For the oldest living generation of Arab-Americans and for the youngest Arab-American activists now rediscovering their heritage, a walk in downtown Manhattan brings tremendous feelings of loss and foreboding.

From the 1880s to the 1940s, a world-famous center of Arabic-speaking life, business, literary culture and journalism existed along Washington Street in the lower west side of Manhattan. Most structures were destroyed in large property-seizure actions supported by the government, the first instigated by New York dictatorial icon Robert Moses to build the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the second with the construction of the World Trade Center. No other major ethnic Manhattan neighborhood of the period has been devastated as thoroughly as “Little Syria,” and one can empathize with the pain of a Lebanese-American former resident like Marian Giachi, who told the BBC World Service, “It’s not nice. It’s sad to see, I really mean this.”

Now, the final remaining sliver, an extraordinary trinity of buildings on Washington Street (a Melkite church, community center and final tenement that huddle together in a field of skyscrapers and hotels sprouting like mushrooms), stands in danger of being destroyed, damaged or structurally weakened.

Ten years ago, in 2003, the well-known New York City historian and tour guide Joseph Svehlak wrote a manifesto arguing that these last landmarks of Little Syria should be preserved in order to recognize the people of many diverse ethnicities (including his own, Moravian) who lived in this forgotten residential neighborhood in the financial district. He and his colleagues in the Friends of the Lower West Side group succeeded in a six-year appeal to the Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate the exquisite St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church as a city landmark, and now the fight to protect the other two buildings continues as I and Carl Antoun, a twenty-one-year-old college student whose ninety-three-year-old grandmother grew up on Washington Street, have taken up the banner through the “Save Washington Street” campaign.