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Manhattan

Nolita

Old Little Italy's northern blocks: a brick cathedral, red-sauce rooms, and the city's best tie-dye pizza.

Nolita is short for North of Little Italy, a name that turned up in the newspapers in the mid-1990s and stuck. It covers the few blocks between Houston and roughly Broome Street, from Lafayette to the Bowery — Mulberry, Mott and Elizabeth running north–south through all of it. For a century these were Italian tenement streets, and the Feast of San Gennaro still fills Mulberry each September.

The anchor is St. Patrick's Old Cathedral on Mulberry Street, built between 1809 and 1815 and the seat of the archdiocese until the Fifth Avenue cathedral opened in 1879. Its brick walls enclose a graveyard that runs along Mott and Prince, and the old trees above them make the corner feel older than anything else in the area.

Around it, the storefronts have turned over to small boutiques and some of the most-loved restaurants downtown. A family red-sauce room on Houston Street still takes no reservations; a pizza parlor on Mulberry has kept its line for more than a decade; a candlelit room on Elizabeth roasts meat over a wood fire. Come for dinner, but come early enough to walk the blocks while the shops are open.

Brick walls and old trees around St. Patrick's Old Cathedral

Tenement storefronts turned small boutiques on Mott and Elizabeth

Red-sauce Italian and thin-crust pizza on Mulberry and Houston

The Feast of San Gennaro filling Mulberry Street in September

Local notes

St. Patrick's Old Cathedral

Designed by Joseph-François Mangin, co-architect of City Hall, and dedicated in 1815; the interior was rebuilt after an 1866 fire. Pope Benedict XVI made it a minor basilica in 2010. The parish runs tours of the catacombs beneath it — check the basilica's site for times.

Feast of San Gennaro

Held on Mulberry Street every September for nearly a century, with sausage-and-pepper stands, zeppole and a procession for the saint. It spills from Little Italy into Nolita's lower blocks; come on a weekday evening for the least crush.

The Puck Building

The red-brick 1885 building at Lafayette and Houston, with a gilded statue of Puck over the corner door, once printed the humor magazine of the same name. It marks Nolita's northwest corner.

Through the lens

The cathedral's brick wall along Mott Street is best in late afternoon when the sun rakes across it from the west. Mott and Elizabeth between Prince and Spring are tenement-and-fire-escape blocks — shoot looking south in morning light, before the sidewalks fill.

Editorial draft — core details last reviewed October 13, 2026. Confirm practical details with the official site before you go.

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