Activists Fight City to Save Last Two Buildings in ‘Little Syria’

posted on: Jun 24, 2012

Little Syria is facing a big problem.

Activists are rallying to save the last vestiges of America’s first Arab-American neighborhood before it’s too late — but the city doesn’t think the buildings are worth it.

“Most people don’t realize that the center of Arab life was in the shadow of the World Trade Center,” said Todd Fine, an organizer with Save Washington Street, a campaign to preserve the surviving two buildings of New York’s once bustling Syrian quarter.

“The fact that it’s near Ground Zero makes it trickier to talk about,” he said. “Yet this should have been protected wherever it was.”

Washington Street, from the Battery to Rector streets, was an enclave for Syrian and Lebanese immigrants in the early 1900s before it was bulldozed to build the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and later the World Trade Center.

Today, a church, tenement and community center are all that remain. The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church a landmark three years ago but refuses to consider the others.

“They won’t talk to us,” Fine said. “The less of a serious response we get from them, the more we have to wonder why they’re not treating this fairly.”

Now, Fine is demanding a public hearing.

“You have a religious institute, a community-service institute and a residence next to each other,” said preservationist Joseph Svehlak. “That those buildings survived is a miracle.”

The six-story Downtown Community House — a currently empty red-brick structure at 105-107 Washington St. built in 1926 — provided the first downtown public library and a clinic and gymnasium for immigrants.

Svehlak fears the building’s owners, Pink Stone Realty, will tear it down, especially since the company has plans for a 50-story high-rise on the block.

Pink Stone also owns the five-story tenement at 109 Washington St., built in 1885. On the ground floor, Syrian immigrants ran a cigar factory.

But the Landmarks Preservation Commission argues that the structures lack “architectural and historical significance.” It said the church adequately represents the Syrian Quarter’s rich history.

“If the city landmarked all three of these buildings, we’d be able to tell the story of Little Syria,” said activist Carl Houck, 21, of Queens, whose great-grandfather ran an import business on Washington Street.

Kate Briquelet
New York Post