Mulberry Street (Manhattan)

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Mulberry Street (Manhattan) – Simple overview

Mulberry Street is a major street in Lower Manhattan, New York City. It’s famous for its Italian-American history and for being the old heart of Little Italy. The street runs north-south, between Baxter Street and Worth Street, passing through Little Italy and Chinatown. Today it shows a mix of old immigrant areas and nearby urban development.

Location and what’s nearby
- Mulberry Street sits between Baxter Street to the north and Mott Street to the east, with Worth Street toward the south.
- It passes through areas known as Little Italy and Chinatown. The east side has several funeral homes, while the street winds toward Chinatown in the south.

History in brief
- The street has appeared on maps since at least 1755.
- A bend in Mulberry Street, called Mulberry Bend, was created to avoid swampy Collect Pond.
- During the American Revolution, Mulberry Street was sometimes called Slaughter-House Street because of a slaughterhouse on the corner of Mulberry and Bayard Streets (the name stuck until around 1784 when the slaughterhouse was moved).
- Mulberry Bend and Mulberry Street were part of Five Points, a famous slum area. Other streets forming Five Points included Anthony (Worth), Cross (Mosco), Orange (Baxter), and Little Water Street (no longer exists).

Mulberry Bend and Columbus Park
- Mulberry Bend was a steep, narrow bend with crowded tenements and many people in the streets.
- Photographer Jacob Riis documented this area as a symbol of urban slums in his work, including The Battle with the Slum (1902).
- In the 1890s, the city bought out many slumlords and replaced many tenements with Columbus Park, at the southern end of Mulberry Street, to improve the area.

Notable buildings and sites
- Puck Building: a historic building near the north end of the street at Houston Street.
- Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral: a landmark church located along Mulberry Street.
- Church of the Most Precious Blood: at 113 Baxter Street, built by Italian immigrants.
- Ravenite Social Club: located near the corner of Prince Street, notable in crime history.
- Italian American Museum: at 155 Mulberry Street and Grand Street, in the building that used to house the Banca Stabile, an old Italian immigrant bank.
- The street area also features historic images and other older buildings from the Italian-American era.

The Feast of San Gennaro
- Every September, Mulberry Street is closed to traffic for the Feast of San Gennaro, a large Italian-American street festival.
- The festival began in 1926 and continues today, claimed to be the largest Italian-American festival in New York and possibly in the United States.

Mulberry Street in culture
- Mulberry Street has appeared in books and music.
- The King of Mulberry Street (Donna Jo Napoli) is a novel about a boy who travels from Italy to New York and settles on Mulberry Street.
- Billy Joel’s song Big Man on Mulberry Street comes from his The Bridge album.
- The band Twenty One Pilots has a track called Mulberry Street on the album Scaled and Icy.

In short, Mulberry Street is a historic artery of New York’s immigrant story, once the center of Little Italy, with notable buildings, a famous bend, a dramatic past of slums and reform, and a continuing culture marked by the annual San Gennaro festival.