Little Italy Mulberry Street
— — a street that still smells like a Sunday kitchen.
Not only on a wall.
“Mulberry Street runs through what is left of Little Italy, a few blocks of red-awning restaurants and old social clubs squeezed between Chinatown to the south and Nolita to the north. Ferrara's has been making sfogliatelle on Grand Street since 1892. Each September the Feast of San Gennaro closes the street for eleven days and strings lights between the fire escapes. The neighbourhood is smaller than it was a century ago, but the block between Hester and Grand still reads, in the late afternoon, exactly the way New York keeps remembering it. from the studio
Little Italy Mulberry Street, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Little Italy on Manhattan's Lower East Side once stretched across much of what is now Nolita and Chinatown; by the 2010 census only about a thousand residents of Italian ancestry remained inside its historic bounds. The neighbourhood that still reads as Little Italy is concentrated on Mulberry Street between Canal and Broome, with a few cross-blocks east and west. The Italian Special Natural District, designated by the city in 1996 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010, runs roughly from Canal Street north to Houston, preserving the tenement frontages, social clubs, and shops that defined the immigrant settlement after 1880.
The Feast of San Gennaro has run on Mulberry Street every September since 1926, when immigrants from Naples first carried the saint's image through the streets to mark his September 19 feast day. Today the eleven-day festival closes Mulberry from Canal to Houston and Grand from Mott to Baxter, draws roughly a million visitors, and ends with a procession behind a statue of the saint borrowed from the Most Precious Blood Church on Baxter Street. Sausage and pepper stands, zeppole carts, and cannoli-eating contests line the curb. The lights between the fire escapes go up in the first week of September.
Mulberry Street is open year-round; the closest subway stops are Canal Street on the 6, N, Q, R, and W trains and Spring Street on the 6. Ferrara Bakery and Café at 195 Grand Street, opened in 1892, claims to be the first espresso bar in the United States and is the longest-running business on the strip; Da Nico, Il Cortile, and Pellegrino's anchor the restaurant blocks north of Hester. Most kitchens turn over twice on a Friday evening. Mid-September is the busiest stretch of the year with the feast; January and February are the quietest, when reservations are easy and the lights still cross the street.