Lower East Side, Chinatown, Little Italy, SoHo and Greenwich Village

Between 1880 and 1920, almost 2 million Eastern European Jews had settled in and made a lasting mark on New York's Lower East Side. Chinatown is the largest Chinese community in the Western Hemisphere. A major tourist attraction, Little Italy has shrunk to a small, yet enticing, stretch of Italian restaurants, bakeries and food shops. SoHo, built as a business district dominated by a distinctive cast-iron architectural style, became an artists' community in the mid-twentieth century when they began squatting in the buildings which had been abandoned. Now it's a major shopping district. Greenwich Village was a farming community settled by freed slaves in the 1640s. After being a magnet for artists in the nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, what remains is a charming neighborhood now prime real estate. In this tour, we walk through these distinctive areas that abut and overlap in interesting and delightful ways.