Most of the buildings are five and six storeys, with fire escapes on the front and signs fixed vertically to the brick. The streets between them are narrow.
Chinese immigrants began settling on these blocks in the 1870s, east of the Five Points. There were about 200 Chinese residents in the city in 1870 and around 2,000 by 1882, the year Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.
has been the main one ever since. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association started at in 1883 and later moved to 16 , which people call the City Hall of Chinatown. At number 25 is the , built in 1801 as an Episcopal church and sold to the Catholic archdiocese in 1853. Its congregation now is almost entirely Chinese.
runs one block from Mott to the Bowery, with barber shops and hair salons along most of it. Doyers branches off partway down and bends hard in the middle of its two hundred feet. The city's first Chinese language theatre stood at 5 to 7 Doyers from 1893 to 1911, and the bend outside it was known as the Bloody Angle.
On the Bowery, the at number 18 was built for a butcher between 1785 and 1789, on a lot taken from the loyalist James De Lancey. It is the oldest row house left in the city.
is the only park here. It opened in 1897 on ground cleared of the Mulberry Bend tenements, in the middle of the old Five Points.
