Little Italy Left Off NYC's Official Immigrant Enclave Map, Blakeman Calls It Intentional, Mamdani Blames Adams-Era Map

New York City's official "New York City Immigrant Enclaves" map highlights 30 neighborhoods, from Koreatown in Manhattan to Little Pakistan in Brooklyn to Little Yemen in the Bronx. Little Italy on Mulberry Street isn't one of them. Neither is Little Odessa in Brooklyn or the Greek-American stretch of Astoria in Queens.

The omission has generated backlash since early July, according to the New York Post.

Blakeman's Charge

Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive running as the Republican candidate for governor, showed up in Little Italy on Friday to make the case that the snub was deliberate. "I think it was intentional that not only the Little Italy here, down in Lower Manhattan on Mulberry Street, was left off as an important immigration point, but also Little Odessa in Brooklyn, and Astoria, where the Greek Americans came from, Hells Kitchen, where the Irish Americans came from," Blakeman told the Post.

Blakeman tied the map to what he called a broader "pattern" from Mayor Zohran Mamdani, pointing to the mayor canceling the traditional Puerto Rican Day breakfast at Gracie Mansion last month, skipping the Israel Day parade in May, and not attending the installation of New York's new archbishop, Ronald Hicks, in February. "So you put this all together, and it's a pattern," Blakeman said.

Mike Crispi, president of the Italian American Civil Rights League, spoke to a crowd of about 100 people at the Friday event, many holding signs reading "Little Italy Forever." Crispi argued Italian Americans across the city, not just in the Mulberry Street neighborhood, felt the omission as an insult. "Italian Americans have contributed so much to this great city, and we are not going to let people take our city away from us and rob it of its identity," Crispi said.

Mamdani's Explanation

Mamdani has addressed the controversy directly. Earlier in July he said the map "was originally created by the prior administration in 2023, and when we inherited it, we added a few additional neighborhoods." He added that it's "clearly not an exhaustive list of the more than 200 ethnic enclaves" in the city and said he'd include Little Italy in a future version.

The map originated under Mayor Eric Adams, not Mamdani, who took office this year. Whether the current administration should have caught and fixed the gap before the backlash hit is a fair separate question, but the map's 2023 origin is not in dispute.

The Competing Framing

A Yonkers Times op-ed by Clifford Jackson takes the opposite view entirely, arguing the backlash "has everything to do with the racism and hatred towards Zohran Mamdani and very little to do with the omission." Jackson's piece cites a Nation article by Chris Gelardi, who is of Italian descent, arguing that Manhattan's Little Italy hasn't had significant numbers of Italian-born residents in decades and that a 2010 census reportedly found no Italian-born residents left in the neighborhood at all.

Critics like Gelardi say the current uproar treats a now largely tourist-driven, historically symbolic neighborhood as if it were still a living immigrant enclave, while ignoring that the map's stated purpose is to reflect where immigrant communities exist today, not where they existed a century ago. If that's the map's actual design principle, leaving out a neighborhood with few foreign-born Italian residents is at least defensible on the merits, separate from any political motive.

However, that argument doesn't address why Little Odessa, a Brooklyn neighborhood with an active Russian and Ukrainian immigrant population, and Astoria's Greek-American district, also got left off. Blakeman's complaint specifically includes those two neighborhoods, and the Yonkers Times piece doesn't address either one.

The op-ed also includes inflammatory claims and quotes attributed to rally attendees and to Mamdani himself, including a claim that protesters called him "an African piece of shit" at an August 2025 Staten Island rally headlined by Scott Lobaido. Those quotes are attributed to a separate rally months earlier, not the Friday event at Little Italy.

What's Actually Unresolved

No one disputes the map's 2023 origin under Adams. No one disputes that it currently omits Little Italy, Little Odessa, and Astoria's Greek enclave. What's unresolved is intent: whether the current administration's failure to add those neighborhoods before controversy broke was oversight or something else, and whether a revised map, which Mamdani has promised, will actually include them. That revision hasn't happened yet.

Until City Hall publishes an updated map, the question Blakeman is running on stays open by default.