A new Chinatown counterfeiting crackdown?

After some business yesterday in midtown, we went down to Chinatown. We go for fruit, vegetables and baked goods, not counterfeit items. However, it was impossible not to notice that a lot of the, uh, "establishments" on Canal Street have been shut down. There was a crackdown on counterfeiters last year (see here for a picture of that goddamn idiot Bloomberg doing a poor impersonation of Eliot Ness), but the actual counterfeiting area is really much larger. That I ever noticed, the shutdown never affected the "stores" beyond that small area (like west of Centre, especially around Lafayette). Until now.

We hadn't been down there in several months, so I couldn't tell you when, but based on what Cyn in the City reported, I'm guessing it's lasted from this past March. One wall even had a restraining order forbidding that "establishment" form engaging in trademark counterfeiting. I tried not to laugh.

Not that it's stopped the counterfeiting, mind you. It only seems to have shifted the business from one racial group to another; go figure. The sidewalks are filled with plenty of black people hawking fakes, and further west on Canal Street (toward Broadway) are plenty of black-operated storefronts with every imaginable type of knock-off.

Here's a map, courtesy of Google, of the area.