[5] The community disappeared almost entirely when a great deal of lower Washington Street was demolished to make way for the entrance ramps to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

[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.

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.

[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.

[11] 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.

[12] 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] 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.

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.

[19] Then, in 2019, the Washington Street Advocacy Group published a report by its president, Todd Fine, "Voluntary Destruction: Historic Preservation in the Lower West Side since September 11, 2001".

Among other things, the report urged that the Community House and the tenement be preserved as among the last remaining vestiges of Little Syria, with St. George's Syrian Catholic Church having already been designated an individual landmark.