Mott Street

I had forgotten about it until today.

Yo, Mott Street is popping.

Chinatown One is better than ever.

I have never seen a Mott Street right below Canal with this many delicious options.

options.Where do you put Moscow Street into this?

What's on Moscow that you're thinking of?

Boy, COVID would never have stood a chance.

Just taking it down those six stairs into the basement on Mott Street.

This place, folks, used to be open 24-7.

They would close for one hour on a Sunday night, which I managed to hit one time.

There were other women's letters mixed in as well, and Leon, as the press would soon notice, didn't lack for correspondence from women, but it was Elsie's that stacked the highest.

A few blocks east on Mott Street, a man named Chu Gain managed the Port Arthur restaurant, one of Chinatown's nicer rooms.

When detectives brought him in for questioning, Chu Gain made a few admissions of his own.

He'd also been seeing Elsie and he had recent letters from her in which she called him her one true love and asked him not to mind that Leon was hanging around.

He hated Mr. Rosenzweig's shop, and the sweaty hugs of his zaftig aunts, and the crazy curls of the Hasids.

But he loved the Torah, and the kids who played stickball on Mott Street.

And he loved the food.

Chopped liver, and blintzes, and matzo ball soup.

[laughs] This-

No, this was literally, I'm driving by, I'm driving on, like, Mott Street or something, and I look over, and he's about to cross the room.

Like, that's...

He is a very low-key c- I'm sure can move around pretty easily.

Yeah, it was a big feast.

The whole street, Little Italy, Mott Street, the whole thing was...

Yeah, the three restaurants that make up Little Italy in Manhattan, the three Italian restaurants that are left...

It's all taken

And the Chinese are getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

Yeah, Little Italy just is shrinking.

Yeah, like Mott Street.

That's what I saw.

This is a great discussion.

I was born on Mott Street, so I'm 72 years old, and I have distinct memories, uh, from when I was in high school from '68 to '72 of men strewn on the street-

Mm-hmm

... on the sidewalk between Houston and Spring dead drunk.

In fact, the brawl got so large that it eventually spilled out onto the Manhattan Bridge, and it brought traffic to a halt.

Concurrently, at the corner of Grand and Mott Streets, where Chinatown met Little Italy, roughly 50 young men lined the narrow street waiting to snatch straw hats.

Now, several of the hat hunters, they acquired a 10 foot long or three meter long pole, which they poked through the open windows of the passing trolley cars.

And of course, they were doing that to knock the hats off the unsuspecting passengers.

I get an email saying, oh, we're locked and loaded.

Call time is 1230 on, you know, Mott Street down there in Little Italy.

And we'll see you then, Joe.

And they had like they were they were like 20 people copied.

And then Stacey had driven.

She drove me in, and we had the car, so we could have kicked up.

I think it's Mott Street, and I could have driven up.

But no, I'll walk.

Yeah, she was on Christie Street at that time.

She started on Mott Street down in Chinatown earlier.

But by the time I became aware of the Catholic Worker and Dorothy Day was in 1959.

And I went there almost every night for six, eight months.