Italian New York
From Mulberry Street to Bensonhurst and Staten Island.
Little Italy, 1910
Around Mulberry Street seven in ten people mapped in 1910, about 60,000, were of Italian stock. Little Italy was one of several: East Harlem and South Brooklyn had their own.
Bensonhurst, 1930
New subway lines reached southern Brooklyn in the 1910s, and families followed. By 1930 about 91,000 people of Italian stock lived in Bensonhurst and its neighbors, 44% of everyone mapped. Citywide, Italians were now the largest single origin, about a million people.
The peak, 1970
At the peak in 1970, six in ten people mapped here were of Italian stock, about 85,000. Citywide about 680,000 New Yorkers were of Italian stock.
Across the Narrows, today
After the Verrazzano bridge opened in 1964, many moved on to Staten Island. Today a third of those mapped on its South Shore, about 64,000, report Italian ancestry, while in Bensonhurst Asian New Yorkers, 40%, are now the largest group.
Where New York Came From: a map of NYC immigration and ancestry, 1910 to today
All stories
- Harlem and the Great Migration
- From Italian Harlem to El Barrio
- Brooklyn's Nordic waterfront
- Finns, Lithuanians and Estonians
- New York's three Chinatowns
- The Lower East Side
- Jewish New York
- Little Odessa
- Redlining's long shadow
- Italian New York
- Washington Heights and Dominican New York
- German New York
- A century in seven stops