People from the boot got the boot!
The City Council’s Italian Caucus is fuming over Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new immigrant enclaves map — which ignored Little Italy and other Italian-American areas of the five boroughs.
The caucus demanded Thursday that Mamdani amend the guide, which Italian enclaves — as well as big Irish and Jewish neighborhoods — but spotlighted 30 other areas, including Little Palestine, Koreatown, Little Pakistan and Little Odessa.
“You cannot tell the story of immigrant New York while airbrushing out one of the city’s most recognizable and historically significant immigrant communities,” the caucus said in a statement Thursday, calling the omission “incomplete at best and insulting at worst.”
The caucus said the Mamdani administration should work with historians and community groups so the next version of the map gives Italian‑Americans a fair shake.
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“Italian‑Americans are not a footnote in the history of New York,” the group added. “We are one of the city’s foundational immigrant communities, and our neighborhoods, churches, small businesses, feast traditions, civic institutions, and family networks helped build modern New York.”
A City Hall spokesperson said Wednesday that the map was designed to “highlight neighborhoods in New York City that have substantial foreign‑born populations from regions and countries around the world.”
The Italian Caucus pointed out Belmont in the Bronx, Bensonhurst and Dyker Heights in Brooklyn and Italian‑American pockets in Queens and Staten Island are also neighborhoods where Italian roots run deep.
None were mentioned in the map.
“Respect for one community should never require erasing another,” the group said.
