Chinatown New York City is the biggest in the United States, with the largest concentration of Chinese in the Western Hemisphere. It is located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. With an area covering two square miles, Chinatown is home to a resident population estimated at 150,000. Manhattan’s Chinatown is loosely bounded by Lafayette, Worth, Grand and East Broadway streets. 

Some of the most detailed passages of imagery happen when a character is seeing something new for the first time, and this is true of when Mario ventures into Sai Fong's shop in Chinatown. He takes in all his surroundings, and the descriptive passages allow readers to feel as if they are walking into the shop, too. 

Chinatown is a surprisingly diverse neighborhood. Since the 1800’s the area today called Chinatown has been home to the highest number of immigrants in New York, representing a variety of ethnic groups. In the mid-1800’s, the Irish, Germans, and freed slaves resided here and by the late 1880’s and into early 1900’s the next wave of immigrants brought Eastern European Jews, Chinese, and Italians. 

Today, the majority of Chinatown's inhabitants are from the Guangdong, Toisan and Fujian Providences in China as well as Hong Kong. The Cantonese community today is well established in this area whereas the Fujianese people, who come from Fujian Province on the southern coast of mainland China, are considered the “new immigrants”. The neighborhood is also home to Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Burmese, Vietnamese, Filipinos and West Africans, among others. 

The Chinese first arrived in the US in the early 1800s. Many of these new immigrants worked during the gold rush in mining, manufacturing, and building railroads. The Chinese in the U.S., were largely self-supporting, with a growing internal structure of governing associations and businesses that provided jobs, economic aid, social services and protection. 

Life became more difficult with the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943), limiting the growth of Chinatown. Chinatown has been growing steadily since the elimination of the immigration quota in 1968. 

Today Chinatown is home to hundreds of garment factories that have an annual payroll bill of over $200 million, a jewelry district that rakes in approximately a $100 million in gold and diamond sales per year, over 200 restaurants that attract thousands of tourists, and 27 banks, by far the highest bank-per-capita ratio in the city. 

There are sooo many cool things to do in Chinatown!!

Vibrant Chinatown is a densely populated neighborhood that draws foodies and tourists to its many Chinese and Southeast Asian restaurants for dumplings, pork buns and hand-pulled noodles. 

The busy sidewalks are packed with souvenir stores, bubble tea shops, and markets selling everything from fresh and dried fish to herbs and spices. Locals hang out in leafy Columbus Park for Tai Chi, chess and mahjong. 

Soup dumplings are a staple dish in Chinese and, in particular, Shanghainese cuisine thought to be invented in the late 1800s. They are made using a very thin dumpling skin that's rolled out and flattened into small circles.

MOTT STREET is where visitors can truly feel the hustle and bustle of Chinatown. A plethora of banners and signs with Chinese writing, some of Chinatown’s most popular restaurants and shops, and the rhythms of Mandarin and Cantonese dialects fill this narrow street. The oldest street in Chinatown inhabited by the Chinese, it is also the site of the Chinese Community Center and the Eastern States Buddhist Temple of America. 

The street is also home to 32 Mott Street (where the oldest shop in Chinatown used to stand – established in 1891), and 41 Mott Street (the only building that remains with a wooden pagoda roof). 

Visitors are welcome to tour the National Historic Landmark and learn about its time as a cultural hotspot in the bustling Jewish Lower East Side, to its decades of decay, to its miraculous rebirth as a 21st-century Museum in present day Chinatown. 

Throughout China and Japan, a teahouse (Chinese: 茶館, cháguăn or 茶屋, cháwū; Japanese: chaya (茶屋); Standard Nepali: chiya ghar (चिया घर)) is traditionally a place which offers tea to its customers. People gather at teahouses to chat, socialize and enjoy tea, and young people often meet at teahouses for dates. 

An integral part of everyday life for the Chinese, tea houses offer visitors a place to relax and re-charge after walking and shopping in Chinatown. Try different varieties of Chinese tea and enjoy a snack at the same time 

The origins of ice cream are both mythical and abstract, including legends attributing the invention of ice cream to the Chinese during the Tang Dynasty. 

There are a few different choices for ice cream (or bubble tea) in Chinatown. Egloo is good, or Juicy Spot.  Sam's Fried if you like that. Mochidoki if mochi is your thing. 

But best flavor-wise is probably Chinese Ice Cream Factory.  For more than 30 years they've been serving up quality, authentic, homemade traditional Chinese recipes. Their flavors are so interesting and also delicious. There are ones like Almomd Cookie , Pineapple or Mango, Red Bean, Durian, Lychee, Green Tea, Black Sesame and Don Tot (Light creamy Chinese egg custard).

About a hundred headstones and aboveground tombs can still be seen in what remains of the old graveyard, which lies above street level on the south side of St. James Place.  Congregation Shearith Israel continues to maintain the cemetery, and it also has an annual Memorial Day ceremony at the site in honor of the Revolutionary War veterans buried there. 

SO many other things to do and see!!