Save Washington Street Coalition Formed
Through my work on Ameen Rihani and The Book of Khalid, I have learned a great deal about the role of Washington Street, the first Arab-American neighborhood, in American history. And I argue that The Book of Khalid is the greatest cultural product depicting this neighborhood that emerged, and therefore it uniquely serves to tell its story.
Yet, the neighborhood, because of the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and the World Trade Center, has been devastated physically unlike any other in New York, and sadly, despite Washington Street overlapping with the 9/11 Memorial and the site of the South Tower of World Trade Center (where it is especially important to emphasize the long and patriotic history of Arabs in the United States), little has been done to preserve or memorialize this neighborhood. There are no plaques or signs, and many important historical buildings have been demolished without a second thought.
Fortunately, by a kind of miracle, three buildings remain and are physically connected: 103 Washington Street, an Arab church that served as a Irish bar for many years; 105-107 Washington Street, a community house inaugurated by the governor of New York to serve the Little Syria neighborhood; and 109 Washington Street, a tenement building still containing apartments. Tens of millions of tourists will walk every year from the Battery Park and the Statue of Liberty to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum — all through historic Arab New York! — and these three buildings deserve to be preserved as landmarks to leave some general trace of an ethnic neighborhood that has been devastated like no other in the city. Yet, it looks like the community center is in immediate danger of demolition and this trinity of building is in jeopardy.
Therefore, together with Carl Antoun, a Lebanese-American undergraduate studying International Culture Studies and Political Science at Saint Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, New York, whose family once lived and worked on Washington Street, I have founded Save Washington Street, a national coalition of organizations and individuals advocating the preservation of the last remaining traces of the Washington Street neighborhood of the Lower West Side.
We believe that this neighborhood, one of the oldest parts of the city and which has had its ethnic history diminished and denied and has endured more demolition and destruction than any other neighborhood, deserves to have its few remaining historical traces preserved for posterity, and I urge you to sign our petition at savewashingtonstreet.org.
