Lower Manhattan’s Old Syrian Quarter Evoked by New Art in FiDi Park
A multi-part public artwork was unveiled yesterday, April 30, in Elizabeth Berger Plaza, the pocket park bounded by Greenwich Street, Edgar Street, Trinity Place, and an exit ramp from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. With sculpture, mosaics, and poetry, artist Sara Ouhaddou created “Al Qalam: Poets in the Park” to memorialize the writers of the Arab diaspora who were part of an enclave that came together in Lower Manhattan starting in the 1880s and became known as Little Syria.
The park’s central lawn now features large, sculptural calligraphy that represents the Arabic word “al Qalam” (“The Pen”), a nod to the Pen League, the first Arabic-language literary society in the United States. Formed in 1920 by a group of Lower Manhattan poets, the Pen League was led by the renowned Kahlil Gibran, who wrote: “The whole earth is my homeland, and the human family is my tribe.” Nearby, curving mosaic panels have been incorporated into the backrests of existing stone benches, featuring excerpts from works by the writers honored on the sculpture.
Today, the stretch of Greenwich and Washington Streets between Battery Place and Albany Street—bisected by the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel ramps—is known by the forgettable name, “Greenwich South.” By all appearances, it is an orphan of a neighborhood that never quite coalesced. But nothing could be further from the truth. A century ago, before the World Trade Center or the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (the two giant public works projects that decimated this once-thriving quarter), it was an ethnic enclave as vibrant as Little Italy or Chinatown.
The immigrants who flocked here were Arabs. The most southern stretch of Washington Street was to newcomers from Damascus, Beirut, and Jerusalem, what Mulberry Street was for Italian transplants and Canal Street was for the Chinese. Their life was centered beneath the Ninth Avenue Elevated Train, which ran up Greenwich Street. As difficult as it is to envision this perilously narrow lane accommodating a railroad viaduct, it did—and the station at Rector Street was the center of their small town. The social and spiritual focus of the community was St. Joseph’s Maronite Church, for most of the Arabic-speaking immigrants who lived here were Christian (of the Maronite and Melkite sects).
In the 1940s, construction of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel erased many square blocks of the neighborhood. During this period, the construction of the West Side Elevated Highway also cut off Little Syria from the surrounding area. St. Joseph’s Church, which stood where the Battery Parking Garage is now located, was demolished. (Its cornerstone was found amid excavation of debris from the World Trade Center site in 2002.) By 1946, the New York Times would observe with grim prescience, “Washington Street, at the lower end of Manhattan Island, is today a condemned street. From Rector Street to Battery Place, all the people who live there and run restaurants and spice shops and Oriental bakeries and newspapers have received notice to vacate.”
In the 1950s, the Ninth Avenue El was taken out of service and its tracks torn down, further isolating the neighborhood. As New York’s status as a port declined and nearby docks were abandoned, the constant stream of imports that was the economic lifeblood for the community withered. Little Syria’s death knell was the construction of the World Trade Center, beginning in the late 1960s, which seized several more blocks of the community and effectively sealed its northern border. The small remnant of the 100,000-plus Arab population that had once lived there decamped for Brooklyn, where Atlantic Avenue is now the thoroughfare that Washington and Greenwich Streets were.
At Thursday’s ceremony, Linda Jacobs, president of the Washington Street Historical Society, whose grandparents were members of the Little Syria community, spoke of the neighborhood that once thrived here: restaurants, grocery stores, boarding houses, small businesses, schools, and chapels. Arabic presses founded here published newspapers and books. “Out of this cultural hotbed emerged the group of writers and poets who gave us works of art that were boundary-breaking in their theme and language, changing the face of both Arabic and American literature” Ms. Jacobs said.
City Council member Christopher Marte said, “for me, this is a reminder of the displacement crisis that our city has long gone through, sometimes in the name of capitalism, sometimes in the name of quality of life, sometimes in the name of urban renewal. This is a reminder that a community was here thriving, inviting new members to come, sharing our language, our culture, and reminding us of who we are.”
“This is our reminder for Lower Manhattan,” he continued. “Central Park has Seneca village and the former African-American community there. Right outside of Lincoln Center, you have the old San Juan Hill, the former Puerto Rican and African-American community. This is an important monument because these fights and these crises are still around today.”
Todd Fine, founder of the Washington Street Historical Society, who began advocating in 2013 for the monument unveiled Thursday, said afterward, “the Arabic-language literary scene that emerged in Lower Manhattan, including figures such as Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, produced arguably the most significant foreign-language literary movement in American history. Its influence extended far beyond immigrant New York, helping to reshape modern Arabic literature itself.”
“The permanent commemoration of that legacy at Elizabeth Berger Plaza is an important cultural development whose long-term significance may only become clear with time,” he continued. “At a dangerous moment marked by war and growing authoritarianism, the messages of these writers still resonate and deserve renewed study and contemplation.”