Little Syria, Manhattan

The earliest Syrians migrants to arrive in the United States were nearly all men, who came as Presbyterian seminarians between the 1830s and 1880s. Many were converts as a result of the American Protestant mission in Syria and only remained in the U.S. for a few years to complete their studies before returning home.[4] The first wave of permanent Syrian immigrants arrived in Manhattan through the Castle Garden landing docks and registration depot by the start of the 1880s. These were mostly rural Christian merchants from the Mount Lebanon area in Ottoman Syria. The majority of these Christians belonged to the Melkite, Maronite, and Eastern Orthodox denominations, with a few Protestants, who had fled Greater Syria due to religious persecution and poverty following the French intervention after the 1860 Syrian Civil War. During this conflict between the Arab Christian and Druze populations, many militias ended up killing several thousands civilians across the Mount Lebanon area and Damascus. In addition, disruptions to the local silk trade caused by the influx of international competition following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 lead many merchants to leave for port cities across Africa, Latin America, and North America, with Manhattan being one.[9] It is estimated that only 5-10% of the area's Arab residents were Muslims, mostly coming from the area around present day Palestine.[6][10] This included a minority of Druze, which although a distinct ethnoreligious community in the Levant, are often counted as Muslim.[9]

Cool drinks peddler in Little Syria (1910-15)

In New York City many immigrants worked as pack peddlers. They would often carry forty to eighty pounds of notions, which they would sell uptown during the day and further afield in upstate New York during the summer.[4] Other peddlers sold luxury goods and religious objects such as damask cloth, embroideries, rosaries and crosses made from olive wood from the Holy Land.[4] In order to maintain this constant flow of these goods many Syrians also started import-export businesses in order to sell directly to these peddlers. Many women worked as peddlers as well, mainly selling sundry goods, however they also labored as seamstresses, mill workers, factory workers, and entrepreneurs in their own right. Marie el-Khoury, a prominent jewelry designer, was one of the most successful Syrian-born business owners in the city. Originally trained as a jeweler under her father, she moved the business from its original location on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey to Manhattan after his death.

The Christians in the neighborhood mainly lived on Washington Street, to the south of the site of the World Trade Center, where they established three churches, including St. Nicolas Syrian Orthodox congregation and St. George Chapel of the Melkite Rite, which as of 2010 survives as Moran's Ale House and Grill,[6] and which was designated a New York City Landmark in 2009.[11]

In reaction to the emergence of this new community nativist sentiments against Syrians began to be published in local papers such as Harper’s Weekly and the New York Times as early as May 1882.[9] Over the years, several reports were published which called the Syrian peddlers "dirty Arabs from Mount Lebanon", quoted an immigration officer who said the Arab immigrants "were educated to steal” as they came from "the landing of thieving Arabs", and stirred up fears that "the Syrian Arabs from the Lebanon range have undertaken to invade the United States". This was spite of the fact that there were less than one thousand Syrians in Manhattan at the time. Over the years nearly 125,000 Syrians eventually immigrated to the United States, settling across the mainland United States, Alaska, and Hawaii.[9] In 1899 an article about the Syrian Quarter and its 3,000 residents described how the immigrants arriving there didn't "leave all their quaint customs, garments, ways of thinking at home," nor did they become "ordinary American citizens," but instead "just enough of their traits, dress, ideas remain, no matter how long they have been here, to give the colonies they form spice and a touch of novelty." Noting "a number of amazingly pretty girls," the reporter described Little Syria near the turn of the 20th century as a mix of social classes.[12]

In reaction to this many immigrants such as Philip K. Hitti, attempted to use Americans who praised Syrians; such as Louise Houghton, who published a four-part series titled "Syrians in America" in the Survey, to change the public perception of these immigrants. Houghton maintained that "Syrian immigrants appreciated liberty, kept clean homes, and obeyed the law".[9] In his book, The Arab Americans: A History, writer Gregory Orfalea describes playwright Henry Chapman Ford's view of Syrian-Americans by quoting that, "Their family life, their clean way of living impressed me and I decided that the Americanization of such a race was a big factor in making the "melting pot" one of the greatest nations of history".[13] An 1895 New York Times article mentions that Syrians are fond of "water, trees, and flowers and perhaps one great reason that keeps the Syrian Colony in the lower part of Washington Street".[14]

However, Houghton's report was in spite of the fact that at this time many immigrants lived in squalor in multi-family tenements as noted by immigrant Abraham Mitrie Rihbany, during his time working and living in the Syrian Colony. Hitti was also notorious for cherry picking details and findings in order to foster the assimilation of Syrian immigrants and further promote their acceptance by the American populace by erasing any divisive findings. Hitti even went on to obscure anti-Syrian prejudice, and government backed studies such as the a 1901 report by the Industrial Commission that noted that Syrians lacked a strong worth ethic.[9]

Lebanese-Americans Ameen Rihani, Naoum Mokarzel, and, the Boston raised, Kahlil Gibran were among the first cultural luminaries that called Little Syria home, with the other cultural, educational, and journalistic minds. It was in Little Syria the linotype machine was first modified to produce Arabic characters, which transformed Arabic language journalism. The first Arabic-language periodicals in North America were all printed in New York, the first being Kawkab America in 1892. Kawkab America was established by the brothers Nageeb and Dr. Abraham J. Arbeely, Syrian immigrants who settled in Tennessee. The Arbeely were one of the first Syrian families to immigrate to the U.S., Nageeb Arbeely was even made the American consul to Jerusalem by President Grover Cleveland and worked as an immigration inspector at Ellis Island.[15][16] Kawkab America mainly had an Orthodox Christian readership and was edited for a time by the theologian Abraham Mitrie Rihbany, a Lebanese Presbyterian convert who came from a family belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch.[3] Later, over 50 Arabic-language periodicals came to be published out of the neighborhood, including Al-Hoda. There were also the English-language The Syrian World which aimed at the first generation of Syrian-Americans who grew up or were born in the United States.[3]