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Chinatown new york stories

There are actually five Chinatown's in New York City, but the one I visited is the one most people think of and it's in Manhattan.

The Manhattan Chinatown, bordering the lower East Side and Little Italy, is home to around 100,000 people of Chinese descent. Within this section of the city are smaller neighborhoods that are home to people from various parts of China and those neighborhoods have their own nicknames. Little Hong Kong and Little Fuzhou for example.

The Chinatown neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens are both about twice the size of Chinatown Manhattan. Queens is the biggest with almost 250,000 residents.

You can easily spend a day in Chinatown. You can cover every street, as I did, and still not see everything. The people, the choices, the activity is too dense for you to catch it all. Most of the photos in this spread, for instance, were taken on one street; Mott Street. Chinatown covers several blocks.

This part of the city was first populated by Chinese immigrants in the mid to late 1800s with another explosion in population coming about a hundred years later when immigration policies were relaxed.

From early in the morning the streets of Chinatown are filled with the hand to hand commerce so well known in other parts of the world. Fresh food including meat, fish, vegetables, and exotic fruits are the main products for sale, but there are also imports from the old country, clothing and household needs.

Business is transacted loudly, with bargaining, and mostly in Chinese dialects, but cash is an effective translator.

For many immigrants New York is the place to be, but in Chinatown, generations have successfully transplanted their world into a new country and created a unique culture.

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© Dean Pagani 2022

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© Dean Pagani 2022

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