Quick answer
Chinatown is a Lower Manhattan neighborhood with the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, tracing its settlement to Chinese immigrants who arrived from the 1870s. Canal Street marks its northern edge, and Mott, Mulberry, Pell and Doyers hold its oldest blocks.
Full transcript
The oldest Chinatown in the West
New York's Chinatown is the largest and oldest Chinese enclave in the Western Hemisphere, and it squeezes that history into a tangle of narrow blocks south of Canal Street. Chinese immigrants arrived here from the 1870s, settling Mott, Mulberry, Pell, Doyers and Worth in the shadow of the growing city. Today its busy sidewalks hold more concentrated Chinese life than anywhere this side of the Pacific, and it anchors a regional community of more than a million people.
Streets that tell the story
Canal Street is the northern gateway, its curbs stacked with produce, cheap goods and crowds. Mott and Pell carry the historic core of the old community; Doyers is the famously angled street where the earliest settlement turned the corner. Cross the Bowery and you enter Little Fuzhou, settled by Cantonese and Fuzhounese speakers from the 1980s and 1990s along East Broadway. Every street is a chapter: the herbalists, the noodle bars, the tea counters, the small family shrines tucked between storefronts. Walk slowly and read the window signs as you go.
How to spend an hour or a day
Start at the Museum of Chinese in America on Centre Street to understand how much history stands behind the storefronts. Then eat your way up Mott Street — dumplings, hand-pulled noodles, roast duck hanging in the windows. Stray down Doyers and into the alleys for the quiet, older Chinatown the crowds miss. Watch the elders play cards in Columbus Park while you think about the tens of thousands who call these blocks home.