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.”
