If you think of turn-of-the-century immigrants to New York City, you probably call to mind images of Eastern Europeans in drab clothes and kerchiefs on the Lower East Side – or Irish farmers fleeing the devastating potato famine. But those who moved to New York at the height of its famous period of immigration also included Arabs from the Ottoman Empire who set up their own Arabic-language shops, mosques and churches in Lower Manhattan.
“History excludes certain people,” says Asad Dandia, who was raised in a Pakistani community in Coney Island, Brooklyn. “If you don't know where you came from, you don't know where you're going. Having a sense of history gives you a sense of place, gives you a sense of belonging.”
For the past few years, Dandia has been researching the histories that are left out of New York – particularly those of Arab, Muslim and South Asian immigrants. “I wanted to tell the stories of people like me and my family,” he says about his project, New York Narratives, which brings public and private groups around different parts of the city to point out what other historians might have missed.
“I don’t want people to see the city as some undifferentiated mass of buildings,” he says. “I want them to feel a part of the city, and the best way to do it is to take them on the street level and show them that they have a story here.”
His tour of Little Syria highlights the community of immigrants from what was then Ottoman Syria, who lived among German and Irish immigrants in Lower Manhattan from roughly the 1880s to the 1940s. In Harlem, his Malcolm X tour takes visitors around the mosques and churches that the civil-rights leader frequented when he lived in upper Manhattan in the mid-1940s – underlining his Muslim faith that is often overlooked. Another offers a people’s history of the NYPD, and he is currently researching a tour of Little Palestine in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
On a recent hot and rainy Saturday, Dandia started his second, sold-out tour of the day (Tickets are $30, or Dh110, via his Substack). A varied group of New Yorkers met him among the throngs of Lower Manhattan, where tourists were getting ready to embark on boats bound for New York’s flagship monuments to its immigrant past: Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.
Dandia, instead, led his group inward. Passing by churches and monuments that speak to the area's diversity, the group headed towards Washington Street, the heart of Little Syria.
Washington Street and the now demolished end of Greenwich Street had been the home of the country’s WASP or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants community in the 18th and early 19th centuries. But with the frequent epidemics, the Great Fire of 1835 and the arrival of steamships loudly exhaling a few metres away, the wealthy inhabitants fled uptown.
Tenement blocks were erected in their place, and the area became the first stop for many immigrants who were arriving in Manhattan. Syrians, Lebanese, Armenians and others from the Ottoman Empire became a substantial part of this community, opening shops for Arab and sundry goods and publishing the country’s first Arabic-language newspaper, Al Kawkab.
Most of the Syrian immigrants were Christians who had worked as translators for Western missionaries. Missionary work and other professions typical to Christians gave them more job mobility than their Arab Muslim compatriots, who tended to work on farms and were more tied to the land. At its peak, thousands of Arabs lived in the small area that is now the city’s financial district.
Only one tenement remains where there used to be hundreds. The entire area was changed when the city government, under the plans of its notorious urban planner Robert Moses, razed the area to build the Battery Park Tunnel.
Their story is being revived not only by Dandia but by other researchers and historians. The Washington Street Historical Society, formed in 2013, and the Friends of the Lower West Side (a new name for this area) recently got the greenlight for a public monument to the literary society of the Pen League or al-Rabita al-Qalamiyya – the first group of Arab-American writers in the US, which included Kahlil Gibran and other mostly Lebanese-American and Syrian-American figures.
One, the writer Ameen Rihani – the first Arab to publish a novel in the US (The Book of Khalid, 1911) – lived on Washington Street when he first arrived.
Lower Manhattan was also the first area settled by the Dutch and British, and Dandia reaches farther back to show the integration between Arabs and the US from the very start. The first peace treaty the new country signed – in Fraunces Tavern on Pearl Street – was with Morocco, in English and Arabic.
One of his most persuasive gambits is his singling out individuals to show the lasting impact of Arab and Muslim migrants on the political and social life of the US today. One colourful character, half-Dutch and half-North African, has the honour of being one of the first Muslims to be tried on what is now US soil, in 1638.
His antics ranged from the commonplace – he owed money – to the suggestion of a man with flair: he tried to repay his debt with a goat (It might have worked but the goat died.) He was sentenced to exile in the faraway place of Brooklyn and, after a time, redeemed himself and re-entered society. His descendants today count Anderson Cooper, Gloria Vanderbilt and the Whitneys of the Whitney Museum.
Dandia, though only 30, is himself already a known figure through a painful episode of his youth. When he was a college student in Brooklyn, he started a Muslim charity with some friends. It later transpired that one of the men involved in the charity – who had approached Dandia wanting to become a better Muslim – was a police informant. This was in 2012 and 2013, an atmosphere still charged by the Islamophobia that swept across the city in the wake of 9/11.
Dandia signed on to a class action suit filed by the ACLU, and, before he’d even turned 21, successfully sued the NYPD. The agreement reached with the NYPD barred the police force from using race, religion, ethnicity or national origin as cause for surveillance – effectively protecting New York Muslims who were at the time subject to disproportionate and discriminatory investigations.
The episode, for Dandia, was unnerving, and he sees New York Narratives as his way of redressing the betrayal he went through. “I feel I’m no longer responding to what was done to me,” he says. “I’m the one who is setting the terms of the debate and the one who's empowering other people to learn.”
