Sites featured on our Little Syria tour
This is the starting place of our tour, and the starting place of New York City itself. It is on the tip of this harbor where the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam was established, out of which the city grew.
Fraunces Tavern was an important meeting location for American Patriots leading up to Revolutionary War. It was where George Washington bade farewell to his soldiers after the war was won in 1783. An important site for diplomacy, this is where the US signed a peace treaty with Ottoman Morocco in 1786. Morocco was the first country to recognize US Independence in 1777, and the first Muslim, Arab, and African country to do so.
109 Washington Street is the location of the "Last Tenement of Little Syria." Once upon a time, hundreds of these walk-up tenements teemed the area, housing the low-incoming and working-class communities that resided here. Conditions were often shabby and poor, and most families moved out once they had the means. This tenement offers a rare portal into the past into that world.
17 Rector Street was once upon a time the site of an Ottoman mosque or masjid. A New York Sun article from February 25, 1912 chronicles its appearance, mentioning that it was a Muslim prayer space adjacent to an apartment rented by Mehmed Ali Effendi, an imam and an attaché to the Ottoman Embassy in Washington.
The Syrian Quarter, or "Little Syria" as historians call it, began on Washington Street and Battery Place. As soon as Syrian immigrants landed off Castle Clinton or Ellis Island, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, many of them would move straight into the neighborhood from here. For a long time, it was marked by Michael Kaydouh's candy store.
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