Chinatown and the Lower East Side

Why it matters

East of City Hall and south of Houston Street lie the two neighborhoods where much of immigrant New York began. The Lower East Side took in the great wave of arrivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of them into crowded tenement buildings. Chinatown grew on its western edge, around Mott Street, from the 1870s onward, and it is now home to the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, an estimated ninety to a hundred thousand in the neighborhood itself.

Neither is a museum piece. Both are working neighborhoods of shops, markets, restaurants and apartments, and the best way to see them is on foot, slowly, at mealtimes. They also sit below the grid of 1811, so the streets bend, meet at odd angles and carry names rather than numbers, which is a large part of their character.

Chinatown's old streets

The historic core of Chinatown is the small area bounded by Chatham Square and the Bowery, Worth Street, Baxter Street and Canal Street. Chinese immigrants began settling Mott Street south of Canal, and the nearby Mulberry, Bayard, Pell, Doyers and Worth Streets, in the 1870s. By 1882, when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, about two thousand people lived here, almost all of them men; the imbalance lasted until the act was repealed in 1943.

Mott Street is the spine. At number 62 stands the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, founded in 1883 and still the neighborhood's senior community organization; its building has been called the city hall of Chinatown. Further up the street is the Church of the Transfiguration, the oldest Roman Catholic church building in Manhattan, a reminder that other immigrant communities, Italians among them, lived on these streets before and alongside the Chinese.

Doyers Street, off Pell, is a single block with a sharp bend in the middle, one of the most photographed corners downtown. From 1893 to 1911, 5 to 7 Doyers Street housed the first Chinese-language theater in New York; in 1903 the community held a fundraiser there for the Jewish victims of a massacre in Kishinev.

From Five Points to a park

Columbus Park, at the western edge of Chinatown, is the neighborhood's only park and its living room: on any fine day it is full of card and mahjong players, tai chi, and families. It was built in 1897 over Mulberry Bend, a curve of Mulberry Street that had been the center of the Five Points, the most notorious slum of nineteenth-century New York. The reporter and photographer Jacob Riis, author of How the Other Half Lives, is generally credited with getting the slum cleared and the park made.

Since the 1980s and 1990s, many newer arrivals have come from Fujian province, and the streets east of the Bowery have become a Fuzhounese neighborhood of their own, while the older streets to the west remain largely Cantonese. The border runs roughly along the Bowery, Chrystie Street, Catherine Street and Chatham Square.

The Lower East Side

North and east of Chinatown the Lower East Side begins. Before the city reached it, this was farmland, and much of it belonged to James Delancey, whose pre-Revolutionary farm survives in the names of Delancey Street and Orchard Street. Delancey began laying out streets here in the 1760s and planned a square in the manner of London's West End; after the Revolution his loyalist family's land was confiscated and the square was replaced with a plain grid.

Some of the first tenements in New York went up here in the 1830s, and by the end of the century the district was packed with new arrivals. After the Second World War it became the city's first racially integrated neighborhood. Orchard Street was its market street, and walking it now, among the old brick walk-ups with their iron fire escapes, is the easiest way to picture the neighborhood's past.

The Tenement Museum

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum occupies two real tenements at 97 and 103 Orchard Street. Between them they housed an estimated fifteen thousand people from more than twenty nations: 97 Orchard Street from 1863 to 1935 and 103 Orchard Street from 1888 until 2015. When 97 Orchard was built it held twenty-two apartments and a basement saloon.

The museum has restored apartments and shops to show how particular families lived in different eras, and you see them on guided tours, some led by costumed interpreters playing former residents, alongside neighborhood walks and food tours. Booking a tour ahead is the safe way to be sure of a place; booking ahead covers this.

How to visit

The streets themselves are free to wander. Chinese greengrocers and fishmongers cluster around Mott, Mulberry and Canal Streets and all along East Broadway, and Columbus Park is at its busiest in the early morning, when the tai chi groups gather. Wear comfortable shoes and allow two or three hours for a wander that takes in Mott, Pell and Doyers Streets, Columbus Park, and then Orchard Street across the Bowery.

Much of the reason to come is the food, from bakeries to dumpling shops to the delis of the Lower East Side; eating and drinking describes what to look for. Canal Street is the busy commercial edge of Chinatown and a good landmark if you lose your bearings. Where to stay covers the Lower East Side as a base.

Nearby

The walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge starts a few blocks south of Chatham Square, and the old streets of Greenwich Village are a walk to the northwest across SoHo. City Hall and the courts are just to the south, on the way to Wall Street.