Peter Feinman: Lower Manhattan’s Little Syria

Once upon a time in the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan called Little Syria. The area was defined as west of Broadway to the Hudson River and from the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan north to Liberty Street.

Beginning in the 1880s, a variety of people from the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East began settling there. By the 1920s the population consisted of about 8,000 people, including 27 ethnicities. Their tenements were located near the docks where the residents worked.

Thanks to the construction of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the World Trade Center, almost all of Little Syria has been destroyed. The 9/11 Memorial is now adjacent to what was once Little Syria.  You can read the full story here.