Little Syria, Manhattan

Syrian/Lebanese immigrant children on Washington Street in Lower Manhattan

Little Syria was a largely Arab-American but widely diverse neighborhood that existed in the New York City borough of Manhattan from the late 1880's^[1] until the 1940s. Also called the Syrian Quarter, it encompassed Washington Street from Battery Park to above Rector Street.^[1] The enclave, in its greatest reach, overlapped with the future site of the World Trade Center – the cornerstone of St. Joseph's Maronite Church was found in the rubble after September 11.^[2] It declined as a neighborhood as the inhabitants became successful and moved to other areas, especially Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn,^[3]and disappeared almost entirely when a great deal of lower Washington Street was demolished to make way for entrance ramps to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.^[2][4]

Description and history

The overwhelming majority of the residents were Arabic-speaking Christians, Melkite and Maronite immigrants from present-day Syria and Lebanon who settled in the area in the late 19th century, escaping religious persecution and poverty in their homelands – which were then under control of the Ottoman Empire – and answering the call of American missionaries to escape their difficulties by traveling to New York City. The New York Times estimated that as many as 5% of the area's Arab residents were Muslims, who mostly came from the area of Palestine.^[2] The Christians lived on Washington Street to the south of the site of the World Trade Center, where they established three churches, including St. George Chapel of the Melkite Rite, which as of 2010 survives as Moran's Ale House and Grill,^[2] and which was designated a New York City landmark in 2009.^[5] In addition to Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians, many other ethnic groups lived in this diverse neighborhood, including Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Czechs, and Irish.

An 1899 article about the Syrian Quarter and its 3,000 residents described how the immigrants arriving there didn't "leave all their quaint customs, garments, ways of thinking at home," nor did they become "ordinary American citizens," but instead "just enough of their traits, dress, ideas remain, no matter how long they have been here, to give the colonies they form spice and a touch of novelty." While noting "a number of amazingly pretty girls," the reporter described Little Syria near the turn of the 20th century as a mix of social classes, but said that "the lower class, men and women, have little that is attractive about them. They have been called the dirtiest people in all New York".^[6]

In his 2006 book The Arab Americans, Gregory Orfalea described Little Syria as "an enclave in the New World where Arabs first peddled goods, worked in sweatshops, lived in tenements and hung their own signs on stores." Naoum and Salloum Mokarzel created the publication Al-Hoda, adapting the Linotype machine to produce text in the Arabic alphabet, which "made possible and immeasurably stimulated the growth of Arabic journalism in the Middle East." By August 1946, residents and business owners on the stretch of Washington Street from Rector Street to Battery Place in what was then the "heart of New York's Arab world" had received condemnation notices, just years before the neighborhood was razed to create entrance ramps needed for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which opened in 1950.^[2][4]

References

Notes

External links

• "City Room: Little Syria (Now Tiny Syria) Finds New Advocates" New York Times (January 1, 2012)

v t e Neighborhoods in the New York City Borough of Manhattan Alphabet City Astor Row Battery Park City Bowery Carnegie Hill Chelsea Chinatown Civic Center Columbus Circle Cooperative Village Diamond District East Harlem East Village Financial District Five Points Flatiron District Garment District Gashouse District Gramercy Park Greenwich Village Hamilton Heights Harlem Hell's Kitchen Herald Square Hudson Heights Hudson Yards Inwood Italian Harlem Kips Bay Koreatown Lenox Hill Le Petit Senegal Liberty Island Lincoln Square Little Germany Little Italy Little Syria Loisaida Lower East Side Lower Manhattan Madison Square Manhattan Valley Manhattanville Marble Hill Marcus Garvey Park Meatpacking District Midtown Manhattan Morningside Heights Murray Hill NoHo Nolita NoMad Peter Cooper Village Pomander Walk Radio Row Randall's Island Roosevelt Island Rose Hill San Juan Hill SoHo South Street Seaport South Village Strivers' Row Stuyvesant Square Stuyvesant Town Sugar Hill Sutton Place Sylvan Court Mews, Sylvan Place, and Sylvan Terrace Tenderloin Theatre District Times Square TriBeCa Tudor City Turtle Bay Two Bridges Union Square Upper East Side Upper Manhattan Upper West Side Wards Island Washington Heights Waterside Plaza West Village Yorkville Community Boards: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Coordinates: 40°42′29″N 74°00′50″W / 40.70806°N 74.01389°W / 40.70806; -74.01389