Toward the end of 1999, I was living in Atlanta when a friend called with an intriguing offer. He’d finally scraped together enough money for a down payment on a place, and the modest one-bedroom apartment he’d been renting, a fourth-floor walkup in an old tenement building in downtown Manhattan, would be available. What really sold me, before I even set foot inside, was the address, on Mulberry Street, in the heart of Little Italy. Both of my parents are Italian immigrants. Neither had ever lived in New York; they arrived separately in Detroit, where they met and married. Nonetheless, from a distance, I felt a visceral attraction to the neighborhood. Metropolitan Detroit had Italian markets, bakeries, churches (including one that still held masses in Italian); a place for spumoni, another place where you could pick up kits to make your own wine; an import shop that sold Italian-language greeting cards and magazines like Oggi and those gross candied wedding almonds more suitable for lining the bottom of an aquarium than eating—but we didn’t have a street, and certainly not the street where I’d wound up, the street of iconic Jacob Riis photographs, famous Mob hits, and Martin Scorsese movies.

Scorsese had in fact grown up two streets over, on Elizabeth, where the Sicilians lived at the time (Neapolitans having settled Mulberry), and he’d been an altar boy at Old St. Patrick’s, just a block from my new place. Years later, I happened to be standing near the back entrance of the church, making a phone call, when Scorsese himself exited. I froze instinctively, not wanting to startle the rare bird in its natural habitat. It was a weekday afternoon. He wore a dark woollen trenchcoat and quickly slipped into a chauffeured car idling at the curb. My time in the neighborhood felt charmed that way.

Mulberry Street itself proved more complicated. Until I flew up to New York to sign my lease, I didn’t realize that the Little Italy I’d imagined as my new home was actually a couple of blocks south of my apartment. My stretch of Mulberry had been colonized by neighboring SoHo and rebranded as Nolita, which sounded vaguely ethnic but was actually a dumb acronym, short for “north of Little Italy.” I soon learned the north–south divide was stark, just like in the Old Country, and I’d landed in Milan.

Enough vestiges of the old neighborhood remained, though—the slice place on Prince, Lombardi’s for whole pies, a butcher’s, a barbershop, a knife sharpener’s—to keep Nolita charming and provide some ballast to the gentrification. The cemetery that Charlie (Harvey Keitel) and Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) sneak into at the end of “Mean Streets” was still there, adjoining St. Pat’s; ditto the grungy DeSalvio Playground where Charlie (Mickey Rourke) and Paulie (Eric Roberts) eat lunch in “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” and where I soon began dining al fresco as well, at the same concrete tables with the faded chessboard tops. A group of elderly Italian women with dyed hair sat in lawn chairs in front of a building kitty-corner from the park, looking like extras hired to keep the place honest. The day John Gotti died, I happened to be walking by when a reporter from one of the tabloids asked the ladies if they cared to comment. “Sammy the Bull was a fucking rat!” one of them rasped, adding, “Excuse my French.”

When asked, I said that I lived in Little Italy rather than Nolita, as if I’d been there my whole life and couldn’t be bothered to learn the latest realtor jargon. Most people must have assumed I meant the guide book version of Little Italy that existed south of Delancey Street, four blocks of neon restaurant signs, tricolore bunting, and junk shops selling “Little Meatball” onesies and parking signs that read “If You Taka My Space I Breaka You Face.” I tried sounding out longer-standing New Yorkers about which Mulberry Street restaurants to sample. Mostly, they rolled their eyes. Didn’t I know that those places were for tourists, a bunch of mediocre, overpriced red-sauce joints? If I wanted an unpretentious meal in the neighborhood, I should just walk next door to Chinatown.

Stubbornly, I ignored their advice, rejecting the disdain as snobbery. I also didn’t care for the way they said red sauce. What was wrong with red sauce, anyway? It’s true, most of the Italians had left years earlier, and the touts standing outside of the restaurants were more often newer immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries who pretended to be Italian. They tried to slow your stride by waving giant menus, like zealots gathering names for a petition, and shouting “Ciao, bella!” in a convincing impersonation of naughty ragazzi. It could feel like a broken theme park out of a George Saunders story. I didn’t care, vowing to eat my way through the dozens of restaurants anyway, insisting that there was something cool in their total absence of hipness. I took dates and interview subjects to Mare Chiaro (now the Mulberry Street Bar), the dive bar where they filmed the sit-down scenes between Tony Soprano and the New York Mob bosses. I bought cheese at Alleva Dairy (established in 1892), fresh pasta at Piemonte Ravioli (1920), cold cuts at Di Palo’s (1925) and the Grand Italian Food Center (1954, and now closed), and bread at Parisi Bakery (1903).

When I flew up to sign my lease, my new landlord, Mr. Yee, had asked me to bring along one month’s security deposit plus first and last month’s rent, about four thousand dollars, all in cash. On the phone, I’d asked if I could bring a check instead. “No have cash?” he said, sounding disappointed. Later I would learn that his grasp of English tended to fluctuate depending on what you happened to be requesting. He had fled China during the Cultural Revolution, his arrival in the United States made possible by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which President Johnson signed at a desk on Liberty Island, at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. The legislation overturned racist and nativist “national origins” quotas dating back to the Immigration Act of 1924, which had severely limited immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe—more than four million Italians had passed through Ellis Island between 1890 and 1924—and blocked immigration from Asia almost entirely. The post-1965 surge of new arrivals from China led to the expansion of the traditional boundaries of Chinatown north of Canal Street and east of the Bowery, into territory that had once been Little Italy.

I brought the cash to a basement address on Mott Street. A woman opened the door when I buzzed. “Hi, I’m here to see Mr. Yee,” I began, but she was already shaking her head no and shutting the door in my face. I buzzed several more times. Mr. Yee finally opened the door and waved me inside, where about a dozen people were playing mahjong for money at a handful of card tables. He kept an office in the back of the space, cluttered with jars of various herbs, acupuncture posters detailing pressure points in the human body and, hanging from the ceiling, cages housing Chinese songbirds. Mr. Yee’s son later told me that his father would get together with friends in a park on Christie Street and listen to the birds sing to each other. “It’s like the radio for them,” Mr. Yee’s son told me. “It reminds them of home.”