Little Italy Reprieved in City Guide to Immigrant Enclaves, but Map Shows Who Counts in Mamdani’s New York

Relenting in the face of criticism, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is agreeing to recognize Little Italy to the city’s map of “Immigrant Enclaves.” Yet the message of the original map was clear.On the guide to 30 distinctive neighborhoods across the five boroughs, Little Palestine was on the list. As was Little Pakistan, Little Yemen, Little Egypt, and Little Albania. Omitted from the tourist guide from the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, distributed for the World Cup, were enclaves including Little Italy, every Irish community from Woodlawn to Sunnyside, and Jewish neighborhoods in a city that is home to more Jews than any place on earth outside Israel. It was especially jarring that the neighborhood that gave America the very idea of a “Little” anything — Lower Manhattan’ Mulberry Street, where Italian immigrants arrived with nothing and built the churches, shops, and families that made modern New York, was nowhere to be found. Mulberry Street, the heart of New York City’s Little Italy, circa 1900. Via Wikimedia CommonsYet Borough Park, one of the largest Orthodox communities in the world, the Sephardi corridor of South Brooklyn, and the Bukharian Jewish community of Queens were notably absent as well.According to City Hall, the map highlights neighborhoods with “substantial foreign-born populations,” not religious groups. But as Isaac Choua of the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America observed, Brooklyn’s Sephardi corridor and the Bukharian Jews of Queens are immigrant communities by any definition, comparable in size to others the map celebrates. And Italian-Americans, as Joseph Scelsa of the Italian-American Museum noted in calling the omission a “terrible mistake,” remain one of the city’s largest ancestral populations.It is important to put this in context; this map is not a human tragedy. People did not die and rents did not rise because a flag was missing from a tourist brochure. Yet the episode is telling because a map like this is not the work of one careless staffer. The map reflects who the mayor hires, what those staff members consider worth celebrating, and the culture and tone that City Hall’s leadership sets from the top. And this is the mayor who, in 2020, posted a photograph of himself making a rude gesture to the Columbus statue in Astoria with the caption “Take it down.” A recent view of Manhattan’s Little Italy. Francesco Riccardo Iacomino/Getty ImagesThis spring Mr. Mamdani, too, became the first mayor in more than sixty years to skip the Israel Day Parade. When an administration is staffed by people formed in that mold and with those norms, the omissions draw themselves.In that sense, it’s gratifying to see that City Hall is changing course, at least when it comes to Little Italy. The larger point is that New Yorkers should not accept that this is how change occurs in this city. If the administration believes New York’s immigrant story needs to be told differently, that is a debate we can have openly, and Italian, Irish, and Jewish New Yorkers can take part in it like everyone else. What happened instead is that an official document simply left them out.Neighborhoods and the communal institutions within them are where civic life in New York actually happens and a City Hall with staffers that recognizes some of them and not others, for reasons it will not explain, does real damage even when the document itself is minor. If left unchecked, decisions like these can fuel the processes of marginalization and erasure. Mr. Mamdani won office with the support of an organized and deeply committed minority of voters, but most New Yorkers are not socialists and do not think about their city in these terms. The Italians, Irish, and Jews who were initially left off this map, along with the many New Yorkers who understand the city’s story as something we all inherit and pass on, far outnumber the people who produced such an image. At some point they will need to say so and speak up. Correcting the map is a start, but the real issue is the mindset behind it, and that is not going to change unless New Yorkers push back and they certainly have in the past.

Little Italy Reprieved in City Guide to Immigrant Enclaves, but Map Shows Who Counts in Mamdani’s New York

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