On a sliver of Washington Street, in the shadow of the towers of the Financial District, a white terra-cotta facade still carries a carved knight driving his lance into a dragon. Office workers walk past it every day without a glance. They are passing the last full face of Little Syria, Manhattan, the Arabic-speaking quarter that hummed along these blocks for more than half a century before the city tore it down.
Once this stretch below Rector Street smelled of cardamom coffee and orange-water pastry. Peddlers loaded their packs at dawn here and fanned out across America. Printers set Arabic type by hand in basement shops, and a generation of poets argued about God and language over small cups in the cafes. Almost none of it stands today, which is exactly why it is worth walking back into.
Little Syria: The Place
Little Syria ran along lower Washington Street on the west side of the island, from near Battery Park up past Rector Street, a few dense blocks of tenements between the harbor and the wholesale markets. Newspapers of the day called it the Syrian Quarter or the Syrian Colony. Today the ground it stood on holds the approach ramps to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, the edge of Battery Park City, and the open ground south of the World Trade Center. Three buildings from the old quarter remain, hemmed in by glass and steel.
How Washington Street Became Little Syria
Before the Syrians
Before the Arabic-speaking newcomers arrived, lower Washington Street was already a hard-working immigrant edge of the city, close to the docks and the produce stalls of the Washington Market. Irish, German, Slavic, and Scandinavian families filled its tenements, drawn by cheap rooms near the waterfront jobs. The buildings were tall and narrow, the rents low, and the harbor was steps away.
That nearness to the water mattered. New arrivals coming through the Castle Garden depot at the Battery, and later through Ellis Island, landed almost on the doorstep of these blocks. For people with no English and little money, a room within walking distance of the landing piers was reason enough to stay.
The Syrians Arrive
The first permanent Arabic-speaking immigrants reached Manhattan by way of Castle Garden in the early 1880s, and they settled into the streets right around the docks. They came from Ottoman Greater Syria, the Levantine territory that today is divided among Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. In the language of the era they were all simply called Syrians, the name they used for themselves in their newspapers and their clubs, and the one this story keeps. Many of their descendants now identify as Lebanese, a thread picked up in our piece on the Lebanese in Dearborn, Michigan.
Most came from the mountain villages of Mount Lebanon and from towns like Zahle, with others from Damascus and Aleppo. The great majority were Christians of the Eastern churches, Maronite, Melkite Greek Catholic, and Orthodox, with a smaller number of Muslims among them. They were pushed out by the collapse of the mountain silk trade that had once fed whole villages, by population pressure on thin soil, and, after 1908, by the threat of conscription into the Ottoman army. America was the pull, and the harbor was the door.
The engine of the colony was peddling. A new arrival could borrow a pack from a Washington Street supplier and walk out the same week carrying forty to eighty pounds of goods: linens and lace, needles and thread, buttons, combs, cheap jewelry, and small religious wares such as crosses and rosaries cut from Holy Land olive wood. The pack peddler could earn far more on the road than in a factory, and the trade needed no English to begin. Men and women alike walked it, knocking on farmhouse doors from New England to the Dakotas.
Washington Street was the warehouse behind that whole national network. Importers and wholesalers along these blocks stocked the peddlers and bought back their profits, and many peddlers came home with enough capital to open shops of their own. The 1908 Syrian Business Directory of New York listed more than three hundred Syrian-run businesses. Around seventy of them dealt in linen alone, much of the work done by women who had known the silk and textile trades back home, and nearby Rector Street became a center of the lingerie business.
Little Syria at Its Peak
By the turn of the century the quarter was a small, complete world. A newspaper account in 1899 put the colony at around three thousand people, and by 1900 some twelve hundred Syrians lived on Washington Street itself. Coffee houses, bakeries, groceries, and import shops crowded the ground floors, and the upper rooms held families, boarders, and the occasional newspaper office.
This was the cradle of the Arabic press in North America. The first Arabic-language newspaper on the continent, Kawkab America, appeared in New York in 1892, founded by the brothers Najib and Abraham Arbeely. Al-Hoda followed under the Mokarzel brothers, and between roughly 1890 and 1940 the New York colony produced more than fifty Arabic periodicals, including the influential English-language monthly The Syrian World, which ran until 1932. Type was set by hand, and the linotype itself was adapted to Arabic characters in this very community.
Out of that ferment grew a literary movement. New York became the heart of the Mahjar, the writers of the Arab emigration, and in 1920 several of them formally founded the Pen League, with Kahlil Gibran as its chairman and Mikhail Naimy as its secretary. Gibran lived mostly in Boston and Greenwich Village rather than on Washington Street, but the circle he led drew its energy and its readership from the downtown colony. Ameen Rihani, Elia Abu Madi, and Nasib Arida moved in the same world, writing for the same Arabic presses.
The colony built institutions to match. There were mutual-aid groups like the Syrian Ladies Aid Society, social clubs, and three churches anchoring the community’s faith. Marie el-Khoury became a celebrated jewelry designer; Najib Arbeely, the newspaperman, was appointed a United States consul to Jerusalem. People kept their village ties and their old liturgies while learning, block by block, how to be American.
The Change
The unraveling came from two directions. As families found their footing, the better-off began moving across the harbor to Brooklyn, to Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, South Ferry, and out toward Bay Ridge, and many of their shops followed to Atlantic Avenue. The old quarter was already thinning when the city delivered the final blow.
In August 1946, residents and shopkeepers along the lower stretch of Washington Street received condemnation notices. The land was needed for the approach ramps of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which opened in 1950, and most of the colony’s heart was seized by eminent domain and demolished. What the tunnel did not take, later development did, with the rest of the area cleared in the building of the World Trade Center. A neighborhood that had stood for sixty years was almost entirely erased inside a single generation.
The Landmarks of Little Syria
St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church, 103 Washington Street. This is the one survivor everyone remembers. The Melkite Greek Catholic parish was organized in 1889, and in 1925 the textile importer George E. Bardwil bought the old c.1812 building for the congregation. Four years later the Lebanese-American draftsman Harvey F. Cassab gave it the white neo-Gothic terra-cotta face it still wears, complete with a polychrome relief of St. George and the dragon. It was designated a New York City landmark on July 14, 2009.
The Downtown Community House, 105-107 Washington Street. Built in 1925 with funds from William H. Childs, founder of the Bon Ami cleaning company, and designed by John F. Jackson, this red-brick settlement house opened the next year as the home of the Bowling Green Neighborhood Association. It offered classes, clubs, and services to a downtown population that spoke dozens of languages. It still stands beside the church, one of the three remaining buildings.
The tenement at 109 Washington Street. The third survivor is the plainest: an ordinary walk-up apartment building, the kind that once lined these blocks by the score. It has no plaque and no fame, but it is the last piece of everyday Little Syria, the housing where peddlers and printers and shopkeepers actually lived.
St. Joseph’s Maronite Church. The Maronites worshiped in the lower church at St. Peter’s on Barclay Street from 1899 until 1906, then built their own home on Washington Street, moving over the years among the numbers 127, 81, and 57. The church was pushed out by the tunnel and later by the World Trade Center. In 2002 its original cornerstone was found in the rubble of the towers, beside the destroyed St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox church.
The peddler warehouses of Washington Street. No single address marks them, but the importers and dry-goods houses along the street were the colony’s true center of gravity. They outfitted the peddlers, banked their earnings, and shipped linen and lace nationwide. Every Syrian grocery and notions shop that later opened in a far-off American town traced a line of credit back to these blocks.
The Arabic print shops. Scattered through the quarter were the basement offices where Kawkab America, Al-Hoda, and dozens of other papers were written, set, and run off. The photographer Percy Loomis Sperr captured a Syrian grocery at 78 Washington Street in 1929, one of the few clear glimpses we have of the street as it lived and breathed.
Where the Little Syria Syrians Came From
The people of the colony came overwhelmingly from Ottoman Greater Syria, and within it most came from Mount Lebanon, the silk-growing mountain range behind Beirut. They left villages in the hills and towns like Zahle, with smaller streams from Damascus and Aleppo, and they carried their churches with them: Maronite, Melkite Greek Catholic, and Orthodox. They thought of themselves first by village and by rite, and only second by the broad label Syrian that the era applied to them all.
What pushed them out was concrete. The mountain economy had depended on silk, and when that trade stagnated and then failed, families that had farmed mulberry and spun thread for generations had no living left. Add population pressure, a heavy-handed Ottoman state, and, from 1908, the prospect of being drafted to fight the empire’s wars, and a steady migration became a flood. The peddling networks already running out of Washington Street did the rest, pulling cousin after cousin across the ocean to the same few blocks.
Little Syria Today
If you go looking for Little Syria now, you will find three buildings and a great deal of memory. St. George’s terra-cotta face, the Downtown Community House, and the lone tenement at 109 Washington Street stand together as the last of the quarter, watched over by the Washington Street Advocacy Group and the Save Washington Street campaign that won the church its landmark status. Plaques and walking tours have begun to mark the ground, but the streetscape itself belongs to the towers now.
The living legacy crossed the river long ago. When the tunnel cleared the old colony, its grocers and importers regrouped on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, where Sahadi’s, founded in Manhattan’s Little Syria in 1895, reopened in 1948 and still trades today. From there the community spread south into Bay Ridge, the subject of our piece on the Arabs in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and the smell of cardamom and orange-water that once filled Washington Street settled into a new home.
Little Syria was not the only world to vanish from the bottom of Manhattan, and the story rhymes with the one we tell about the Jews on the Lower East Side a few blocks east. A neighborhood can be demolished, but the people it formed keep walking. The journey that began on Washington Street is still going.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Syrians settle on Washington Street?
Lower Washington Street sat right beside the harbor landing depots, so it offered cheap tenement rooms within walking distance of where immigrants stepped off the boats. The street’s importers and wholesalers also supplied the pack peddlers who powered the colony’s economy, which made it the natural commercial base for Little Syria, Manhattan.
What happened to Little Syria?
The neighborhood was largely demolished in the late 1940s when the city seized the land for the approach ramps to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which opened in 1950. Families had already begun moving to Brooklyn, and later construction, including the World Trade Center, cleared away most of what remained of the quarter.
What remains of Little Syria today?
Three buildings survive on Washington Street: St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church at number 103, the Downtown Community House at 105-107, and a single tenement at 109. They are the last physical trace of Little Syria, Manhattan, now surrounded by the towers of the Financial District and Battery Park City.
Where did the people of Little Syria come from?
Most came from Ottoman Greater Syria, and especially from the villages of Mount Lebanon and towns like Zahle, with others from Damascus and Aleppo. The great majority were Eastern Christians, Maronite, Melkite, and Orthodox, with a smaller number of Muslims among them.
When did Syrians first arrive in Little Syria?
The first permanent Arabic-speaking immigrants reached Manhattan through the Castle Garden depot in the early 1880s and settled along the docks of lower Washington Street. The colony grew through chain migration over the following decades, reaching several thousand people by the turn of the twentieth century.
Little Syria is gone from the map, but its story is one of departure, endurance, and arrival, the same pattern that shapes almost every American family. If your own people once carried their world across an ocean, their journey is worth tracing too.