Toward the end of 1999, I was living in Atlanta when a friend called with an intriguing offer. He’d finally scraped together enough money for a down payment on a place, and the modest one-bedroom apartment he’d been renting, a fourth-floor walkup in an old tenement building in downtown Manhattan, would be available.

What really sold me, before I even set foot inside, was the address, on Mulberry Street, in the heart of Little Italy. Both of my parents are Italian immigrants. Neither had ever lived in New York; they arrived separately in Detroit, where they met and married. Nonetheless, from a distance, I felt a visceral attraction to the neighborhood.