Little Syria and The Arab Ghosts of New York
I didn’t grow up an exception to the rule: I was an Arab in an Arab country. I never felt discriminated against or felt the the bigoted throes of Islamophobia until I was in my early adult years. I grew up privileged; as the majority Egyptian, in Cairo, Egypt, where diversity is hard to come by. With the exception of an American elementary school teacher and a British summer school teacher, I didn’t meet anyone with a different native tongue until my teens, unless you count my parasocial Disney Channel obsession. And that, I think, has led me to an expectation of a more diverse experience in America.
I moved to New York at 21 in 2021 to get my master’s degree. I had been told a lot about New York, that it was a “melting pot”, and it was, but not in a good way. Those who came from elsewhere melted into New York and became purely New Yorkers, leaving much of their culture behind.
I went to Syrian shawarma restaurants and only heard English. I saw people who looked like my mother and learned they didn’t speak her tongue anymore.
In anguish, I resorted to Arab restaurants in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where my dad spent some years of his 20s before returning to Cairo to marry my mother. A few years ago, I found a souvenir rolodex my dad owned with the logo and address of a restaurant called Karam on 4th Avenue in Bay Ridge. After a quick Google search, I found that Karam still existed, over 25 years after my dad lived in New York. So I decided to give it a visit.
Karam is a Lebanese restaurant run by Chaouki Eladem, who I got to chat with a little bit. He was proud to run a restaurant showcasing his own country’s food, and he put it plainly: people just love the food, so they keep coming back. The restaurant is small, with enough seating for four or five groups, and it’s decorated like an Arab grandmother’s living room. There are paintings on the walls of Lebanese elders drinking coffee and sharing fruit, an engraved lion fountain like you’d see at the New York Public Library, an old clock, and mosaic-lined walls. Of course, Lebanese classics like Fayruz blasted from the speakers, even at 9 AM.
At Karam, a 30-something man walked into the restaurant with his 7-year-old son on this Saturday morning that I was there. The man, who spoke Arabic with a Lebanese dialect, started speaking to Chaouki and catching up. He seemed like a local at Karam. I watched as Chaouki tried to have a playful Arabic conversation with the young son, and the young son stayed silent. “He doesn’t speak Arabic, unfortunately, because his mom doesn’t,” the father told Chaouki in Arabic as the son tried to hide behind his dad.
It saddened me that the kid never learned the language. His kids won’t learn the language, and by the time they have kids they may not even identify with their Lebanese heritage.
While this is, of course, reading into a stranger’s life without context and making my own assumptions about his family’s future, I hope it’s understood as a general understanding from an outsider’s perspective of what happens when immigrants assimilate in today’s America.
Soon after my trip to Karam, where I didn’t connect with the patrons nor the mediocre shawarma, I was once again walking around Brooklyn, nostalgic and homesick. I was listening to a podcast to dull out the despair, as I often do, when I heard about this community called Little Syria. It wasn’t a current community of Syrian immigrants in Bay Ridge, as I initially assumed from the name. It was a historical Syrian Colony in Lower Manhattan, in the area that has become what we now know as the Financial District.
The Syrian Colony
I had never heard about this community before, nor was I aware of it being a “colony”, a word I’m not used to hearing in reference to people from my region of the world. It was not just me who wasn’t aware of this community, this information was simply not in the public sphere for so long.
Looking into Little Syria, I found roots that were essentially ripped out of the ground, but remain in descendants’ stories. Since 1880, Syrians had been immigrating to New York, and the U.S. at large, and settling, bringing their culture, clothes, foods, businesses and more.
Looking into Little Syria, I found a large group of people, in what is now the Financial District, being unabashedly themselves and representing their culture, through dress, food, and tradition.
It was a small area that you could tour in 15-20 minutes, spanning Battery Place to Liberty St on Washington Street and Greenwich Street, a thin strip of land on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. In that area, thousands of Syrian immigrants created their own community that thrived not only within itself but also as part of New York City.
Walking through Washington Street, you would have found American and Syrian flags. You would see shops with both Arabic script and English written on them. On an early morning, you were likely to see young men selling Arabic newspapers and older men selling cool drinks in large traditional kettles they would carry like a backpack.
A man wearing a fez sells drinks in the Syrian quarter of New York City in the early 1900s. Bain Collection/Library of Congress
Seeing these photographs, I couldn’t believe they were taken in New York. They looked awfully similar to scenes I’d seen downtown in my home city of Cairo, but nothing I’d expect in Manhattan. The more I read about Little Syria, the less I was able to imagine it existing in modern day New York. An 1899 New York Times article stated that there were 3000 residents in the Syrian Quarter of Manhattan at the time.
The Syrians that are being referred to at this time came from Greater Syria (or Ottoman Syria) which at the time was composed of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan.
A Syrian immigrant to the U.S. would take a long journey by ship, much different and more difficult than the direct flight I took to New York, and disembark at Battery Park where the Castle Clinton immigration center would process them. They would then settle a short walk away in the tenement buildings on Washington Street, surrounded by their fellow countrymen that came before them.
From photographs, you could tell these immigrants stuck to cultural clothing for a while. Men and women wearing the traditional dress known as the jalabiyya, as well as men wearing the fez (tarboush), among other photos were men wore suits and fedoras and women wore dresses.
There were hundreds of restaurants that served traditional Syrian food as well as grocery stores importing Syrian goods, and assuming from the Arabic newspapers, they must have continued to speak Arabic long after they immigrated to these foreign lands.
The feeling of pride I got from these first generation immigrants does not transfer to the generations after them. It seemed to me like only the first generation of immigrants keeps connected to their heritage, and as the generations go by, only a tiny bit of it is left. If I stay in the U.S., I would be the first person in that generational cycle, and I’m scared I’ll be the last person to hold on to my Egyptian heritage.
Syrian Sisters
Finding out about this community was the start of my connection with this land. I started researching every directory and library I could, going through documents for hours and scrolling into hundreds of tabs. Hidden in decades of archives at North Carolina State University's Khayrallah Center, I found an article titled “Is the fate of Syrians in America declining?” written in 1899. The author, Marie Azeez El Khoury, was only 16 at the time, and a student at Washington College.
El Khoury, whose name has long been forgotten, was allegedly the first Arab woman to graduate college in the United States.
“We are like a pigeon that lost its colors on a lone island in the East, then we were carried to civilization, so we must invade the obstacles in our way and stay strong despite the wills of those who wish us ill,” said El Khoury in the callout to her fellow Syrians, published in Al-Hoda, one of the first Arabic language newspapers in New York, and the U.S. She had aspirations to be a writer and a journalist.
I wanted to know more about my ambitious 1890s soul sister. El Khoury was born in 1882 to a Syrian family in Beirut. Her family moved to the U.S. in 1891, when she was only nine years old, and her father, Tannous Azeez, ran The Little Shop of T. Azeez, a jewelry store on the Atlantic City boardwalk in New Jersey.
Whilst pursuing her journalistic ambitions with Al-Hoda, both her father and her husband Esau El-Khoury died within the span of a year, and she was left to manage the jewelry business. And she did manage it, all the way to Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue, two of the most elite streets for high fashion boutiques.
Marie’s sister Alice Azeez desired a different path. “An energetic young woman from the east” is what The Sun called Alice Azeez in 1903. She was apparently known by the name Fannitza Abdul Sultana Nalide, a fake name she chose to go by when she traveled through America “lecturing” about “Life on the Orient”, dressed in glamorous native Syrian dress and claiming to be a Syrian princess. The strange thing about Alice Azeez is despite all her grandeur, no photos of her exist, or at least none have been found. The only image of her I found is a black and white drawing, where her hair is short and wavy with front bangs, and she wears what looks like a fancy ball gown and several arm bangles.
Of her many alleged lies, she also declared that she was the cousin of the wealthiest Arab in Beirut, and that she was a student at Harvard, though there appears to be no documentation or proof of her enrollment anywhere I and other researchers have searched.
Azeez told reporters in one of her many interviews that her father had been killed in the 1860 Damascus Massacre while he was still alive and running the Little Shop of T. Azeez. She was an entrancing con-artist, which isn’t exactly what one imagines when you hear about a Syrian immigrant woman in New York in the early 1900s.
Her sister Marie had different goals, but still had grand expectations for her life, which I would say she fulfilled. She had dreams of becoming a journalist, as seen in her articles in Al-Hoda. She was a young Arab woman in America hoping to make it as a writer. That’s what charmed me, she was just like me, over 100 years ago.
Tragically, her dad’s death got in the way, and she decided to continue running his jewelry shop in his honor. She kept his name in the shop title, The Little Shop of T. Azeez, but moved it to Fifth Avenue, then Park Avenue, as it continued to grow.
El Khoury started creating customized jewelry, attuned to the individual customer’s style and personality. Her jewelry started getting full-page features in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and The New York Times. It was no longer a small boutique on the Atlantic City boardwalk, it became a sought-after brand for the New York City woman.
Little Shop of T. Azeez featured in Vogue.
“She has a solidly established business, a reputation backed by more than a quarter of a century of experience, an enviable and exclusive clientele, and a midtown apartment that is a proper background for objets d'art acquired during extensive travels, a library featured by a distinctive collection of books on jewelry of many countries, and a tradition as a hostess at unusual dinners,” said Kathleen Mclaughlin about El Khoury in a 1940 New York Times feature.
“Still, she yearns to tap a typewriter, and consistently threatens to write her memoirs by way of satisfying that literary urge.”
I wish that she did. I couldn’t find any of her writings post-Al Hoda, perhaps she wrote but never published. Perhaps she never did.
Marie, who was called The Emerald Queen, was an essential fellow of Al Rabitah (The Pen Bond), the Syrian literary minds of the Lower West Side, most notable of whom was Gibran Kahlil Gibran. She fostered a deep, and likely intimate relationship with him. Just recently, 33 letters written by Gibran to Marie were found and sold in a bid for a hundred thousand dollars.
The letters were written between 1908 and 1920, and in them, Gibran wrote to Marie about his new books, his exhibits, and how much he enjoyed and needed her company, interpreted by May Rihani, Director of the Kahlil Gibran Chair for Values and Peace at University of Maryland.
Of the 33 letters, four were in English, and 29 were in Arabic. I wondered if they started in Arabic, then transitioned to English - or if he dedicated English for certain topics, and chose Arabic for his more romantic and poetic text. As a native Arabic speaker, I imagined their shared bilingualism only brought them closer.
“You, Marie, are like the pure morning breeze carrying the fragrance of flowers and breaths of bouquets. So, when I think of you I feel an internal ease as though my spirits have been bathed by waves of this perfumed breeze,” Gibran wrote to her in one of their letter exchanges.
The Little Shop of T. Azeez shut down in 1955 when she retired. Unlike other jewelry shop owners, she didn’t sell it, and she didn’t have children that could inherit it. Part of me wishes it lived on through someone else so that her memory could live on. Two years later, Marie Azeez El Khoury died a week before her 75th birthday. She was remembered in a New York Times obituary as one of the city's leading and most original jewelry designers, a hostess of unique gem-color inspired dinners, like her emerald dinners with split-pea soup and pistachio ice cream, and was hailed as the most colorful personality ever to live in a community.
Her name lives on through a fine arts scholarship at the American University in Beirut, but frankly, not much elsewhere.
The only person who cares about Marie and Alice as much as I do seems to be Dr. Linda K. Jacobs, a descendant of this community whose four grandparents were all members of the Syrian colony, and a board member of the Washington Street Historical Society, an organization trying to revive the memory of the Syrian Colony.
Jacobs too is fascinated by these sisters and is writing a book featuring them as I write this. But until she started researching her own Middle Eastern genealogy, she didn’t know the Manhattan Syrian colony existed, and she’s not alone.
She only knew her grandparents moved to Brooklyn, where most Syrians in New York remain to this day, and that her grandmother moved to the U.S. in 1897. “It was the beginning of everything,” she told me.
Jacobs decided to research the colony, much of which she said she had to find by digging through the dusty analog shelves of the Municipal Archives of New York City, the only place where the documents exist.
“These are vital documents because they show people’s religion, who they married, where they were buried, friends, marriage witnesses. The machines are all broken, the windows don’t open, they have 40-foot ceilings with files in folders all the way to the top, covered with soot and dust,” she told me.
Jacobs was one of the only names that came up in my months of excited research of the Syrian colony. Every resource on the topic cited her book Strangers in the West. I borrowed the book from my university library and devoured as much information as I could from it, but I had a million follow up questions for every chapter: what happened to this person? Does any proof of their life exist in present-day New York? Where can I find their writings? Their memoirs? A book could be written exploring every chapter of this book in depth, but none have.
When I asked her about the Azeez sisters, Jacobs got excited for a fleeting moment, then decided it was best not to share her fresh research that is going into works not yet published. It was maddening that there’s information about Marie and Alice out there that I couldn’t have access to. I asked her for advice on where to look, and she tried to be helpful, but I’m no historian, and I couldn’t find half what she could. Still, I was elated that there would be something published about them. For weeks, I would look for any data on these sisters, but what I found is limited. I’m still looking.
“People know Marie from the Rabitah [the pen bond], but no one knows her the way I know her,” the author giggled on my Zoom screen.
Voyage through Little Syria
Jacobs kindly invited me to a Little Syria walking tour happening the next week, and I ecstatically agreed I took the 6 train on a gloomy Saturday morning to the Wall St Station, two blocks from where the tour started at 103 Washington Street.
Wearing a highlighter yellow rain jacket and shiny black rain boots for the forecasted downpour, I wondered if Marie had a yellow rain jacket. I wondered if it rained a lot in her home of Beirut, or if New York’s rain was new to her, like it was to me. The subway car is surprisingly empty for a weekend. When I arrived, I found a group of Arab women reporters in their 20s and 30s in New York Times caps chatting with the tour guide, Lili Murad, another descendant of the colony, and Jacobs, the mother of this research. The tour is in English as a majority of the tour is second or third-generation American with little Arabic fluency.
Murad tells us her mother grew up in a tenement near where we were standing on Washington Street. Her grandparents got married at St George’s Syrian Catholic Church, a landmark that stood behind us with the same exterior, but with a Chinese restaurant inside in place of a church. She told us her grandmother lost her hair and her hearing from scarlet fever at 16. Life was not easy, she told us. Sometimes they would have to go down over six flights of stairs to use the bathroom, in the dark, in the middle of the night. There was also a high infant mortality rate. I had frankly romanticized Little Syria up to this point, it seemed like a wonderful thriving Arab community. Maybe it was for Marie and Alice, they had money and a business. But it doesn’t seem like they represent the majority of the colony.
St. George’s Church is landmarked but the building behind it is not so “anything could happen to it,” Jacobs told us. Nothing about the church indicates that it was once filled with Syrians, except for an engraving of the word Syrian hidden behind two water pipes. The church is one of only three buildings still in place on Washington Street, after a combination of Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel construction and 9/11 collateral damage took a toll on the already fatigued neighborhood.
The Downtown Community House at 105-107 Washington Street was up for sale up until two weeks before the tour in March, Jacobs said, and she thinks it sold to a non-profit organization. It is a glorious red brick six-story building with terracotta Buddhas framing its facade where Syrian Americans connected and shared support.
We walked some more and as we stood in front of 77 Washington St., which is now a freight parking lot, Jacobs told us her grandparents had gotten married in a chapel that once stood at that exact spot called St. Nicholas’ Church that was completely destroyed in 9/11.
“Does anyone here know what notions are? Of course not, you’re all millenials,” Jacobs joked. “Notions were buttons, shoelaces, and so on.”
The Syrians of the Lower West Side were all self-employed, they didn’t work in factories. There were two kinds of peddlers: those that peddled fancy things like silk, and those that peddled notions.
Unlike peddlers in the Lower East Side that peddled within their own streets, Syrians went out and peddled outside of their area. Murad’s grandmother peddled in Queens. “She was a rockstar, a business-woman,” she told us.
The sun came out as we approached Elizabeth H. Berger Plaza, which will soon be the first Arab monument in the U.S., and the Washington Street Historical Society’s biggest project yet.
“It actually makes me emotional. It makes me tear up,” Jacobs stopped for a moment as she told us the plans for the project.
It will be a monument to the writers and poets of Al Rabitah (The Pen Bond); including Ameen Rihani, Kahlil Gibran, and Elia Abu Madi. There will be a sculpture that says Kalimat (words) in Arabic and mosaic tiles with quotations from the writers.
The Washington Street Historical Society is also planning on making a virtual touring app of Washington Street that people can access wherever they are in the world.
We then crossed the bridge over the Brooklyn Battery tunnel, the tunnel whose construction effectively destroyed the neighborhood. You will be able to see the park and the tribute from the bridge, Jacobs said, looking over at the entire neighborhood.
In front of Battery park, a massive 20-story building stands tall - The Whitehall Building, a residential and office building. A hundred years ago, Jacobs said, there was a candy and liquor store run by Michael Keydooh, a Syrian immigrant, at the front of the building. His name was written on the outside.
“I like to think of it (the building) as ours,” she told us. I felt like it was mine too.
We were now standing in front of battery park, the disembarkment station and the intake center for Ellis Island. What was most incredible is that even then, America wasn’t so unfamiliar. The Syrian immigrants would get off in front of the Whitehall building and already see all the Arab names and faces after a long voyage.
It was hard to live on the Lower West Side. It was as hard as the notorious tenements in the Lower East Side, but hardly as documented. There were airless, windowless rooms “as dark as a wolf’s mouth”. Battery Park next door, though, was a breath of fresh air.
Literary Minds
Arabic newspapers, including the one Marie wrote for, were starting to flourish. Murad’s father was a newspaper delivery boy in the area as a child, and one can only assume there were many like him. Another tour attendee, Karen Zraick, a New York Time staff reporter, was also related to a newspaper man. Her great grandfather Antoine Zraick ran Jurab Al Kurdi, a political anti-Ottoman paper on 60 Washington Street.
The dozens of magazines and newspapers become no surprise when you find out there were 153 missionary schools in Lebanon, which all taught English, so many of the immigrants were already well educated and spoke the language when they arrived in the U.S.
I’ve found that if you were one of these educated missionary school graduates and a resident of the Syrian colony in the 1890s, you were likely a reader of Kawkab America, the first Arab publication in the United States, and some say the entire Western world.
In the third issue of Kawkab America, “Planet America” in Arabic, published in April 29, 1892, a column titled “Syrians in America” cites a statistic: saying that there were 80,000 Arabic speakers in America in 1892, “and as many more may be expected within the next five years..Nearly all of those now here can converse intelligently in the English language.” The column then encourages Syrian readers to tell their American friends about the native customs of the Orient and connect the two cultures.
For $3 a year, which would be about $94 in 2022, more expensive than most New York publications these days, you could read a number of articles, one of which is a travelogue from a Syrian fresh out of Syria who travels from California, to Chicago, to New York.
The letter, titled, “The Iron Horse and the Ship of the Desert,” is by an anonymous Syrian man. “Everything was ready for us. The people at the stations knew what time our train was due and they had everything warm and comfortable,” he wrote. “It was a journey full of pleasure from beginning to end. We were less than four days on the cars, but in that time I learned to appreciate how kind and courteous Americans are to strangers. I contrasted the situation I was in, with the mode of travel I had known since my infancy. How different the palace car is from the ‘ship of the desert’”!
I was struck with similar emotions on my first visits to the United States, despite expectations of prejudice and bigotry as a reaction to my Hijab. I remember recalling to friends how nice it was that every barista and waitress would ask you how your day was going, and some would actually be genuinely interested.
It’s surprising how 100 years holistically doesn’t change things that much.
Seeing History in Valhalla
As I was wrapping up this essay I found out that there was one place in New York state where I could find my beloved Azeez family’s names written down, set in stone. Somewhere where there is physical evidence that they lived, and loved, and prospered. After scouring the internet meticulously for where the Azeez family was buried and not being able to find anything, I resigned to the guess that they were probably buried in their home of Mount Lebanon, as Marie’s dear Kahlil Gibran was.
But I couldn’t stop searching. There was this hope that somewhere out there they were there. I found a Mary A Khoury buried in Connecticut that also died in 1957, and also had a sister called Alice she was buried next to, but was born two years before Marie actually was. I found another Mary Azeez buried in Detroit, Michigan, but the dates were all wrong.
I finally decided to ask the one person who might know this very specific piece of information, Dr. Jacobs. And only 33 minutes after I emailed her, she got back to me with the location. I finally knew.
And it was only 45 minutes upstate at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, Westchester. So I booked a $22 Metro-North ticket and headed to Grand Central Station. I sat in the blue chairs of the train to Valhalla in both anticipation and worry. I realized I had actually never been inside a cemetery before. It’s not exactly something you ever want to cross off your bucket list intentionally. But today I wasn’t going to grieve.
I had no idea what I signed up for. Three hours of walking around a gigantic 600-acre cemetery with no clue where I was going, except for a low-resolution photo that Dr. Jacobs had sent me. I didn’t know which plot I was going to, and I naively thought I would just be able to walk around and find it myself.
I saw a lot at Kensico. Kensico is a non-sectarian cemetery, meaning it houses graves of all religions and denominations. I had imagined that meant different sections for each faith, but that wasn’t the case. Everyone was side-by-side. I saw Muslims next to Christians and Buddhists.
But I couldn’t find Marie. I walked for three hours in the early summer heat. There were steep hills I could barely walk up. I was exhausted. What made it harder was that I had no sense of where I was going. I was just looking at names, hoping Marie was one of them.
I sat down in exhaustion and admired the view. It was much more beautiful than I ever thought a cemetery would be. The lakes were crystal clear, with dandelion petals flying through the wind everywhere you go. There was no one there as far as my eyes could see. It was just gardens for miles on end, not a sight I was used to, whether in Cairo or New York. All I could think of walking through thousands of gravestones is how peaceful it was, not like life ever is. The phrase rest in peace started to make sense to me.
I missed the first train I planned to take back to New York because I was still looking for Marie and Alice. Then the second. Then the third. I emailed Dr. Jacobs to ask for the location but I didn’t get a response in time. And around when it was time for me to get moving to catch the fourth I had given up. I was never going to find them. There were simply too many graves and no sense of where they were.
As I looked at my phone for Google Maps’ guidance on how to get back to the train station, I glimpsed a red gravestone that said “PARRY'' with an image of an obelisk on the front - the same as the one in the photo Dr. Jacobs had sent me. I felt goosebumps go through my body. Surely, it can’t be? Walking through the cemetery felt like walking through a desert, it was hot, and every time I thought I spotted what I was looking for it was like a mirage. I ran up the hill that Parry gravestone was on. And I saw it. There was a black gravestone erected from the ground that said “Azeez - El-Khoury”. I had found them. Julia and Tannous, the parents. Esau, Marie’s husband. And Marie and Alice, side by side.
I sat by Marie’s gravestone, partially because of exhaustion and part admiration and a strange sense of connection. She was real. She was right there. In Section 31 of Kensico Cemetery in the tiny town of Valhalla, New York.
I started this piece with dissatisfaction with the diversity I found in this city, and this country at large. But walking through Kensico, I found a new meaning of diversity. I saw something I never thought I’d see - Muslim graves with “Bismillah”engraved on them with crosses on graves immediately next to them. Chinese graves next to Estonian graves. These people all existed in each other’s midst, not just in the grave, but in their lives. And now their graves are sitting side-by-side.
That sight is not something I would ever find in my home country nor do I think I’d see it anywhere else, and from what I’ve read about Marie - I know that would have made her happy too.