Nolita

Nolita, also written as NoLIta (North of Little Italy), is a neighborhood in Manhattan (New York). Nolita is bounded on the north by Houston Street, on the east by Bowery, on the south by Broome Street, and on the west by Lafayette Street. It is located east of SoHo, west of the Lower East Side, and north of Little Italy and Chinatown.

The neighborhood was long part of Little Italy. The area, however, lost its Italian character in the last decades of the 20th century due to migration of original residents Italian to other communes (mainly Brooklyn) and to the suburbs.

In the second half of the 1990s, the neighborhood saw an influx of yuppies and an explosion of boutiques, restaurants, and bars. Trying unsuccessfully to include the neighborhood in SoHo, the builders suggested several new names for the neighborhood, adopting Nolita, a name that follows the pattern started with SoHo (South of Houston Street) and then along TriBeCa (Triangle Below Canal Street).

The neighborhood includes the Old St. Patrick's Cathedral, at the corner of Mott and Prince streets, which was originally built in 1803 and rebuilt in 1868 after a great fire. This building served as New York's cathedral until the current St. Patrick's Cathedral was opened on Fifth Avenue in Midtown in 1879. Old St. Patrick's Cathedral is now a parish church.

Another characteristic building in the neighborhood is the Puck Building, a structure built in 1885 at the corner of Houston and Lafayette streets, which originally housed the newsroom of the now-defunct Puck Magazine.