Certain rules get dropped in favor of getting around or making a buck in Manhattan. If jaywalkers were vigorously prosecuted, the NYPD would be rich in a day. Reddish-orange light-running is usually kosher as long as you weren’t explicitly trying to kill a Jew. Peddling questionable goods wherever and whenever is usually a safe bet, though directly at odds with the commuting effort.
Chinatown turns this casual lawlessness up to eleven. Walking along the blurry and blurring borders of Little Italy and Chinatown is walking through a narrow bazaar of stacked clothing, buckets of trinkets, and crates of food. It’s hard to tell what’s being loaded into the stores and what’s being sold on the spot. Sometimes it’s being distributed to the street dealers: one crowd of peddlers gathered around a trash bag full of purses had a member whose job it was to fend off interested tourists with shouts of, “No sale! No sale!”
I recognized the shouter from the Starbucks team. She doesn’t work at Starbucks, she works the sidewalk just outside. I assume she and the rest of her team recognize me by now, which is why I don’t hear “watches, rings, watches, rings” muttered quietly in my ear as often as I did when I first started getting coffee there. As far as I can tell, they’re selling approximately the same thing as the blocks of nearly identical stores selling knockoffs or otherwise acquired items, some in the window, some in the rooms you have to ask six or seven times to see.
The confusion caused by the masses of people trying to sell you things on and off the street is roughly doubled by the hosts at the Italian restaurants trying to assure each passing tourist that the restaurant just to the left is the very best Italian restaurant out of the thirty or so that are holding up against the Chinatown onslaught. The only way to navigate or hold a conversation among the turmoil is to create a sensory blind spot and not give any indication that you can see or hear anything that isn’t in the dead center of your vision. It’s also important to do this, since the rules of right-of-way seem to be whoever got there first by not backing down. The roads tend to be 50% sidewalk, and there’s often no way of knowing if that’s because it’s currently safe or if it just happens to be that way because some delivery guys took over a section street, and will at any moment release a stack of angry traffic, or just run you down themselves with an overloaded hand trolley.
It’s Chinatown.