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There are many trendy shops on Mulberry Street from Houston down to Spring Street and though Chinatown is overrunning much of Little Italy, the block between Broome and Canal remains strictly Italian. It is filled with restaurants, coffee shops with tempting Italian pastries, and stores selling pasta implements, statues of saints, and T-shirts saying “Kiss Me, I’m Italian.” The Feast of San Gennaro packs the street each September.

After the boroughs merged into Greater New York in 1898, the city’s police department expanded rapidly. This 1905 headquarters near Little Italy was the result, a monumental, columned Baroque structure fit for “New York’s Finest,” with an ornate dome tall enough to be seen from City Hall. The strange shape of the building fits a wedge-shaped lot. Empty for more than a decade after the department relocated in 1973, the building has since been converted into luxury cooperatives, the Police Building Apartments.

Small but fascinating, this first floor museum, devoted to the Chinese experience in the West, features an exhibit called “Where is Home?,” with personal stories, photographs, and poetry culled from the community. Among the topics explored are women’s roles, religion, and the “bachelor society.” Changing exhibits range from art to the experience of gay Chinese. Books, area guides, and free flyers on cultural events are available.

Originally known as Quong Yeun Shing & Company, this is the oldest store in Chinatown, established in 1891. The store was a social hub for Chinese men, who were not allowed to bring their wives to the U.S. under old immigration laws.

Clustered on this block are shops with a wonderful selection of Chinese goods. China Silk and Handicrafts has vases, figurines, bowls, tea sets, and Buddhas by the dozen. Lamps made from attractive Oriental vases are the specialty of Pearl of the Orient Gallery, while New Age Designer makes clothing to order in your choice of jewel-hued silks. Serious antiques collectors should head to the Sinotique Gallery.

The largest department store in Chinatown has two locations and a fascinating potpourri of goods for sale. There are Chinese musical instruments, paper lanterns, kites, dried herbs, embroidered silk tops, dresses and pajamas with mandarin collars, purses, dolls, pillows, and sandalwood and jasmine soaps.

Step into the incense-scented interior, where offerings of fresh fruit are piled high, and more than 100 gold Buddhas gleam in the candlelight. The temple takes advantage of Chinatown’s tourist traffic by offering $1 fortunes for sale near the front.

Built by the English Lutheran Church in 1801 and sold to the Roman Catholic Church of the Transfiguration in 1853, this Georgian-style stone church with Gothic windows is typical of the influence of successive influxes of immigrants in New York. The church has changed with the nationalities of the community it serves, first Irish, then Italian, and now Chinese. As the focal point of today’s Chinese Roman Catholic community, it offers classes and services to help newcomers and holds services in Cantonese and Mandarin.

Chinatown’s only park was created in the late 1890s as a result of the campaigning of newspaper reporter Jacob Riis and other social reformers. It filled a stretch of the city that at the time was New York’s worst slum, where Riis reported a stabbing or shooting at least once a week. Though it features more concrete than greenery, the park is popular today, filled with Chinese kids at play, mah jong players, and people practicing tai chi and martial arts. On the weekends, Chinese fortune-tellers sometimes set up shop in the park.

The name for this sharp curve on Doyers Street was coined by a newspaper because this was the site of so many gangland ambushes during the 1920s. It was a period when the Hip Sing and On Leong tongs , groups similar to criminal gangs, were fighting for control of the opium trade and gambling rackets in Chinatown. The tong wars continued off and on until at least the 1940s, and their rivalries continue in the present-day youth gangs.