Little Syria @ Washington Street, Manhattan, New York City

Little Syria was a neighborhood that existed in the New York City borough of Manhattan from the late 19th century until the 1940s, when the area around Washington Street was demolished to make way for entrance ramps to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. The enclave existed primarily to the south of the eventual site of the World Trade Center, just blocks away from the proposed site of Cordoba House.

Christian immigrants from present-day Syria and Lebanon settled in the area in the late 19th century, escaping religious persecution and poverty in their homelands then under control of the Ottoman Empire, and answering the call of American missionaries to escape their difficulties by traveling across the Atlantic Ocean to New York City. The overwhelming majority of the residents were Arab Christians. The New York Times estimated that as many as 5% of the area's Arab residents were Muslims, who mostly came from the area of Palestine.[1] The Christians lived on Washington Street to the south of the site of the World Trade Center, where they established three churches, including St. George Chapel of the Melkite Rite, which as of 2010 survives as Moran's Ale House and Grill. The small Muslim community was predominantly located to the north of the World Trade Center site.[1] An 1899 article about New York's Syrian Quarter and its 3,000 residents described how the immigrants arriving there didn't "leave all their quaint customs, garments, ways of thinking at home," nor did they become "ordinary American citizens," but instead "just enough of their traits, dress, ideas remain, no matter how long they have been here, to give the colonies they form spice and a touch of novelty." While noting "a number of amazingly pretty girls," the reporter described Little Syria near the turn of the 20th century as a mix of social classes, but said that "the lower class, men and women, have little that is attractive about them. They have been called the dirtiest people in all New York".

The WPA Guide to New York City (1939) mentions the Syrian Quarter of what was then the "Lower West Side," in the market district, siting it "at the foot of Washington Street from Battery Place to Rector Street".[3]

In his 2006 book The Arab Americans, Gregory Orfalea described Little Syria as "an enclave in the New World where Arabs first peddled goods, worked in sweatshops, lived in tenements and hung their own signs on stores." Naoum and Salloum Mokarzel created the publication Al-Hoda, adapting the Linotype machine to produce text in the Arabic alphabet, which "made possible and immeasurably stimulated the growth of Arabic journalism in the Middle East." By August 1946, residents and business owners on the stretch of Washington Street from Rector Street to Battery Place in what was then the "heart of New York's Arab world" had received condemnation notices, just years before the neighborhood was razed to create entrance ramps needed for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which opened in 1950.

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