NEW YORK's LITTLE SYRIA, 1880-1935 by Gregory J. Shibley a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College
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NEW YORK’S LITTLE SYRIA, 1880-1935 by Gregory J. Shibley A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement of the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida May 2014 ! ! ! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is to acknowledge the contributions of the following individuals, to whom I am grateful: Dr. Marianne R. Sanua, for sharing her voluminous knowledge and expertise with me, and for patiently guiding my efforts in the preparation and defense of this thesis; Dr. Mark H. Rose, for teaching me, by word and deed, what professional historians do and how they should treat each other; Dr. Stephen D. Engle, for initiating me, graciously, into the world of historical studies, and for epitomizing conscientiousness in the performance of his professorial duties; Dr. Ben P. Lowe, for admitting me to the graduate program in history, and for providing encouragement throughout the course of my studies; and, above all, Beth Ann Shibley, for giving our children and me her unconditional love, and for making our home a happy one. iii! ! ! ABSTRACT Author: Gregory J. Shibley Title: New York’s Little Syria, 1880-1935 Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Adviser: Dr. Marianne R. Sanua Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2014 This thesis argues that, from 1880 to 1935, Syrian immigrants, who comprised an enclave on the Lower West Side of Manhattan in New York City, sought to control the pace and extent of their assimilation into mainstream American society, by distancing themselves from their ethnicity, or by using their ethnicity to their advantage, or by combining both approaches to varying degrees, as they determined individually, rather than monolithically. iv! ! ! DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Joseph D. Shibley (1930-1988), a man who had real courage, and who taught me the meaning of sacrifice. NEW YORK’S LITTLE SYRIA, 1880-1935 List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………...vii I. Introduction…………………………...………………………………………………...1 II. The Historiographical Context…………….…………………………………….........19 III. Making Money……………………………………………………………….............42 IV. Faith and Faction…………………………………………………...………………..81 V. Arts and Letters…………………………………………………………...................122 VI. Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….171 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………240 vi! ! ! LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Map of large portion of Little Syria …...……………………………………..47 Figure 2. Map of lower portion of Little Syria……………..…………………………...49 Figure 3. Former Downtown Community House, 105-107 Washington Street………...70 Figure 4. The Sheik Restaurant, 87 Washington Street…………………………………73 Figure 5. St. George’s Catholic Chapel, 103 Washington Street…….……….…………89 Figure 6. Tenement house, 109 Washington Street……………………………………116 Figure 7. Syrian World’s original location, 104 Greenwich Street…….………………140 Figure 8. View of Washington Street from Battery Place …………………….………177 Figure 9. Battery Parking Garage………………………………………………….......178 Figure 10. Building at Greenwich and Rector Streets……….…………………….…...179 Figure 11. View of 85-87 Washington Street………………………………………..…182 vii! ! ! I. INTRODUCTION On April 30, 1903, The Independent carried an interview of an unidentified Syrian immigrant in New York City whom the Sultan of Turkey had sentenced to death for publishing treasonous articles. The man recalled that, years earlier, within ten hours of arriving at Ellis Island, he and his mother and uncle had taken rooms in a brick tenement on “Washington Street, only three blocks away from Battery Park.” Washington Street was “the center of our quarter,” the locus of New York’s Syrian Arabic-speaking community. He had no difficulty finding work “as a clerk in an Oriental goods store,” while his uncle secured employment in jewelry manufacturing and his mother supplemented their “joint income by embroidering slippers after the Lebanon fashion.” In time, he became a newspaper reporter and thereafter a publisher—the role in which he offended the Sultan. He proudly observed that “[t]he little Syrian city which we have established within the big city of New York has its distinctive advantages and its distinctive institutions,” including multiple churches, Arabic-language newspapers, restaurants, drug stores, and dry goods shops, as well as firms manufacturing garments, silk items, rugs, tobacco, and myriad other products. He had hoped to visit Syria in 1897 but aborted his plan upon learning that the Ottomans intended to arrest him, and in 1902, the Ottoman governor in Beirut issued the formal death proclamation. Like many of his fellow immigrants, the man had become a naturalized citizen of the United States. “When we first came we expected to return to Syria, but this country is very attractive 1 ! and we have stayed until we have put out roots.” Indeed, “[t]wo-thirds of our men now are American citizens,” with more to follow. Yet these immigrants yearned for the welfare of their former countrymen, who lacked the opportunities and freedoms enjoyed in America.1 This interview revealed immigrants who were also emigrants. Duality inhered in their daily lives. Originally expecting to visit America temporarily, they found freedom, remunerative work, and an intangible sense of community that led many of them to change their minds and stay permanently. While most had become naturalized citizens, they still felt an understandable attachment to their native land and the families and friends left behind. They did not, however, leave their culture behind. These “Orientals,” in the parlance of the day, brought their distinctive habits and customs, their vital, if fractious, religious sects, and, above all, their foreign language, Arabic, to Manhattan’s Lower West Side. There they created and nurtured a thriving ethnic enclave, a mini-city within a mega-city, where each immigrant in his or her own way adapted to the new environment, negotiating daily between assimilation and ethnicity. The scholarly consensus holds that New York’s Little Syria, also known as the Syrian colony and the Syrian quarter, served as the model for virtually all other Syrian communities in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sources describe the unique importance of the New York colony with such evocative terms as “cradle,” “principal,” and, above all, “mother.”2 Yet no scholarly monograph on New York’s Little Syria, covering the period from 1880 to 1935, has been published to date. A concise demographic study published 2 ! in 1904 addressed three Syrian enclaves in New York City: the Lower Manhattan neighborhood at issue here, plus two sections of Brooklyn. In 1911, a philanthropic journal published a detailed, four-part series on Syrian immigrants nationwide, without focusing on New York City. A few pages of the seminal history of Syrian immigration to the United States, published in 1924, referred to the Syrian colony in Manhattan. Sundry scholarly works on early Syrian immigration, published from 1975 onward, have given cursory treatment to New York’s Syrian quarter. The standard volume on the role peddling played in facilitating Syrian assimilation, published in 1985, discussed, but did not elaborate on, various aspects of the New York settlement. An encyclopedia on New York City, published in 1995, contained entries that made brief reference to the neighborhood. A 2002 anthology of essays, some scholarly and some not, dealt generally with Arabic-speaking immigrants in New York, including one essay, eight pages long, lacking footnotes or endnotes, on Little Syria. A book of archival photographs, published in 2004, depicted the neighborhood before and after its demise, but contained virtually no text, other than captions. A few pages of a 2009 study of Arab American experiences from the mid-1960s forward discussed Little Syria’s history. In 2013, a volume of interdisciplinary essays on multicultural studies contained a chapter on Syrian American identity construction, of which several pages discussed New York’s Syrian colony in its heyday and decline.3 A couple of books intended for a popular audience in the early twentieth century included illustrated scenes, or anecdotal textual treatment, of New York’s Little Syria. Neither volume made any pretense of scholarship. This historically significant 3 ! community simply has not received sufficient study, much less an analysis of evidence extending well into the twentieth century.4 Consequently, a historiographical lacuna exists that this thesis aims to fill. The goal here is to make an original, if modest, contribution by writing a scholarly history of New York’s Little Syria, beginning with the influx of immigrants starting around 1880, and ending in 1935, with the demise of both the first Syrian-owned bank, D. J. Faour and Bros., and the leading English-language periodical published in the neighborhood, the Syrian World. The narrative seeks to demonstrate how the first wave of Syrian immigrants in New York City sought to control their assimilation into the mainstream, sometimes distancing themselves from their ethnicity, sometimes using ethnicity to their advantage, sometimes both. This does mean that they succeeded in gaining control, but that, consciously or subconsciously, they tried. Incessant tensions between ethnicity and assimilation, and between individuals grappling to resolve those tensions, dominated the public and private lives of Syrian immigrants. Some took more readily to assimilation than others.