In November of 2025, Design Trust launched a Design Ideas Competition in collaboration with Van Cortlandt Park Alliance to reimagine an Enslaved African Burial Ground in the Bronx. Following a series of events with the community, Reimagining the Enslaved African Burial Ground at Van Cortlandt Park seeks to honor and memorialize the people who lived and worked in VCP, and invites other sites of memory across the city to deeply reflect and invest in ways to ensure the sacred spaces that exist on their lands are not forgotten. 

This series explores other reimagined public spaces across the five boroughs, asking the question of what it means to memorialize a space and how we can pay tribute to the lives of people who contributed to the layout of public space as we know it. 

South of the World Trade Center on Washington Street lies three buildings, St George’s Bar, a five-story tenement building, and a six-story settlement house. These structures are the last remaining memories of what was once Little Syria.

Little Syria formed from 1880, and continued flourishing into the 1940’s until urban renewal efforts started demolishing smaller neighborhoods in Lower and Upper Manhattan. As New York's first Arabic-speaking community, the neighborhood was once home to immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine, before being demolished in order to make way for Hugh L. Carey Tunnel, or as locals refer to it the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, connecting lower Manhattan to Brooklyn along the east river. 

Little Syria, like many of the other communities in this Reimagining Space series, formed as an enclave for culture and community amidst the political, social and economic climate many Syrians faced during this time. During the first wave of the Great Migration of 1880-1924 approximately 95,000 Arabs migrated to the United States after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

During their time in Lower Manhattan, they established over 300 businesses and solidified themselves in the economic fabric of New York City. By 1940, many of the last members of the community were forced out or fled to the other middle eastern communities in The Bronx and Brooklyn, and by the 1960s, the World Trade Center’s construction had officially demolished what was left of the community except for the three buildings that remain today. 109 Washington Street is an old tenement building which people still reside in. The second building, Downtown Community House, opened in 1926 and was funded by Wall Street to serve the community’s “social, educational, and medical needs.” The last building, St George’s Syrian Catholic Church, which is now St George's Tavern has been designated as a historic landmark since 2009. 

Efforts to memorialize Little Syria have been slow with little support from any major group or the city. Carl Antoun and Todd Fine, whose ancestry in New York City is tied to Little Syria, have started movements such as Save Washington Street, and an online petition to have the last three remaining buildings become historical landmarks in New York City. There has also been a push for the 9/11 Memorial to include a permanent exhibit on Little Syria as historical acknowledgement for the community that once existed.

Little Syria provides a look into the ways cities struggle to come to terms with remembering communities that were removed to create public infrastructure. Although the Little Syrian community has now spread throughout the city and has settled into different spaces, the Lower West Side of Manhattan was the first stop for many Arab immigrants in which they called home and developed an identity outside of the unfamiliar city. While Little Syria’s legacy in Lower Manhattan has not been officially memorialized by the city, historians and activists are still fighting to keep those three remaining buildings on Washington Street from being forgotten.

Start from the beginning of the Re-Imagined Space Series with Seneca Village here.