Little Syria (Now Tiny Syria) Finds New Advocates

Little Syria (Now Tiny Syria) Finds New Advocates By DAVID W. DUNLAP January 2, 2012, p. A18

In 1891, Yusuf Sadallah arrived in Lower Manhattan from the town of Baskinta, in the part of the Ottoman Empire that is now Lebanon. Going by the name of Joseph Sadallah, he set up a trading shop on Washington Street, where other immigrants from the Levant — Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians — had created a vibrant Arab quarter known as Little Syria.

Most residents were Christian, their loyalties divided only between St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church at 103 Washington Street and St. Joseph’s Maronite Church at 57 Washington Street, later at 157 Cedar Street.

Other villagers who had journeyed to New York had let those in Baskinta know: “There’s a great place to make money; you don’t have to worry about the Turks collecting taxes or drafting you into the Turkish army” — or words to that effect, said Mr. Sadallah’s great-great-grandson, Carl Anthony Houck Jr., who goes by Carl Antoun to emphasize his Lebanese roots.

Mr. Antoun’s great-grandfather, Antonio J. Sadallah, whose name at birth was Tanus, ran the family business — importing and exporting dry goods, notions and jewelry — at several locations along Washington Street. Much of their trade was with Central and South America. The family has kept some of the calling cards, ledgers, invoices, correspondence and ephemera from the early 20th century.

Mr. Antoun was born in 1991, a full century after his forebear arrived in Manhattan. But he talks about Little Syria as if he can recall it himself. “I always get a deep chill down my spine,” he said the other day outside what used to be St. George’s, near Rector Street. The building’s facade was designed by a Lebanese-American draftsman, Harvey F. Cassab; the church is now an official landmark.

“I kind of freeze in time,” said Mr. Antoun, a junior at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. “In the back of my mind, I envision peddlers from here down to the water. I see tenements, with mothers screaming out

Much of Little Syria was demolished in the 1940s to allow construction of entrance ramps to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. What was left was bulldozed two decades later to make way for the World Trade Center.

About all that survives today with a demonstrable connection to the old settlement — apart from the St. George’s building — is the six-story building at 105-107 Washington Street, formerly the Downtown Community House. When the cornerstone was laid on Oct. 1, 1925, in a ceremony attended by Gov. Alfred E. Smith, The New York Times noted that “Wall Street financiers rubbed elbows with Nordic, Slav and Levantine neighbors in colorful crowds which packed Washington Street.”

Four years later, the Bowling Green Neighborhood Association, which built the community house, estimated the full-time population of the financial district at 12,500, including Greeks, Italians, Russians, Slovaks, Syrians and other nationalities.

In recent years, the building housed the True Buddha Diamond Temple. It is now empty. It is owned by Pink Stone Capital Group, which also owns a cleared site, 111 Washington Street, at Carlisle Street, where it is planning a tower more than 50 stories tall, with rental apartments and stores. The company has not announced its plans for the 105-107 Washington Street parcel.

The old community house and a tenement at No..109 are buildings that Mr. Antoun, together with Todd Fine and Norah Arafeh, would like to see preserved, alongside St. George’s, as a miniature historic district. They have set up a Save Washington Street Web site and created an online petition that had garnered 1,085 signatures by Sunday night.

“Tens of millions of tourists will walk every year from Battery Park and the Statue of Liberty to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum — all through historical Arab New York! — and these three buildings deserve to be preserved as landmarks,” the petition declares.

A senior staff committee of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, however, has already analyzed the community house and found it wanting. Mary Beth Betts, the commission’s director of research, said in a letter to Mr. Fine in August that “the property does not appear to meet the criteria for designation and will not be recommended to the full commission for further consideration.”

“The commission has recognized the significance of the Little Syria neighborhood through the 2009 designation of the (former) St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church,” her letter continued, “and the senior staff noted that there are better examples, from both an architectural and historical point of view, of the settlement house movement in other neighborhoods of Manhattan.”

Mr. Fine professes not to be discouraged. He said Ms. Betts’s letter “at least indicated to me that they were taking these arguments more seriously and saw how this could become an issue, with the cultural and historical value becoming weighed more substantially.”

buildings, and we get additional political support, the L.P.C. valuation might shift.”

No matter what happens, the members of Save Washington Street are performing the service of calling attention to the lost legacy of Little Syria. Mr. Fine is promoting the centennial of what he calls the first Arab-American novel, “The Book of Khalid,” by Ameen Rihani. It describes the Syrian quarter through the eyes of Khalid and Shakib, newly arrived from Baalbek, Lebanon. They quickly learn that their new environs, built on a landfill, are subject to flooding:

In the front part of this cellar we had our shop; in the rear, our home. On the floor we laid our mattresses, on the shelves, our goods. And never did we stop to think who in this case was better off. The safety of our merchandise before our own. But ten days after we had settled down, the water issued forth from the floor and inundated our shop and home. It rose so high that it destroyed half of our capital stock and almost all our furniture. And yet, we continued to live in the cellar, because, perhaps, every one of our compatriot-merchants did so.

Among the supporters of Save Washington Street is Msgr. James A. Root, rector of Our Lady of Lebanon Maronite Cathedral in Brooklyn Heights, where one more tangible reminder of Little Syria can be found: the cornerstone of St. Joseph’s. It was discovered in October 2002 as the rubble and ruins from the Sept. 11 attacks were being cleared around Cedar Street.

“For me,” Monsignor Root said, “it’s a sign that God is still present.”

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times In the vestibule of Our Lady of Lebanon Maronite Cathedral, 113 Remsen Street, in Brooklyn Heights, is the cornerstone of St. Joseph’s Maronite Church from Little Syria.

Several neighborhoods in New York City have sheltered important literary communities and movements: Greenwich Village was the stomping ground of the Beat Writers and the so-called “Lost Generation,” Brooklyn Heights claimed Richard Wright, W.H. Auden, and Truman Capote, and today’s vibrant contemporary literary scene stretches from Brooklyn Heights to Fort Greene.

However, in terms of global impact, the “Little Syria” neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, along the lower part of Washington Street, produced one of the most significant New York literary movements of all. Concentrated on Washington Street, from Battery Park up through Rector Street, and as high as Chambers Street, Little Syria was famous throughout the Arab world. A sizeable cohort of writers that worked in this neighborhood and formed an organization called the “Pen League” is still widely read in Arabic-speaking countries. They launched an aggressive campaign of innovation in the style and form of Arabic literature, explicitly importing Western and American ideas. The work of one of its participants, Kahlil Gibran’s singular English-language phenomenon The Prophet (1923), thrives as one of the best-selling books in world history, with estimates ranging from eleven to one hundred million copies sold.

Yet, besides Gibran with his massive popular following, collective memory in the United States and in New York City has largely forgotten both this first Arab-American neighborhood (mostly demolished by the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and by the World Trade Center) and the talented writers who operated there and often wrote in English as well as Arabic. This ignorance even has physical consequences for New Yorkers today.

The Arab-American community, in New York and nationally, has had to struggle in a difficult fight with the Landmarks Preservation Commission to protect the final three remaining historic buildings of Washington Street from demolition. This preservation campaign has received wide media attention in Europe and in the Arab world, but New Yorkers may not be familiar enough with the history of Little Syria to understand why Arab-Americans, of both Christian and Muslim background, feel so strongly about it.

From the 1870s until around 1940, New York City was the center of Arab life in the United States and in the Western Hemisphere, and, from Washington Street, Lebanese and Syrian merchants built up armies of peddlers and import-export empires that reached from the Midwest to Latin America. And with its freedom from Ottoman control and vibrant newspaper scene (strengthened by the adaptation of modern printing presses to Arabic script in New York), the neighborhood cradled a vibrant group of

poets and intellectuals who gathered in the numerous cafés and pastry shops which dotted Washington Street. In addition to Gibran, other key figures (also born in modern-day Lebanon) included the popular poet Elias Abu Madi (1889 or 1890–1957), the mystical Mikhail Naimy (1889–1988), and the versatile mentor of them all, Ameen Rihani (1876–1940).

While much of their writing engages specific Arab cultural issues and nationalism, a good amount directly addresses American and New York themes in a surprisingly modern and universalist manner. One work in particular, the first Arab-American novel written in English, Ameen Rihani’s The Book of Khalid (1911), tells the story of two young men who leave Lebanon for Little Syria. The New York setting serves as a vehicle for a sophisticated philosophical rumination about Arab democratic revolution and religious reform.

Melville House, the Brooklyn press which has undertaken a mission to revive many overlooked works of literature through its “Neversink” series, is republishing an edition of this long out-of-print novel in May. Because of its explicit theme of revolution in the Arab world (the novel concludes with revolutionary riots in Damascus, Syria against the Ottoman Empire), intellectuals of the Arab Spring have grappled with the novel’s uncanny parallels with the events that occurred exactly one hundred years after its publication.

In Rihani’s Arabic-language writings, he used the symbolism of New York in a conscious appeal to the Arab world. In one essay, while looking out from the Brooklyn Bridge, he asked, “When will you turn your face towards the East? Is it possible that the future will witness a Statue of Liberty next to the pyramids?” Now, as some of Rihani’s dreams articulated in The Book of Khalid are perhaps materializing, New Yorkers may wish to consider how some of the most powerful and creative visions of Arab revolution and of cultural dialogue were first articulated from a now forgotten Lower Manhattan neighborhood.