With the Feast of San Gennaro underway, New York takes a look at the changing aesthetics of the neighborhood. Asked, "What if a Chinese restaurant tried to open on Mulberry Street?," Umberto's owner Robert Ianniello Jr. plums his demons:
"We would have a problem with that," he says. "We would sit down with the owner and say, 'You can't do this to us.' Now, of course, you can't really do anything to stop it. An owner is free to do whatever he wants with his building. But it would hurt us. A Chinese restaurant on Mulberry Street would turn it into a hodgepodge. It would confuse people. Of course, what I really fear is Starbucks. If they tried to open here, we would do everything we could to stop them. Even pickets."· Arrivederci, Little Italy [New York Mag]