BootsnAll Travel Community

On Saturday before the 2006 BootsnAll party, a group of folks went on a walking tour of Portland's Old Town. I joined them, and ended up learning quite a bit about Portland that I'd never known... Amazing what you can learn about the place you've lived for years!

One of the things our tour guide told us was that the area known as "Chinatown" is more of a local government creation than a grassroots one. Apparently the city really wants there to be a vital and interesting Chinatown, perhaps for tourism, perhaps for other reasons, but it doesn't seem to have a big community push behind it. As a result, Chinatown in Portland is an odd mix of great Chinese restaurants and bad ones, souvenir stores and sex shops, and a glorious Chinese garden. I like that part of town, but I'm not fooling myself that it's anything like visiting the actual China.

In larger cities, there are vibrant and lively Chinatowns, Little Italys and so on. Apparently in Sydney, Australia there's even a Little Portugal. Some of them succeed as mini-versions of their namesake countries, others don't. Which ones do you think work? Which ones make you feel like you've been transported out of the city you're actually in?

The ever-shrinking Little Italy in Manhattan now consists of 2 or 3 small blocks of nearly identical restaurants, but when I first visited NYC it seemed fairly authentic and evidently not too long before that most of its inhabitants were actually Italian one way or another.

Little Italy is being swallowed by the ever-expanding Chinatown here, but it's not a pretty thing. For some reason there is more trash on the street in Chinatown than any other part of Manhattan. And it seems that more than half the goods that are sold in the neighborhood are fakes or bootlegs, so in that sense it reminds me of Hong Kong, so maybe it is authentic?

Most of the actual residents are indeed Chinese, and there are herbal medicine shops and acupuncture places mixed in, but it's actually kind of gross. I really prefer the Chinatowns in Los Angeles and San Francisco because to me they seem much less corrupted than the NYC one.

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Chinatown in Portland is an odd mix of great Chinese restaurants and bad ones, souvenir stores and sex shops, and a glorious Chinese garden.

This sounds a lot like the SF Chinatown. Well, the souvenir/restaurant stuff. (the sex stuff is reserved for Little Italy/North Beach, right next door to Chinatown) I believe our Chinatown (or SF as a whole) has the largest concentration of Chinese outside of China. It is a madhouse over there; I tend to avoid it because there are too many damn people. But I have seen pictures of some of the festive streets in China, and it looks pretty close to what we have here. I agree, the PDX one didn't feel quite the same; it seemed a little artificial.

SF has a ton of "Little X" places, some work, some don't. Just being in SF I sometimes feel like I have been transported to another country. I hear a mix of languages all day; we have a heavy population of Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Russian, and Irish (probably others, but those are the big ones). We have a Chinatown, little Chinatown, Japantown, little Italy, an area of the city where it is mostly Russian Immigrants ("little Russia?"), etc. All in a 7x7 square mile city. It is what I really love about it here.

I remember trying to find Little Italy in NYC, and surprised how small it was! I guess it is, as Rawjer said, shrinking. I liked the Little Italy area in Boston; I felt like I was somewhere else.

Federal Hill in Providence, RI has the feel of authentic atmosphere about it. I wouldn't really call it Little Italy (and I don't think anyone does), but it feels kind of authentic in that it resembles parts of the film "GoodFellas" during the period of the '70s. Lots of guys named Big Nicky sitting in front of old Italian restaurants wearing out of place suits.

It must at least look real enough to convince Hollywood to film there. The current show 'Brotherhood' takes place there. There was also a film or show (I don't remember) called "The Hill" and although it isn't shown, it is referenced in "The Departed" a few times.