Mr. Bernstein would not speculate on how the administration of Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio would treat the proposal.

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However, it might be noted that Lower Manhattan is on the radar screen of a couple of key players. The co-chairman of Mr. de Blasio’s transition team, Carl Weisbrod, is a former president of the Downtown Alliance. Anthony E. Shorris, the designated first deputy mayor, worked as a consultant to the alliance in 2003.

The alliance manages the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Business Improvement District. In 2009, it issued a report, “Five Principles for Greenwich South,” concerning a trapezium-shaped area on the west side that includes much of what was once an Arab-American neighborhood called Little Syria.

Little Syria, its residents and its many small businesses were displaced and scattered by the construction of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel in the 1940s and ‘50s. The tunnel “brought the noise and pollution of thousands of cars” to the district, the alliance said. It also created an archipelago of traffic islands, one of which is bordered by Edgar Street, reputedly the shortest in New York. It runs about 100 feet, from Trinity Place to Greenwich Street. No building has an Edgar Street address.

The alliance called for a “more welcoming, engaging pedestrian environment” in this area.

A step in this direction was taken this year by the Washington Street Historical Society, which is devoted to perpetuating the memory and heritage of Little Syria. It sponsored the repair and repainting of six park benches in the Edgar Street Greenstreet that were damaged during Hurricane Sandy.

To these benches, the society affixed plaques commemorating historical Syrian-American and Lebanese-American people, institutions and businesses. One plaque, quoting the poet and writer Khalil Gibran, reads, “Those are the sons of my homeland, who are born in cottages, and die in palaces.”