Loading ...Little Syria: New York preservationists fight for remains of historic cultural hub
Ellen Brait and Mahita Gajanan
The Guardian
Blocks from the World Trade Center, there’s an unassuming street just like so many in New York. Nestled between a Holiday Inn and a vacant lot that will soon house another skyscraper, three buildings weathered with age are dwarfed by their surroundings. These are the sole remnants of Little Syria, an early immigrant community in New York.
Todd Fine stands across the way, giving a tour and talking without pause for close to an hour. As president of the Washington Street Historical Society, a group determined to preserve the community’s history, he’s used to showing people around the area, his passion for the neighborhood apparent.
He strolls into an empty restaurant oblivious to the hostess who asks if he would like to take a seat, intently focused on relaying its history as a Syrian church.
At its height between the late 19th and early 20th century, Little Syria was home to a thriving community of immigrants from the Middle East who established the neighborhood as a cultural and mercantile haven.
With so little remaining of the once sprawling neighborhood and so few of its former residents still alive, Fine, along with a handful of others, has been fighting to preserve what’s left of Little Syria, against a backdrop of fevered political debate over immigration and the acceptance of Syrian refugees.
The birth of Little Syria
Little Syria, sprawling across Washington and Rector streets on the west side of lower Manhattan, was for decades the center of New York’s first Middle Eastern community.
An issue of Kawkab Amirka. Photograph: Library of Congress
According to Fine, the area became a destination for Arab immigrants in the 1830s and 1840s. They used the proximity to lower Manhattan’s waterfront to establish import and export businesses.
The immigrants came from Ottoman-controlled Greater Syria, which encompassed modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and Jordan, giving the neighborhood its name.
Between 1880 and 1924, 95,000 Arabs moved to the US, boosting the Arab-American population to 200,000, in cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland.
New York’s Little Syria joined the likes of Paris, Cairo and Beirut in becoming a cultural hub, according to Fine. By the early 1900s, Syrian Americans had created more than 300 businesses in New York and developed community organizations.
Arab Americans became part of a literary renaissance, reinvigorating the Arabic press in the Middle East after the linotype machine was converted to Arabic characters by the brothers Naoum and Salloum Mokarzel, of Little Syria’s Al-Hoda newspaper. The community published more than 50 Arabic language newspapers between 1890 and 1940, beginning in 1892 with Kawkab Amirka, the first Arabic language newspaper in North America.
“Everybody wanted to talk politics and talk about the Ottoman Empire,” Fine said. “Out of this journalism scene and this literary inspiration, there was this major movement and innovation in Arabic writing in the United States.”
Source: www.theguardian.com