Negotiating Urban Environment and Economy in New York’s Little Syria,1880-1946

Scholars agree that New York’s downtown enclave of Arabic-speaking immigrants, established during the late nineteenth century, played a unique, even maternal, role in giving birth to Syrian colonies across the United States. ¹ Yet no scholarly monograph on the neighborhood that became known as Little Syria, covering the entire period of its existence, has been published to date. A concise demographic study in 1904 addressed three Syrian sections of New York City: the Lower Manhattan neighborhood discussed here, plus two in Brooklyn. In 1911, a philanthropic journal published a four-part series on Syrian immigrants nationwide, without focusing on New York. Several pages of the seminal history of such immigrants, published in 1924, referred to Little Syria, and sundry scholarly writings through the end of the twentieth century gave the colony cursory treatment. Works published in the twenty-first century have discussed, but not focused on, the ethnic neighborhood per se, with one exception before 2015, when the first book about New York City’s Syrian colony, dealing primarily (but not exclusively) with the period from 1880 through 1900, appeared in print. ²

This article makes a modest but original contribution by presenting a study, with source citations, devoted solely to Little Syria, as an ethnic community, whose residents negotiated specific environmental and economic pressures, from its origin around 1880 to its demise in 1946. New York City provides the context: to understand the rise and fall of Little Syria, we should view it as a tiny segment of an environmentally challenged, economically dynamic metropolis. Primary sources, including contemporary works of experts, newspapers, periodicals, memoirs, directories, and archival material, plus a host of secondary works, show that Syrian immigrants encountered and endured a miserable residential zone—a slum—in Lower Manhattan, and turned it into a locus of commercial prosperity. The thesis here is that early Syrian immigrants used their distinctive ethnicity to economic advantage within this particular urban enclave but exited its unappealing, unhealthy environment as soon as they could. Not unlike other immigrant populations, they found unparalleled opportunities for mobility and financial success in New York. Manifesting an Arabic culture and an affinity for the middle class, they left Little Syria behind, and made no concerted attempt to preserve the old ethnic neighborhood. ³ They embraced ethnicity as an economic virtue but distanced themselves from ethnicity as an environmental burden. Only their descendants looked back to Little Syria, much later, with nostalgia. ⁴

Little Syria existed within a multiblock zone on New York’s Lower West Side, between the Hudson River and Broadway. All sources agree on the south end of Washington Street and its side streets as the neighborhood’s nucleus but conflict on its geographic borders, suggesting spatial growth and fluctuation over time. ⁵ The bulk of the district, from Battery Place to Liberty Street, between Greenwich Street and West Street, lay within Manhattan’s First Ward, while the Third Ward covered the small section north of Liberty Street. ⁶ Here, New York’s Syrian immigrant population grew from a few hundred in the early 1890s to several thousand in the first decade of the twentieth century. ⁷

They began migrating to New York in significant numbers circa 1880. A former immigration official’s memoir spoke about Arabic-speaking immigrants, newly arrived from Mount Lebanon, then a part of geographic Syria. ⁸ A religious leader’s correspondence described famine conditions in Syria: “Finding no cereals at all, some are eating corpses and become ill in consequence.” ⁹ Begging (by some) in New York beat starving in the Near East. Through 1890, journalists reported regularly—often, but not always, negatively—on Syrians seeking admittance. ¹⁰ Syrian immigration increased in the 1890s and early 1900s, peaked in 1913, fell with World War I, then resumed after the armistice, undergoing a precipitous reduction following enactment of the notoriously restrictionist immigration law of 1924, on which others have written. ¹¹

Rapid growth, demographically and economically, defined this epoch in the city’s history. New York’s population rose from approximately 1.2 million in 1880 to at least 1.4 million in 1890, 3.4 million in 1900, 4.7 million in 1910, 5.6 million in 1920, 6.9 million in 1930, and 7.4 million in 1940. ¹² The city’s boroughs, as we know them today, were consolidated into Greater New York as of January 1, 1898. ¹³ In 1900, 37 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born; in 1910, close to 41 % in 1920, more than 36 % in 1940, 34 percent. ¹⁴ By the late nineteenth century, New York was a center of finance and international trade, as well as home to a large percentage of the nation’s millionaires. It also served as a major industrial center, with more than 20 thousand manufacturers by 1890. ¹⁵

If the city’s economy was vibrant, its environment was little short of horrid. Indeed, the Lower West Side district, like the city generally, had an environmentally problematic history. New York only began addressing rampant unsanitary conditions—overflowing privies, a lack of sewers, uncollected garbage, insufficient light, air, and water in tenement housing, and street filth, among others—in 1866 with the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Health (BOH). In 1867, the BOH reported disgraceful conditions at the bustling Washington Market, a venue for the purchase and sale of food items, so vast that it occupied an entire city block, stretching from Washington Street to West Street, and from Fulton Street to Vesey Street. ¹⁶ Illegal structures surrounded the market, generating masses of garbage while rendering the area inaccessible, thereby preventing refuse collection. In 1870, the agency, now called the Department of Health (DOH), saw to the demolition of many such structures. ¹⁷

Unhealthy conditions did not exist on land only. Polluted waters wafted through the nearby New York harbor. Cheaply built slips along the Lower Manhattan waterfront provided convenient receptacles for garbage and raw sewage in the mid-nineteenth century. ¹⁸ Until the late 1880s, the idea of preventing sewage from polluting the harbor did not begin to penetrate the public discourse. From 1889, new sewers, plus some old ones that required modification, dispensed waste into the waters at the end of piers, which extended further out from shore than slips. Sewage treatment became the focus of investigative commissions that issued reports issued in 1906, 1910, 1912, and 1914. ¹⁹ City residents suffered illnesses and discomfort attributed to bathing and fishing in, and consuming contaminated fish from, the city’s polluted waters. ²⁰

Death and disease were rampant. Infant mortality was all too common. During the 1890s, deaths of children under five years of age represented approximately 40 percent of all deaths in New York City. To ameliorate the problem, pure-milk stations for needy children were established by private charities. In addition, municipal government began to require milk sellers to obtain permits and dairy cows to submit to examinations for tuberculosis. That disease was a particular scourge. Tuberculosis of the lungs, often called consumption, claimed the lives of 237 per 100,000 persons in the city, as of 1898. It became the focus of a multiagency effort, starting in 1910. By 1919, the death rate had dropped to 123 per 100,000 persons. While this reflected improvement over two decades, thousands of people still were dying of tuberculosis, including more than 1,600 from pulmonary tuberculosis alone in that year. Other types of tuberculosis added to the mortality rate. ²¹

Deplorable housing conditions contributed to poor health. Tenement houses of the mid-nineteenth century, typically railroad structures, contained no shafts for sunlight to penetrate, leaving the vast majority of rooms literally in the dark. The late 1870s brought the dumbbell configuration, with a narrow shaft permitting most rooms to experience some sunlight. An investigative commission appointed by the Governor of New York in 1894 detailed the problems associated with slum dwellings—including, embarrassingly, those owned by the venerable downtown religious institution, Trinity Church—leading to passage of the Tenement House Act of 1901. Dwellings built under this statute, so-called new-law tenements, had to meet requirements that improved accessibility to natural light, fire protection, and sanitation, though less than optimally. ²²

In such a challenging environmental context, Little Syria never became a setting conducive to good health. In 1914, an investigating committee of a presumably now-chastened Trinity Church reported on yard toilets, refuse, broken stairs, deteriorating walls, filth, and other vile conditions in neighborhood housing, and it pinpointed Little Syria’s environs as a locus of infant mortality, tuberculosis, and contagious diseases. ²³ It also appears, from records summarized in a 1936 study, that Little Syria lay within a zone where the tuberculosis mortality rate ranged from 125 to 174 per 100,000 individuals for 1929 to 1933, and 200 or more for 1929 to 1931, and where the infant mortality rate ranged from 75 to 84 per 100,000 live births for 1929 to 1933, and 200 or more for 1929 to 1931. ²⁴

Overcrowding in tenement dwellings was endemic. In 1862, New York’s 12,000 tenements housed 380,000 residents. ²⁵ By 1900, the tenement population in Manhattan alone had risen to 1,585,000, while tenement houses had not risen commensurately, totaling 42,700. ²⁶ Moreover, the scarcity of real estate in Lower Manhattan drove its market value upward after 1860, giving property owners little economic incentive to ameliorate habitability problems. ²⁷ The First Ward had 210 tenement structures as of 1893, and 216 as of 1900, showing little growth in supply. ²⁸ Decades later, in 1926, overcrowding in tenements still remained a serious, chronic problem. ²⁹

Just before the turn of the century, writers described the vile and unhealthful conditions of the tenement district at the southern end of Washington Street. Despite the highly valuable properties on Broadway and eastward in Lower Manhattan, the Lower West Side properties inhabited by Little Syria residents did not enjoy the benefits of routine repair and maintenance, much less upgrades. ³⁰

Little Syria continued to manifest undesirable housing and health conditions in the new century. In 1901, the U.S. Industrial Commission reported that, in New York’s Syrian colony, “the tenements occupied are old and in bad condition.” ³¹ The next year, a fire caused panic in the neighborhood, leading the New York Times to mention the poor quality of materials used to construct the tenements. ³² Harper’s Weekly carried a story in 1911 about pure-milk stations, established to ameliorate the nutritional deficiencies among immigrant children, with a photograph caption linking “Syrian children” and “New York slum[.]” ³³ Thirteen years later, the colony’s tenements still suffered from dark hallways, and its side streets were replete with broken pavement. ³⁴ On Christmas Eve 1925, the Wall Street Journal greeted the generic “Johnnie of Washington Street” who lived in a tenement district overshadowed by Lower Manhattan skyscrapers, poignantly highlighting Little Syria’s residential unsuitability. ³⁵

Johnnie’s predecessors on Washington Street enjoyed few, if any, open spaces or recreational facilities, either. No bona fide parks existed within Little Syria at the turn of the century. The nearest was Battery Park, across Battery Place. ³⁶ An 1887 law authorized annual expenditures of as much as $1 million for city parks and playgrounds, yet none of the authorized funds got spent until 1901. ³⁷ An influential two-volume treatise on New York tenement house issues, published in 1903, includes a chapter that neither shows nor refers to any such facilities in the First and Third Wards, except for Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan. ³⁸ In the main, children in Little Syria had to play on busy sidewalks and in streets and alleys. The city simply did not set aside safe space for juveniles in this business-oriented downtown zone.

Entertainment establishments for adults were lacking there, too. As of 1910, the Lower West Side housed only one movie theater and no amusement, concert, or lecture halls. ³⁹

Noise added to the misery of daily life. Subway construction took place in the late 1890s and early 1900s in Manhattan. A Brooklyn connection was added as of 1905. Subway ridership exceeded expectations ab initio. ⁴⁰ Indeed, rapid transit usage of various sorts increased markedly between 1880 and 1910. ⁴¹ The sheer density of humanity added to the noise. Few cities anywhere rivaled Manhattan for congestion by 1910. ⁴² Clamoring vehicles crammed into West Street, doing daily business runs on the dock side of the district, too, generating still more noise. ⁴³ Moreover, commercial real estate development, including erection of skyscrapers, intensified after the turn of the twentieth century. ⁴⁴ In 1909, construction began on a 31-story addition to the Whitehall Building on the corner of Washington Street and Battery Place. Upon completion, it towered over Little Syria’s structures, typically only a few stories in height. World War I caused a construction halt, but large projects resumed after hostilities ceased. ⁴⁵ Construction work and motor vehicle horns in Lower Manhattan accounted for some of the highest decibel levels reported by the city’s Noise Abatement Commission in 1930. High average noise levels were measured in or around Little Syria. ⁴⁶ Even during the throes of the Great Depression in 1931, the erection of office buildings continued in Lower Manhattan, where riveters on skyscraper construction sites relentlessly filled the air with piercing sounds. ⁴⁷ Aural assault was quotidian fare in Little Syria.

Aside from creating incessant noise, the construction of skyscrapers blocked sunlight and diminished any open space, which was already minimal. Hence, Little Syria, according to the Syrian immigrant and historian, Philip K. Hitti, was quite different for the Syrians than Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Lower East Side were for the Chinese, the Italians, and the Russian Jews, respectively. The ongoing construction and sheer verticality of surrounding office buildings in and near the financial district fenced in, while ineluctably pushing out, the local residents. ⁴⁸ Newcomers from Syria surely must have found this environment jolting to their sensibilities. The earliest pioneers hailed mostly from villages and towns in Mount Lebanon, where silk production and agriculture provided the principal sources of livelihoods. ⁴⁹ They had been rural dwellers, sometimes described in sources as peasants. ⁵⁰ Now they were unmistakably urbanites, crammed into a dim, narrow section of a metropolis. Arabic-speaking immigrants also came from other regions of geographic Syria, including cities, such as Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs, and their environs. ⁵¹ Even they had to adjust to the sense of compression caused by Lower Manhattan real estate development, especially the erection of skyscrapers. ⁵²

Alas, these entrepreneurial individuals persevered, and concentrated on making money. ⁵³ A cleric’s manuscript on Syrian immigrants, probably penned in the late 1920s, candidly described these people as uncomplicated, with classic ambitions of economic self-betterment, who managed in fairly short order to make more money here than their counterparts in the Levant. The immigrants sent funds back home, leading to stories that, exaggerated or not, led to greater immigration. The primary motivation for emigration from Syria was not political freedom, but rather economic advancement. Typically, the Syrians began earning income in America by peddling, after which many become suppliers of new immigrant peddlers, who naturally purchased their stock from Syrians. Following the success of shops came the establishment of factories. In a relatively short span, Syrian immigrants improved their standards of life. Money-making concretely transformed immigrants’ lives and begat further Syrian immigration—a chain migration born of pragmatism, not idealism. ⁵⁴

Syrian immigrants’ accounts buttress this interpretation. Costa George Najour related to researcher Adele L. Younis that another Syrian, Ameen Slyby, arrived here in 1888, rendezvousing in New York with Constantine El Biskinta, who sold goods to Syrians there, and they would peddle from town to town, wearing backpacks. If they found a locale that they found desirable, they would settle there. ⁵⁵ A contemporary Syrian directory appears to corroborate Najour’s recollection of Slyby’s story about his supplier friend: it lists a similarly named individual as a dry goods merchant at 60-62 Washington Street, New York City. ⁵⁶ According to his memoir, Syrian immigrant Abraham Mitrie Rihbany set foot on Washington Street in 1891, lodging in squalid Syrian-owned rooming houses, and suffering a lack of privacy as well as daily noise from earthy and unkempt Syrian peddlers bargaining for inventory in the wholesale supply store downstairs. Whenever possible, he took solace in Battery Park. ⁵⁷

During the 1890s, trade and commerce thrived in Little Syria. As of 1897, Arabic (and other ethnic) businesses operated at multiple addresses along and around Washington Street. ⁵⁸ Syrian immigrants of all socioeconomic classes owed their daily bread, directly or indirectly, to Little Syria, where, according to demographer Lucius H. Miller, virtually all Syrian-owned businesses in New York were found at the time. ⁵⁹ Labor of Arabic-speakers was abundant, and, according to the Industrial Commission, “none but Syrians are employed by Syrians.” ⁶⁰ More than 60 businesses engaged in the manufacture or sale of laces, embroideries, linens, and similar Arabic finery. More than 40 dry goods stores, 30 grocers, 24 garment makers, nearly 20 restaurants, as well as several hotels, drug stores, candy stores, cigarette makers, and tobacco shops operated along Washington Street and its cross streets, laden with spoken Arabic. Many Arabic-language newspapers and magazines were printed there. Real estate agents, jewelers, tailors, and a few professionals maintained offices. ⁶¹ Scores of Syrian businesses generated livelihoods for Arabic-speaking immigrants. Syrian manufacturers, importers-exporters, wholesalers, and retailers generated tens of millions of dollars in annual revenues in the early twentieth century, and Syrians played a leading role in New York’s lace and linen (white goods) industry by the late 1920s, if not sooner. ⁶²

Syrian immigrant women frequently peddled, sharing with men the elevated status of regular contributors to the family coffers. ⁶³ So many females peddled that, in 1899, the Syrian Women’s Union, a charitable organization in Little Syria, decided to open a nursery for the children of such women to obviate the necessity of mothers taking their children on peddling forays. ⁶⁴ A few years later, Miller found that women comprised more than 36 percent of peddlers in the Lower Manhattan colony. ⁶⁵ The New York Times remarked that the Syrian man preferred to sequester the females in his family unless they were peddling, thereby generating revenue. ⁶⁶ Hitti explained that Syrians recognized female peddlers’ pecuniary value, which in turn caused an increased inflow of such women from the Levant to U.S. shores. ⁶⁷ Subsequent scholars have echoed this view. Perhaps because they related better to the largely female clientele, women peddlers often generated profits superior to their male counterparts. Hence, Syrian female peddling constituted an exception to contemporary Arabic gender norms—an exception to patriarchy borne of pragmatism. ⁶⁸

Arabic-speaking women contributed economically through other employment, too. In Little Syria, 98 percent of those employed in sewing, and 42 percent of factory workers were female. Slightly more than 38 percent of all females over the age of 14 in the Syrian quarter earned wages. The endemic problem of female illiteracy—in Arabic as well as English—plainly did not prevent Syrian immigrant women from engaging in remunerative work. ⁶⁹

Not every Arabic business in Little Syria was legitimate. Pragmatism sometimes fostered illegal pursuits. One business sold cigarettes in pre-used packaging containing Internal Revenue stamps, a form of tax fraud. Another received smuggled laces. Liquor and gambling violations occurred. ⁷⁰ Even licit businesses sometimes engaged in deceptive practices, such as selling putative imports from the Holy Land, goods that, in truth, were manufactured locally. ⁷¹ As the Trinity Church committee described Syrians, they appeared “almost wholly commercial.” ⁷²

Syrians who made enough money to relocate did not hesitate to do so. They fled Lower Manhattan tenements for better homes in Brooklyn, consciously rejecting Little Syria as a place of permanent residence. “Their stay in the district, therefore, is a means to an end,” according to the Trinity Church committee report, “and while here, they make a business of taking fellow countrymen as lodgers to help them themselves the more quickly to leave this section.” ⁷³ Those who moved to Brooklyn’s South Ferry section usually returned to Lower Manhattan each day by ferry and, from 1910, by subway. Public transportation thus played a crucial part in facilitating the routine flows back and forth, since roughly 2,000 Syrians resided in South Ferry by 1915. In 1920, the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT) line supplemented the Interborough line as a commuter link between Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. ⁷⁴ Hitti observed in 1924 that the Washington Street area no longer constituted a residential, but only a business, venue for the Syrians. ⁷⁵ Other writers in the 1920s made similar assertions. ⁷⁶ In 1931, a journalist reported that Syrians continued to leave Little Syria for Brooklyn, usually seeking dwellings near those of other Syrians. ⁷⁷ Most such Arabic-speaking immigrants adopted a conventional middle class lifestyle, dividing work and home into separate spaces. ⁷⁸

Syrians moving out of Manhattan in the 1920s mirrored interborough demographic shifts generally. While New York City’s population increased from 5,620,048 in 1920 to 6,930,446 in 1930, Manhattan’s population declined more than 18 percent, from 2,284,103 in 1920 to 1,867,312 in 1930. By contrast, Brooklyn’s population rose nearly 27 percent, from 2,018,356 to 2,560,401, over the decade. The 1930 census found 6,065 Syrians living in New York City, 5,353 in Brooklyn, and a mere 508 in Manhattan. Syrian residential preferences shifted toward Bay Ridge and Park Slope, in addition to South Ferry. The English-language Syrian World, published in Little Syria since July 1926 (with a hiatus from July 1932 through April 1933), could be purchased at multiple locations in Brooklyn in 1933. ⁷⁹

Aside from residential outflow, some of Little Syria’s most successful merchants began to relocate their businesses to the more fashionable Fifth Avenue as of the early 1900s. ⁸⁰ Arabic-owned enterprises were not unique in this. Such shifts were of a piece with late Victorian notions of a modernizing New York. The future of the city was thought to lie uptown, not downtown. ⁸¹ The general trend of businesses moving to Fifth Avenue continued through the first quarter of the twentieth century. ⁸² Syrian businesses followed suit. The Lebanon National Bank moved its central office from Washington Street to 319 Fifth Avenue in 1927, while maintaining its Little Syria branch. ⁸³ Bardwil Bros., a supplier of laces and linens, vacated 90 Washington Street by 1929, reestablishing its business at 153 Fifth Avenue. ⁸⁴ Business relocations from Washington Street to Fifth Avenue persisted into the early 1930s. ⁸⁵

As a result, Little Syria merchants increasingly found themselves in competition with Arabic-owned firms situated on Fifth Avenue and elsewhere in the city. In 1933, the Syrian World lamented the marked decline of foot traffic on Washington Street, noting in December 1933 that “[t]he Syrian linen moguls had moved to Fifth Avenue,” and that current shopkeepers “stand with folded arms waiting for customers.” ⁸⁶ Business relocations did not relent in the mid-1930s. A Syrian World article in May 1934, reflecting on Washington Street’s “old-time atmosphere,” observed with chagrin, “How many Syrian business men, prominent today, and are now on Fifth Ave. or thereabouts in N.Y. cannot be counted on the fingers of both hands.” ⁸⁷ Actually, more than 30 workplaces in the Syrian-dominated negligee industry could be found between Fifth and Madison Avenues, from Thirty-First to Thirty-Sixth Streets. ⁸⁸ A prime example was Simon Kirdahy’s popular spot for Arabic cuisine, the Sheik Restaurant, which terminated its longtime presence on Washington Street in 1935, and moved to 241 Fifth Avenue, in the garment district. The Syrian World ran a celebratory piece on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the restaurant. Like other successful Syrians, the proprietor “outgrew” Washington Street “and moved uptown, to fashionable Fifth Avenue,” where “a few thousand Syrians” worked in factories and shops. ⁸⁹ Pragmatic considerations motivated the shift uptown: this was where the customers now were. Arabic-owned businesses followed their clientele.

Pragmatism bore reflection in two major Syrian business directories, published more than 20 years apart. The Syrian Business Directory (for the United States) appeared in 1908, listing more than 3,000 businesses owned or operated by Syrian immigrants—in English on the left, in Arabic on the right, with a vertical line separating the two. Advertisements were almost entirely in Arabic, except for names and addresses (and, occasionally, sentences). This bilingual construction reflected an effort to control assimilation, as many potential customers who would consult the directory clung to their native tongue. ⁹⁰ The Syrian American Directory Almanac, 1930, published in 1929, limited its focus to New York, evidencing the growth of Syrian-owned businesses in the city by 1929. The majority of business listings appeared in Manhattan, but most residential listings, in Brooklyn, pointed up the common rejection of Little Syria as a place to dwell. All listings appeared in both Arabic and English. This showed that although “American” now followed “Syrian” in the directory’s title, many customers, especially older ones, still might not read English. They were not ignored, but rather accommodated, reflecting the publishers’ conscious efforts to interweave ethnicity and assimilation. ⁹¹

The city’s—indeed, the nation’s—second Syrian-owned bank, D. J. Faour & Brothers, catered to a similar clientele. Established in 1891, the Faour Bank commenced operations on Morris Street, and then, for years, was located at Washington Street addresses. Unlisted in the bank section of The Manhattan Guide—Greater New York Red Book, the firm’s listings and advertisements appeared in publications geared for Arabic-speaking immigrants. ⁹² It is not unfair to call it an immigrant bank, a term actually used in the early twentieth century. ⁹³ Unable to withstand the Great Depression, the Faour Bank faced insolvency in the winter of 1933. The impact of this landmark Syrian institution’s failure reverberated throughout the ethnic colony. The Syrian World devoted an entire page to an itemization of depositors and the amount owed to each. ⁹⁴ A bitterly contested liquidation process ensued, as reported in depth in the pages of the Syrian World. ⁹⁵ By late 1935, the bank finally sank, as did the Syrian World itself. ⁹⁶

Little Syria’s days now were numbered. Arabic businesses still could be found there, although it seems they no longer predominated, in the mid-1930s. ⁹⁷ But by the end of the decade, Robert Moses, the city’s immensely powerful planner and administrator, envisioned building a bridge between the Battery and Brooklyn. Members of New York’s politically influential elite protested vehemently against the bridge proposal, preferring a tunnel, as originally intended by the Mayor and the Legislature. The Battery debates carried all the way up to the War Department and, ultimately, to the President of the United States. Over Moses’s objections, the bridge project was ultimately jettisoned in favor of the tunnel project. ⁹⁸ The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel groundbreaking occurred in 1940. Construction proceeded until 1942, halted until World War II’s completion, and resumed in 1946. ⁹⁹ During that year, neighborhood properties began to be taken by eminent domain. A journalist noted that Washington Street was expected to survive only until around year’s end, with a mere handful of businesses and a few elderly persons still hanging on there. ¹⁰⁰ The demolitions required for the tunnel project essentially destroyed whatever remained of the ethnic colony as such. ¹⁰¹

No evidence of protest against such displacement has surfaced. Arabic-speaking immigrants and their progeny appear to have acquiesced in the inevitable. They did not fight city hall. They publicly exhibited no sentimental attachment to the old neighborhood. Most of them, after all, had long since departed. Little Syria had not taken hold of them, physically or psychologically. By the time they arrived, it had become inhospitable—a ghetto, really—and it never changed for the better. Environmentally, what was there to like: the dirt, the decrepitude, the disease, the darkness, the clamor, the lack of green space? Moreover, city officials had not proposed renovating but rather destroying many of the extant buildings; the tunnel ramp required a wide swath of real estate. Further, a multi-story parking garage would replace buildings in the heart of the district. ¹⁰² New York was not just growing but maturing, modernizing. So were the Syrians in the city. Pragmatic, resourceful, and culturally middle class, they moved up and out, both literally and metaphorically.

We see, then, that Little Syria served as an arena for the negotiation by Arabic-speaking immigrants of particular environmental and economic pressures. The Levantine diasporic community (mahjar) in New York grappled with, and reconciled, such pressures to make a comfortable personal life possible without sublimating their ethnicity or jeopardizing their livelihoods. They marketed their ethnicity, while extricating themselves from a downtown milieu too unpleasant to sustain long-term human habitation. Little Syria had no right to exist independent of the persons who infused it with ethnic vitality while concomitantly propelling themselves into the middle class.

Ethnicization and assimilationism need not be mutually exclusive frameworks for analyzing Arabic-speaking immigrants’ encounters with Little Syria. ¹⁰³ Choosing to abandon their original settlement in Lower Manhattan, these newcomers unquestionably assimilated. ¹⁰⁴ But that should not be interpreted as capitulation or surrender. Rather, it reflected volition and agency. It was only common sense to repair to neighborhoods that, by any measure, were better places to dwell and raise families, and to relocate businesses to Fifth Avenue when downtown businesses generally, and the garment industry in particular, moved uptown. With such pragmatic steps, Syrians made affirmative uses of the knowledge and acumen they brought from the Near East. Their talents included more than how to prepare Arabic food or manufacture silk garments; they also involved the capacity to adjust and acclimate to shifting realities in a culturally unfamiliar setting. Of course, many learned to communicate in English, the lingua franca of the United States, turning toward mainstream, and away from ethnic, norms. Surely this transition was as inevitable for Syrians as for other immigrants seeking admission to the middle class. Still, the Arabic language proved remarkably resilient among Levantine diasporants throughout the multidecade period under study. It seems, then, that Syrian immigrants, individually, sought to control the pace and degree of their assimilation. In economically promising but environmentally challenging circumstances, they asserted their ethnicity, yet also distanced themselves from their ethnicity at times, in ways and measures that they determined for themselves. ¹⁰⁵