One of the largest Chinese communities in the western hemisphere, and the best cheap eating in Manhattan. Bring cash.
The oldest and not the biggest
Chinese immigrants settled around Mott and Pell Streets from the 1870s, largely men, largely from Guangdong, and largely trapped here by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred nearly all further immigration and was not fully repealed until 1943. The community that grew in that enclosed period is why Manhattan’s Chinatown looks and feels the way it does.
The immigration reforms of 1965 brought a much larger wave, and later arrivals — particularly Fujianese from the 1980s — settled east of the Bowery around East Broadway, which is a distinct and less-visited part of the neighbourhood.
Manhattan is no longer the largest Chinese community in New York. Flushing in Queens and Sunset Park in Brooklyn are both bigger and, for a lot of the food, better.
Eating
This is the cheapest good eating in Manhattan and it covers several regional cuisines that are not interchangeable.
Dim sum in the big banquet halls on East Broadway and Elizabeth Street, carts and all, best before noon at the weekend.
Hand-pulled noodles and Northern Chinese food around Eldridge Street.
Cantonese roast meats hanging in windows on Mott and Bayard — roast duck, char siu, soy chicken, sold by the pound.
Vietnamese on Baxter and Bayard, which is a legacy of the ethnic Chinese who left Vietnam after 1975.
Malaysian and Fujianese around East Broadway.
Bakeries everywhere for egg tarts, pineapple buns and pork buns for a couple of dollars.
Walking it
Doyers Street is a sharp dogleg alley that was once nicknamed the Bloody Angle for tong-war ambushes, and now holds a barbershop, a couple of bars and the oldest dim sum restaurant in the neighbourhood.
Columbus Park is where the neighbourhood actually lives — mahjong, xiangqi, tai chi from early morning, and an erhu player most afternoons. It was the site of the Five Points slum before that.
Canal Street is the market spine, loud and heavy on counterfeit handbags.
The Museum of Chinese in America on Centre Street is small, well made and worth an hour.
The Eldridge Street Synagogue, a few blocks east, is a restored 1887 Moorish Revival synagogue standing in what is now Chinatown, and it is one of the most beautiful interiors downtown.
More Neighborhoods
Midtown
Where the skyscrapers, the theatres and most of the hotels are. Nobody who lives in New York would choose to live here, and almost every visitor should stay here once.
Lower Manhattan
The oldest part of the city, where the streets predate the grid and bend around vanished shorelines. Offices by day, increasingly residential by night.
Greenwich Village
Low brick townhouses on streets that ignore the grid, because the Village was a separate settlement before the grid arrived and refused to be redrawn.