Stand on Catasauqua Avenue on a Friday evening in summer and you can smell it before you see it: charcoal, lamb, cinnamon, the sugary crackle of fresh maamoul. The Syrians in Allentown have been gathering on this block for more than a century, and the blue-domed church at number 1011 has become the steady heart of one of the oldest and largest Syrian communities in the United States. People here still call this corner of Pennsylvania their second home.
The Place
Allentown is the third-largest city in Pennsylvania and the anchor of the Lehigh Valley, the broad industrial bowl that sits roughly an hour north of Philadelphia. It was founded in 1762 by William Allen, a former mayor of Philadelphia, and it grew rich first on iron and then on silk.
By 1900 the Lehigh Valley counted twenty-three silk establishments, and at the industry’s 1928 peak some 106 mills ran at once, making Pennsylvania one of the world’s leading silk producers. Those mills needed hands, and the hands came from many places. Some of the most enduring came from a green valley in western Syria.
How It Became Syrian
The Syrian story in Allentown begins quietly, in the last years of the nineteenth century, with men carrying packs.
The first arrivals, late 1800s
The earliest Syrian immigrants reached the Lehigh Valley in the closing decades of the 1800s. Many were Orthodox Christians fleeing pressure under Ottoman rule, and some were drawn directly by local Presbyterian missionaries who carried word back of the boom times in industrial Pennsylvania.
They arrived first as peddlers, walking the towns and farm roads with packs of dry goods and notions before settling into the factories. It was a familiar pattern for Levantine Christians across the United States in that era. The same wave seeded the first great Arab-American quarter in lower Manhattan, the original Little Syria below Washington Street, and Allentown’s silk and cement and steel works gave the migrants who came inland somewhere to put down roots.
Fifteen families and a church, 1916
By 1916 the Syrian community of Allentown had grown to fifteen families, and they decided their numbers were enough to demand a church of their own. Early that spring, ground was broken on a lot in the 1000 block of Catasauqua Avenue.
The men of the parish did much of the labour themselves, digging and hauling with horse-drawn buggies through the summer. The building was estimated to cost five thousand dollars. That parish, St George Antiochian Orthodox Church, has stood at 1011 Catasauqua Avenue ever since and remains the spine of Syrian Allentown.
The silk-mill generations
For decades the community grew alongside the city’s industry. Until the 1980s, newly arrived Syrian immigrants to the Allentown area could still find work in the silk mills that once dotted the Lehigh Valley, some of them Syrian-owned.
Roughly a quarter of Allentown’s workers laboured in its silk mills by 1930, and Syrian families were woven through that workforce. As the mills declined, those same families moved into shops, restaurants, real estate and trades, and into the civic life of the city. The arc echoes that of other immigrant labour towns across the eastern part of the state, from the Italians of Norristown to the close-knit enclaves of greater Philadelphia.
A church too small for its parish, 1956 to 1973
By the 1950s the original 1916 building could no longer hold the congregation. In 1956 Father John Chromiak and the board of trustees began raising money for something larger.
Construction of a new Byzantine-style church began in the spring of 1962, crowned by a single large ribbed dome with a blue roof and a gold cross reaching a peak of fifty feet, with an auditorium seating more than 500. The first liturgy in the new building was celebrated in September 1963, with Metropolitan Antony presiding. A decade later, on 29 September 1973, the parish burned its mortgage with Metropolitan Philip present.
Father Sabbagh and the festival, 1983 onward
In July 1983 a young priest born in Damascus, Father Anthony Sabbagh, was assigned to St George, and he has led the parish ever since. Two years later, in 1985, he founded the Heritage Festival that would become the community’s most public expression of itself.
It is now St George’s largest fundraiser of the year, a three-day event of Middle Eastern food, music and dance held each summer on Catasauqua Avenue, drawing crowds reported in the tens of thousands across a single weekend. The money raised goes both to the church in Allentown and to causes back in Syria.
The Landmarks
St George Antiochian Orthodox Church, 1011 Catasauqua Avenue. The founding institution of Syrian Allentown, established by fifteen families in 1916 and rebuilt in Byzantine style in the early 1960s. Its blue dome and gold cross are the unofficial flag of the community, and its hall hosts weddings, funerals and the annual festival that brings the whole valley to its doors.
The St George Heritage Festival, Catasauqua Avenue. Founded by Father Sabbagh in 1985, this summer weekend of grape leaves, kibbeh and dabke dancing is the moment the community turns its kitchen inside out for the city. It is the parish’s biggest fundraiser and its most generous public gesture, with proceeds shared between Allentown and Syria.
Damascus Restaurant, 449 North 2nd Street. A neighbourhood institution serving Syrian home cooking just off the old immigrant blocks: made-from-scratch grape leaves, lamb kabobs, fried and grilled kibbeh, baba ghannouj and surkey, a salad of shankleesh cheese with onion, tomato, parsley and olive oil. It is BYOB and unpretentious, the kind of place where the recipes have not changed in generations.
The Aladdin Restaurant, 651 Union Boulevard. Ed and Violette Younes opened the first Aladdin on 2nd Street in 1981, shortly after immigrating from Syria, then moved after eighteen years to its current Union Boulevard home. After Ed’s death in 2000, Violette and their daughters carried it on, and it has grown into one of the Lehigh Valley’s best-known Middle Eastern tables.
Catasauqua Avenue, the 1000 block. More a stretch than a single address, this is the historic spine of Syrian Allentown, the street the founders chose in 1916 and never left. The church anchors it, and once a year the festival spills across it, but on ordinary days it is simply where the community’s memory is kept.
Downtown Allentown and the silk-mill district. The brick mills that drew the first Syrian workers still pattern the older parts of the city, even as the centre has been rebuilt around the PPL Center arena that opened in 2014. The geography of work that brought Syrians here in the first place is still legible in the streetscape.
Where They Came From
Allentown’s Syrians are overwhelmingly Orthodox Christians, and a great many trace their roots to one specific corner of Syria: Wadi al-Nasara, the Valley of the Christians, in the west of Homs governorate.
It is a green, hilly region of Greek Orthodox villages tucked below the great Crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers, near the towns of al-Husn and Marmarita. By some local accounts the valley holds dozens of villages, and a striking share of Allentown’s Syrian families come from this single landscape, which is part of why residents speak of the city as the valley’s second home.
The pull was practical as much as spiritual. Christians under Ottoman rule faced real pressure in the 1800s, and Presbyterian missionaries actively recruited from the region, promising work and safety in a booming American mill town. Once a few families had settled and written home, chain migration did the rest, village by village, surname by surname.
Allentown Today
By some estimates at least 15,000 people of Syrian heritage live in the Lehigh Valley today, and the parish at St George has long claimed to lead one of the largest and oldest Syrian communities in the country. Whatever the precise count, the Syrians in Allentown are no longer an immigrant enclave so much as a thread running through the whole city, in business, in politics, in the restaurants people line up for. In that, the Syrians belong to a wider Pennsylvania story of faith-anchored communities, from the Jews of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh to the Ukrainians of Jenkintown outside Philadelphia, each clustered around a sanctuary that became a second home.
The Syrian civil war that began in 2011 tested that identity in public. Allentown briefly became national news as “America’s Little Syria,” and the long-settled, largely Christian community wrestled openly over how many new refugees the valley should accept. Some families opened doors and offered jobs, like the developer Albert Abdouche, who hired arriving refugees to help restore the historic Americus Hotel downtown. Others were wary. The debate was real and it was painful, because for once the whole country was looking.
What endures, away from the cameras, is ordinary and durable. The blue dome still rises over Catasauqua Avenue. The festival still fills a summer weekend. The tables at Damascus and Aladdin still serve the food of a valley most diners will never see. More than a century after the first peddlers walked these roads, Allentown is still, quietly, a Syrian town.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long have Syrians lived in Allentown, Pennsylvania?
Syrians began settling in Allentown in the late 1800s, first working as peddlers and then in the city’s silk, cement and steel industries. By 1916 the community was established enough to build St George Antiochian Orthodox Church, making the Syrians in Allentown one of the oldest such communities in the United States.
Why did Syrians settle in Allentown?
Most were Orthodox Christians who left western Syria under Ottoman-era pressure in the 1800s, and many were actively recruited by local Presbyterian missionaries promising work in the booming Lehigh Valley. Allentown’s silk mills, cement quarries and steel works offered steady jobs, and early arrivals drew relatives over through chain migration.
Where in Syria did Allentown’s families come from?
A large share trace their origins to Wadi al-Nasara, the Valley of the Christians, in the west of Homs governorate near the Krak des Chevaliers castle. It is a region of Greek Orthodox villages, and so many families emigrated from it that residents describe Allentown as the valley’s second home.
What is the St George Heritage Festival?
It is an annual three-day summer festival of Syrian and Middle Eastern food, music and dance, founded by Father Anthony Sabbagh in 1985 at St George Antiochian Orthodox Church on Catasauqua Avenue. It is the parish’s largest fundraiser, drawing large crowds each weekend, with proceeds shared between Allentown and Syria.
Why is Allentown called “America’s Little Syria”?
The nickname spread during the Syrian refugee debate that began around 2015, when national media noted Allentown’s unusually deep and long-standing Syrian roots. With one of the largest Syrian communities in the country, the city became a focal point for the question of how America should respond to the Syrian civil war.
Where can you eat Syrian food in Allentown today?
Damascus Restaurant at 449 North 2nd Street serves traditional Syrian home cooking, including hand-rolled grape leaves and kibbeh. The Aladdin Restaurant at 651 Union Boulevard, founded by Syrian immigrants Ed and Violette Younes in 1981, is one of the Lehigh Valley’s best-known Middle Eastern restaurants.
If your family’s story passed through Allentown, or any of the places Syrians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the Christian villages of Wadi al-Nasara to the blue dome on Catasauqua Avenue, to wherever you are now.