Has anyone ever heard of Little Palestine or eaten at a Tibetan restaurant in New York? When visiting New York, what is your favorite Guyanese festival?
In a recent map of New York City’s immigrant neighborhoods produced in association with the World Cup, New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, excluded Italian neighborhoods despite the fact that Italians were one of the city’s largest immigrant groups and among its greatest contributors to its culture. Mamdani lives in New York, yet somehow does not know what the city is famous for or which ethnicity has become an institution known around the world: the New York Italian.
Instead, the map included much newer and smaller communities that, in some cases, number only a few hundred people, have had little or no impact on the city’s culture, and that most New Yorkers have never heard of. These include Little Tibet, Little Palestine, Little Africa, Little Guyana, Little Bangladesh, and Little Egypt.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion means not only excluding whites and Europeans but also rewriting history to eliminate or vilify the contributions of whites and Europeans while exaggerating the contributions of minorities. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal recently claimed that immigrants from Somalia built the United States of America. As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said, “This country was built by Somalis, Indians, Latinos, Africans.”
Italians have shaped New York since the era of mass immigration to the United States. Between the 1880s and 1920, more than 4 million Italians arrived in the United States, making them the single largest immigrant group and accounting for more than 10 percent of the nation’s foreign-born population at the time. Most entered through New York, first via Castle Garden and, after 1892, through Ellis Island, although other major U.S. ports, including Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, and New Orleans, also received large numbers of Italian immigrants directly.
Roughly a third of Italian immigrants settled in New York City, building neighborhoods from Little Italy and Arthur Avenue to Astoria, Bensonhurst, and Staten Island’s South Shore, now the most Italian-American county in the country. Their labor built the subway system, the Brooklyn Bridge, and much of the city’s early infrastructure.
Today, New York State holds the largest Italian-American population of any state, about 2.2 million residents, or 11.1 percent of the state’s population. That heritage is marked every October with the Columbus Day Parade, organized by the Columbus Citizens Foundation since 1929, drawing 35,000 marchers and roughly a million spectators to Fifth Avenue and broadcast to more than 7.4 million television households, also carried live on RAI International.
Columbus Day has been a federal holiday since 1971, the first tied to a specific ethnic heritage, and remains one of only two such federal holidays — the other being Juneteenth, added in 2021. America itself was named after Amerigo Vespucci, whose accounts convinced European mapmakers that the land Columbus reached was a separate continent, not part of Asia.
Beyond the parade, Little Italy has filled with crowds every September since 1926 for the Feast of San Gennaro, which has grown from a one-day religious observance into an 11-day festival drawing more than a million visitors to Mulberry, Hester, and Grand Streets, with more than 300 vendors lining the route and a Solemn High Mass and religious procession alongside the cannoli, carnival rides, and live music.
The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is known for its “giglio” lift, while smaller parish feasts, including San Rocco and Santa Rosalia, and the annual “Ferragosto” street festivals on Arthur Avenue and in Belmont, continue the tradition of public religious and cultural celebration tied to Italian immigrant parishes.
These parades and feasts, alongside Italian-American food, fashion, and decades of film and television, have become fixtures of the city’s identity and its image abroad, feeding into both the stereotypes and the pride long associated with Italian New York.
Italian food consistently ranks among the top two or three cuisines globally across surveys and social media analyses, trading the top spot with Chinese food depending on the methodology used. New York is famous for its Italian restaurants. Estimates of the number of Italian restaurants in New York City vary by source and by how “Italian” is defined, ranging from roughly 560 to more than 1,500. That figure can roughly triple if pizzerias, which are typically counted separately, are included.
New York’s pizzeria culture traces to Lombardi’s, which opened in 1905 as the first licensed pizzeria in the United States, and Italian-American cooking has since become inseparable from the city’s food identity, from chicken and veal parm to baked ziti, meatballs, and Sunday gravy. Italian ices and cannoli, the latter popularized by Ferrara Bakery since 1892, along with delis, and the espresso and cappuccino culture rooted in Little Italy’s coffeehouses are part of the city’s daily life.
Italian-American New York has supplied some of the most recognizable material in American film and television, from The Godfather, Goodfellas, Mean Streets, A Bronx Tale, Donnie Brasco, and Casino to The Sopranos, Jersey Shore, and Growing Up Gotti. Saturday Night Fever and Moonstruck are both set in Italian-American Brooklyn, and the 2024 film Cabrini dramatizes Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini’s work among Italian immigrants in Lower Manhattan’s Five Points.
The comedy in My Cousin Vinny brought the Italian-American attitude and culture to a small town in Alabama, showing how the outside world perceives the New York Italian and how unique that culture is compared to other parts of the country.
Fonzie, Arthur “The Fonz” Fonzarelli from the TV show Happy Days, is one of the most memorable characters in American sitcom history. Although the show is set in Milwaukee, the character’s backstory is that he is an Italian-American from New York. He is just one of many Italian-American New Yorkers who have become iconic television characters.
Three of the most influential television series of the 1990s, Friends, Seinfeld, and The Sopranos, all featured prominent Italian-American characters, from Joey Tribbiani on Friends and George Costanza on Seinfeld to the cast of The Sopranos. Other memorable examples include Vinnie Barbarino on Welcome Back, Kotter and the ensemble of Everybody Loves Raymond.
The “wise guy” archetype, drawn from Mulberry Street and Little Italy, has become visual shorthand for organized crime in the American imagination, alongside softer images of the pizzeria owner, the deli counter, and the stoop culture of brownstone Brooklyn. Italian-American slang, including “fuhgeddaboudit,” “goomba,” and “paisan,” has worked its way into general New York vernacular, and Frank Sinatra remains one of the most enduring Italian-American symbols of the city itself.
Italian-Americans impacted the fashion associated with New York. John Gotti’s tailored “Dapper Don” style and Frank Sinatra’s fedora-and-suit look became templates for a broader New York aesthetic, echoed later in Tony Manero’s white suit in Saturday Night Fever. Gold jewelry, including cornicello pendants (Italian horns), crucifixes, pinky rings, and layered chains, remains a recognizable marker of Italian-American style, as does the “guido/guidette” subculture popularized nationally through Jersey Shore. At the higher end, Gianni Versace’s presence at New York Fashion Week and Domenico Vacca’s Fifth Avenue flagship tie Italian design directly to the city’s luxury retail corridor.
By rejecting Italian-Americans, Mamdani is also rejecting figures who were significant to New York’s history and had a national impact. New York City has had four Italian-American mayors: Fiorello La Guardia, the city’s first, who served three terms from 1934 to 1945; Vincent Impellitteri, from 1950 to 1953; Rudy Giuliani, from 1994 to 2001; and Bill de Blasio, from 2014 to 2021.
New York State has had five governors of Italian descent. Charles Poletti became the nation’s first Italian-American governor in 1942, completing the final month of Herbert H. Lehman’s term. Mario Cuomo was the state’s first elected Italian-American governor, serving from 1983 to 1994, and his son Andrew Cuomo served from 2011 to 2021. George Pataki, of Italian descent through his mother, served from 1995 to 2006. Al Smith, governor from 1919 to 1920 and 1923 to 1928 and the first Italian-American major-party presidential nominee in 1928, had partial Italian ancestry through his paternal grandfather, Emanuele Ferraro of Genoa.
Antonin Scalia rose from Queens to the U.S. Supreme Court. Italian-Americans have also served as New York City Borough Presidents across multiple administrations, most consistently on Staten Island, including Ralph J. Lamberti, Guy Molinari, Anthony R. Gaeta, James Molinaro, James Oddo, and Vito Fossella, alongside Andrew J. DiPaola in Queens.
Mamdani’s selections for the immigrant-neighborhood map, including Little Tibet, Little Palestine, Little Africa, Little Guyana, Little Bangladesh, and Little Egypt, combined have not had as much impact on New York as Italian-Americans.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/07/mamdani-is-wrong-italians-contributed-more-new-york/
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