New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing backlash from the Italian-American community after a newly released map of New York City’s immigrant enclaves left out a key immigrant neighborhood: Little Italy.
The city’s “New York City Immigrant Enclaves” guide highlights 30 neighborhoods across the five boroughs, from Koreatown in Manhattan to Little Pakistan in Brooklyn and Little Yemen in the Bronx. But among the omissions was Little Italy, the iconic Manhattan neighborhood long synonymous with Italian-American culture that remains one of the city’s best-known tourist destinations. The map also excluded notable Irish and Jewish immigrant neighborhoods.
“This is not a clerical error. This is cultural erasure,” Mike Crispi, president of the Italian American Civil Rights League, said. “Little Italy is sacred ground. It is where Italian immigrants came with nothing, worked like hell, opened shops, raised families, built churches, fed the city, and helped make New York what it is.”
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“Mamdani’s City Hall can find room for every fashionable progressive constituency, but somehow it cannot find Little Italy,” Crispi said. “Our culture is good enough for their photo ops, our food is good enough for their fundraisers, and our neighborhoods are good enough for tourism dollars — but when it comes time to recognize Italian Americans, they erase us.”
The league called on Mamdani to update the map, issue a public apology to Italian Americans, and include Little Italy and other historic Italian-American neighborhoods in future city projects recognizing immigrant heritage.
“Walk down Mulberry Street and you see everything Mamdani’s map refused to see,” Crispi said. “You see the flags, the saints, the food, the families, Baby John’s cannolis, John Viola’s Red Sauce Studio, and the old-school Italian-American grit that built this city. Little Italy is not dead. Little Italy is not optional. Little Italy is New York.”
A City Hall spokesperson defended the map, saying it was never intended to catalog every ethnic or religious community in the city, in a statement to the New York Post. Instead, it “highlights neighborhoods in New York City that have substantial foreign-born populations from regions and countries around the world.”
The spokesperson noted that Little Odessa, which is included on the map, has a substantial Jewish population, pushing back on criticism that Jewish communities had been excluded.
Spencer Pratt, a former Los Angeles mayoral candidate, slammed Mamdani’s map.
“Leaving out the Italian, Jewish, and Irish enclaves in NYC is like leaving out Mexican and Persian enclaves in LA,” he wrote in a post on X. “It’s not an ‘oopsie!’ This is deliberate subversion. The communist must erase your history so he can demolish your home and make it his own.”
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Officials said the guide is intended to help tourists explore some of New York City’s diverse immigrant neighborhoods rather than serve as a comprehensive inventory of every cultural enclave.
“The immigrant enclave series began during the [Eric] Adams administration, and we are planning to add more neighborhoods in the upcoming months,” the spokesperson said.
