Chinatown is mayhem. It's a sea of humanity, an exercise in patience. For the urban hiker, it's like a challenging trail, or hiking with wet boots: at times painful, but you'll get through it and the payoff will be great. The colors, the smells, the contrast, are simply amazing.
Located towards the southern part of Manhattan, it sprawls between Tribeca, Soho and the Civic Center, although sprawling may not be the right word to illustrate what Chinatown is like. Crammed should give you the right mental image. Little Italy is squished within Chinatown in a sometimes surreal juxtaposition of east and west which makes this part of New York so interesting to me.
Take what I saw today: on Mulberry street, in the Chinese section south of Canal (cross Canal and you'll be in Little Italy), a small parade, sponsored by the Little Italy Merchants Association was assembling. It consisted of two Sorrento Cheese floats, a brass band, parade Grand Marshall Dominic Chianese (Uncle Junior ffrom The Sopranos), and a baby Jesus being pushed on some sort of double-decker push cart. There was even a priest.
The first problem occurred when the parade got going and had to cross Canal. In case you are not familiar with Canal Street, it's a major thoroughfare with multiple lanes of traffic and lots and lots of cars, trucks, buses and SUVs. That is where things got interesting and I witnessed an altercation of brass band leader versus SUV driver. A traffic cop intervened, shouting ensued and eventually all the traffic blocking the intersection was cleared and the parade traversed Canal into Little Italy.
Once in Little Italy territory, the sidewalks were crowded with onlookers, some comfortable in lawn chairs, but most not knowing exactly what to make of it. Some giggled, some gawked and others tried to pay attention, but were distracted by the offerings of shiny merchandise by the local stores with displays spilling out into the sidewalk. The people riding in the two floats seemed just as confused. Chianese, riding in some contraption made to look sorta like the Christmas version of the North Pole (but not really) schmoozed the crowd who responded cheering once they realized who he was. Women boarded the float for pictures. In the back of the float, Santa ho-hoed the kids in the crowd in the best Santaly way he could conjure up. Beneath the sleeves of his costume, golden chains peeked out and that, to me, added to the mystique and pseudo absurdity of it all.
Eventually the winner of what I presume to be the Italian-American version of American Idol was introduced and began to sing, Pavarotti style. A woman in the crowd dragged her husband away from the door of an eating establishment he seemed quite intent on entering by saying "Honey, let's go see, they are playing opera music." For whatever reason, that stuck me as funny.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the parade with its small-town-with New-York-attitude ambience, it was time to move on and continue my planned walk through Chinatown. So it was like that, with no fanfare, that I turned the corner and headed back to Canal Street. The brass band and the tenor faded into the distance, gradually replaced by the cacophony of "Rolex watch? Tiffany, Chanel!"
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