canal Street are narrower than uptown tourist places like Times Square and Rockefeller Center.  Those narrow streets add a sense of mystery and romance, most particularly after sunset when the neon lights and colored bulbs come on highlighting all the signs in Chinese script.  You could be somewhere far away.

Unless you live there, Chinatown is two-square miles of shopping, eating, and getting a cheap massage.  The most visible shopping spills out onto the sidewalks of Canal Street between Baxter and East Broadway.  Purses, backpacks, cheap jewelry, and sunglasses (umbrellas as soon as it starts to rain) sit on tables or hang from racks.  As you walk past these hole-in-the-wall stores whose doors roll up like garage doors, the hawkers invite you to buy and to bargain for a price.  These stores all sell basically the same merchandise that changes out every few weeks.

Canal Street in Chinatown is also where you can get a knockoff designer purse, wallet, watch, keychain, shoes, etc.  If you’re interested in that, just stand on any street corner and within a few seconds, someone will whisper, “Handbag? Handbag?  Watch?” and show you a wrinkled photographic menu of designer items.  If you get hooked, you follow someone to the back of a shop, or to a van parked on The Bowery, or down an alleyway to a door.  You’ll have a variety of Louis Vuitton, Coach, Chanel, or other famous brand goods to choose from – in the expensive versions ($hundreds) with genuine leather and brass trim or cheaper ($less and hundreds) which have polyurethane trim that doesn’t wrinkled or stain, but looks obviously fake and ends up in a thrift store instead of on eBay.  You can choose Rolex, Patek Philippe, and other watch brands as well.  Then you can brag that you have a genuine fake something or other.

The designers have boutique stores or have their goods for sale in high-end stores uptown, and they deeply frown at this illicit activity in Chinatown.  The police watch for it and I’ve seen people scatter when a police van arrived.  At one time, the entire block of stores from Baxter to Centre Street were shuttered and padlocked – for months.  It was quite a message. 

Purses and watches are not the only counterfeit items moving through Chinatown.  There’s also a lot of counterfeit money.  I remember once there was a 3-card-Monty game under a construction “shed” (what New York calls covered scaffolding).  I played that scam the first time I visited New York.  I broke even because there was a police car nearby and and I got him to come over and tell the man to return the money he’d cheated from me.  But I digress.  There was a game going on under the scaffolding on lower Broadway near Canal Street.  A tourist had been suckered into playing, but oddly, he was winning.  The crooks running the game were paying out.  It was fascinating and I stood there until I figured it out.  They were giving him counterfeit money.  Two counterfeit $20 bills for a real one.  They wouldn’t get caught passing counterfeit money, the tourist would have that wonderful experience.  I walked over to the Chinatown police precinct and suggested they send someone to play 3-card-Monty on lower Broadway.  This is a floating game all over midtown as well.  Anywhere there are crowds of tourist,s there is a Monty game.

Back to the good stuff.

There are a lot of massage places in Chinatown where you can get a very inexpensive one-hour reflexology session.  That was my weekly event.

I also did grocery shopping in Chinatown.  Along Canal from Baxter to Mulberry I chose from various tiny fresh vegetable and fruit stands at the edge of the sidewalk.  There were two fish markets side by side near Baxter Street.  And, one 3-floor general store that sold maybe 100 types of tea – loose tea in huge glass jars, loose tea in packages, and boxes of teabags.  They sold over 100 types of candy as well as cookies, spices, canned food, etc. 

There was at one time a terrific store on Lower Broadway called Pearl River.  It carried Chinese silk clothing, household products, beauty products all sorts of wonders on two floors creaky wooden floors.  There was plenty of space for wandering around, and it was a flow-through, meaning you could enter on Broadway and exit at the other end of the store onto Mercer Street.  Unfortunately, the rent was raised on this 30,000 square foot store from $100,000 per month to $500,000 per month (yes, that’s right, per month), and they closed down.  You can find Pearl River online though:  http://pearlriver.com/v3/index.asp

There used to be a lot of unique shops on lower Broadway – art dealers selling prints, boutiques owned by the designers who sold their own clothes there, music stores, rare book stores, and even a holographic “museum.”  All gone now because of high rents.  The chain stores have moved in – The Gap, American Apparel, Starbucks.  You could be at a mall in Kansas.

After shopping, comes hunger.  Sometimes I cruised south of Canal looking for a restaurant – there are many, but my favorite restaurant was actually Vietnamese – on Centre Street just south of Walker Street.  It was always crowded at lunchtime, so I tried to get there in the afternoon when there was a lull.  I liked to sit at a two-top table near the cash register and have a Vietnamese coffee (espresso dripped into condensed milk).  

And, more often than not, before going home, I stopped into Pearl Paint.  This is a multi-story art store on Canal Street near Broadway.  It has old wide-plank floors that creak, every kind of art supply you can imagine, and quite possibly the rudest staff you can find in New York.  Overcoming that, I went there to buy gel pens because they had a selection of 100s of colors and I used them up quickly.

More to come on Chinatown…