What remains of New York's Little Syria?

According to a 1912 article in the New York Sun, there was once a mosque on the third floor of a building in lower Manhattan on Rector Street, even if the accompanying photograph gives no indication of a masjid: five steps, a set of unmarked double doors flanked by advertisements for ROYAL IRISH LINEN and an underwear display case.

I’d begun researching the history of the Little Syria neighbourhood for my second novel, The Thirty Names of Night.

Nadir, the novel's trans protagonist, is obsessed with spaces that no longer exist.

The masjid's presence in the remnants of Little Syria is a ghost within a ghost since the majority of the inhabitants of Manhattan's Syrian Quarter — evicted in the 1940s for the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel — were Christians.

"Nowadays, to visit Little Syria is to go looking for the defiant remnants of a small universe"

Even growing up in New York, I didn’t learn about the history of Little Syria as a child.

My father immigrated long after the inhabitants of the Syrian Quarter had restarted their lives in Brooklyn, Paterson, the Twin Cities, and elsewhere.

Like Nadir, I, too, had found myself obsessed with the gaps in history into which a person like me might fit: Arab, trans, the child of a Muslim immigrant, an artist born into and shaped by a changing New York.

These gaps, as Nadir discovers over the course of the novel, contain not only the histories of lost neighbourhoods but also the hollows between those histories, the people whose lives are omitted from official accounts.

Nowadays, to visit Little Syria is to go looking for the defiant remnants of a small universe.

Only three buildings remain: the still-inhabited 109 Washington Street tenement; the Downtown Community House, which once housed a medical centre, a nursery, and a library with more than a thousand books; and the facade of St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church, a white neogothic terracotta chapel with a painted relief of St. George and the dragon out front.

The last time I was there, an Irish pub had taken up residence on the ground floor. The cornerstone by the entrance still announces ST. GEORGE SYRIAN R.C. CHURCH, A.D. 1929.

The Washington Street Historical Society has been working to preserve these three remaining buildings for years, winning landmark status for St. George in 2009 from New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The Society organises walking tours and events, archives historical artefacts that tell the story of the neighbourhood and have recently collaborated with the city to install public art pieces inspired by the Syrian literary community that once thrived here.

There's been a recent resurgence of interest in Little Syria, due in part to the efforts of the WSHS and to the work of historians like Linda Jacobs, Charlotte Karem Albrecht, and others.

I had initially seen the photograph of the masjid in a 2016 exhibit the Arab American National Museum had put on in New York.

Just as Nadir tries, in Thirty Names, to hold stubbornly to the remnants of Little Syria, others, too, cling to the memory of what the neighbourhood means to Arab Americans.

There are some elders yet living who remember life on Washington Street before the evictions.

For many who were born or immigrated later, however, Little Syria provides a precedent similar to the one I originally sought for Nadir, a blueprint of one’s place in a country intent on crushing you.

I wrote the novel in the shadow of the Muslim Ban, in the years when hijabs were set on fire in the street and pigs' heads were thrown at the doors of mosques in New York and Philadelphia.

The stories of the inhabitants of Little Syria are not my story, nor my father's story. Yet the history of the neighbourhood felt like a thread in the fabric of my presence in New York.

Who has the luxury of deciding how their history is told? Though I wasn't out as trans when I started writing the novel, I understood that while I had been raised to consider queerness a type of private information best kept to myself, I had grown up being taught the same about my name, my race, and my ethnicity in the wake of twenty-first century American Islamophobia.

While I understood both the cultural norms and survival tactics of certain silences, I came to realise, during the writing of Thirty Names, that to assert a change in my name, pronouns, and social role would require a public declaration and communal recognition. There is a reason legislative attacks on trans people aim at excluding us from public life.

Who, then, is allowed to choose their silence? In the novel, Syrian American bird artist Laila Z erases the fragments of her diary that reveal her love for another woman as a means of reclaiming the narrative of her life. Nadir, too, scribbles out his deadname to prevent the reader from knowing it. He knows his story will one day be told without him.

"I found myself struggling to articulate not only what it meant to be Syrian in America in the early twentieth century, but also what the legacy of Little Syria continues to mean, even to people whose ancestors never lived there"

I began to understand, then, why the Rector Street masjid might not have advertised its whereabouts, or been widely mentioned in historical records. Standing in the Little Syria exhibit, I listened to Alexander Maloof's 1928 recording of America ya Hilwa, America the Beautiful in Arabic, and thought of George Dow.

After his petition for naturalisation was denied on the grounds of his being non-white, Dow successfully appealed the denial in 1915 in Dow v. United States on the basis that Christian Syrians should be classed as white because of their religion.

This argument made Syrians eligible for citizenship according to the Naturalization Act of 1790, which established whiteness as a prerequisite for US citizenship.

Arab Muslims would not have the ability to naturalise in the United States until thirty years after Dow was granted citizenship.

I wanted to understand myself in the wake of this history without resorting to appeals to assimilation and ideas about productive citizenship, largely at the expense of Black and Indigenous people, let alone other queer and trans Arabs who had been written out of these histories.

I found myself struggling to articulate not only what it meant to be Syrian in America in the early twentieth century, but also what the legacy of Little Syria continues to mean, even to people whose ancestors never lived there.

To have recourse to the myth of what America meant back then is a privilege indeed, considering how the United States fought tooth and nail to keep people like us out.

This is why, after reading the New York Sun article, I entered the masjid's address into Google Maps and went looking for its ghost. I wanted to connect my life and my presence in New York with the photograph of the masjid, and thus with the people who had once come here to pray.

I wanted to connect this history to the history of my own family, to understand what my presence in the city meant. But by the time I arrived on Rector Street, the face of the block had changed.

A Dunkin’ Donuts had opened, and a café, and beside them an entrance set back from the street had been entirely redone in grey marble and glass. Nothing resembled the face of the building in the photograph.

As a New Yorker who saw my own neighbourhood devoured by gentrification in the nineties, I felt a fool for expecting anything else. The place, whatever it once was, had been polished from the face of the block.

I wanted to tell a story about people who don’t appear in official records, people whose histories are erased as hindrances to narratives of assimilation and progress.

I did eventually tell this story: a story about what it meant to be a young woman painter struggling with the meaning of art and America; to be an older woman in love with the widow next door; to be a young trans man newly arrived from Syria, headed up to the haven of Harlem's gay bars long before the riot at the Stonewall.

That afternoon, though, looking for the mosque on Rector Street, I'd written none of this yet. I could barely imagine myself, my flesh and my name, the life I wasn't yet ready to seize for myself.

I stood on the sidewalk opposite the doughnut shop, trying to imagine a place of worship. I closed my eyes and forced the stream of foot traffic to part around me like a stone.

I did not conjure a single ghost. All I had was my own body and its history on this hot sidewalk, taking up space.

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the Lambda Literary- and Stonewall Book Award-winning novel The Thirty Names of Night as well as The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award and was a Goodreads Choice Awards and Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize finalist.

His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], and elsewhere and has been included in anthologies such as Letters to a Writer of Color, This Arab Is Queer, Kink, and others. He has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Joukhadar serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and mentors emerging writers of colour with the Periplus Collective.

Follow him on Twitter: @ZeynJoukhadar