Fifty years ago, on August 5, 1966, the sound of jackhammers rang out at the corner of Cortlandt and West streets in the Financial District, and the intersection ceased to exist. Those jackhammers were the only formal groundbreaking for the controversial World Trade Center project and the end of two distinct but overlapping neighborhoods that once defined the lower west side of Manhattan: Radio Row and Little Syria.

It’s a wonder anyone even noticed. Despite fierce opposition from local merchants, Radio Row—the shops that covered the roughly 13 blocks to be occupied by the World Trade Center complex—had already lost its fight to the Port Authority a couple of years earlier. Most of the buildings had been bulldozed already; the "groundbreaking" was just a formality.

To New York’s business and political elite, the start of the World Trade Center construction heralded a new chapter in the city’s story; few paid any attention to the fact that they were shutting the book on nearly a century of rich heritage.

In truth, the area around the World Trade Center had been in upheaval for decades. Just south of Radio Row had once stood "Little Syria," a close-knit community of Arab shops, tenements, and churches that thrived along Washington Street. A generation before the World Trade Center’s construction, Little Syria had been destroyed by Robert Moses and the construction of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

Washington Street first became identified with Middle Eastern immigrants in the 1880s. A trickle of immigrants from the Ottoman Empire arrived in the late 1870s and early 1880s; after 1885, that trickle turned into a steady stream. Almost immediately, the area where they settled came to be known as "The Syrian Quarter" or "Little Syria" (Ottoman Syria covered most of the Levant, from the modern-day Turkish border to the north through what would become Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel).

To New York’s business and political elite, the start of the World Trade Center construction heralded a new chapter in the city’s story; few paid any attention to the fact that they were shutting the book on nearly a century of rich heritage.

Arriving just as post-Civil War immigration was beginning to swell, these Syrians faced the same hardship and discrimination as others newly arrived in America. In the Boston Journal in 1888, an anonymous writer noted that "last Sunday thirty Syrian Arabs were landed at Castle Garden. This makes about 3,000 of these people who have thus far come in. Most of them are devoted to one of two industries—thieving and begging. It is time the bars were put up." It was the beginning of a sentiment that would, in some ways, never dissipate.

It is unclear exactly how Washington Street became the locus of the Syrian community. In her book Strangers in the West: The Syrian Colony of New York City, 1880-1900, Linda K. Jacobs writes that Washington Street was a natural place to settle, as it was "close to the disembarkation point at Battery Place." That’s certainly true—but starting in 1855, tens of thousands of people had already been processed at Castle Garden. Why was Washington Street not Little Ireland or Little Germany?

In fact, as early as 1852, "emigrant" boarding houses along the street were home to a mix of Germans, Irish, and others newly arrived. It’s not surprising that early Syrian arrivals also availed themselves of these accommodations. For earlier arrivals, Washington Street was a transient destination. The Irish ended up in Five Points, the Germans in what is today the East Village. For the Syrians, it quickly became home. As Jacobs writes: "When the new immigrant walked up Washington Street, he would have heard Arabic on every side. Many of the storefronts had signs in Arabic in the windows; there were men smoking water pipes in the cafés; and many of the men and women walking through the streets looked much as they did at home, notwithstanding their westernized clothing."

By 1900, there were somewhere between 1,229 and 7,000 Syrians and other Arab people in New York, mostly centered on Washington Street. The numbers vary widely because not only is the data difficult to sift through a century later, but census figures at the time were often laughably incomplete. As Jacobs points out, the census was a door-to-door enumeration that was taken in the summer, when "a large number of the Syrian community had left the city to peddle."

No matter what the size, the Syrian Quarter caught the imagination of the press—and not always in a good way. Typical reportage focused uncomfortably on the "amazingly pretty girls" and the "swarthy," "wild-eyed" men.

Or take this example from the 1908 dime novel Secret Service. In the story titled "The Bradys and the Black Giant; or, the Secrets of ‘Little Syria’," a detective finds himself chasing a suspect into

the famous Syrian quarter at New York, which many years ago was the finest residential part of the city, and contains even today some grand, old Colonial mansions far gone in decay. Here are now hived in great numbers Syrians, Arabs, Hindoos and other Asiatic people. But about the distinction of nationality the average New Yorker neither knows nor cares …. [A]ll are people from the dark and mysterious East, and many strange stories are told of the secrets of "Little Syria," as this quarter has come to be known.

Similarly, an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine from 1899 noted that while the area had "abundant interest," by virtue of being "foreign" and "quaint," it was not the romanticized area "the tale-tellers scribble about." Instead, readers were told that if they ventured into Little Syria, they’d be introduced to "the dirtiest people in all of New York" (a direct rebuke of a Times article from a year earlier that had praised the area’s cleanliness), who were living in tenements that were "dens of grime and odor."

This was not necessarily an exaggeration. Despite post-Civil War reforms, tenement buildings at the turn of the 20th century were generally in shoddy shape, prompting the 1901 Tenement House Act, or "New Law," which was designed to replace dumbbell tenements with larger, airier, and more modern apartment houses. In the wake of the law, Lucius Hopkins Miller undertook a survey of the neighborhood in 1903, published as A Study of the Syrian Population of Greater New York. He found many families living in substandard conditions, including 179 families that each occupied a single dark room.

Though Arab immigration slowed in the first decades of the 20th century—and virtually stopped after the Immigration Act of 1924—Little Syria persisted. As Alexander Nazaryan wrote in Newsweek, "If there was ever an Arab Street in the United States," this was it:

Here, the store Sahadi Bros. proffered "Oriental" groceries while Markarian Bros. sold the Armenian variety and Gorra’s sold Lebanese women’s clothing and there was a restaurant called Son of the Sheik at 77 Washington Street, where you could have lunch for 55 cents and dinner for a dime more (no liquor, though). The residents read Al Hoda, the nation’s oldest Arab-American daily. They prayed at churches, not mosques, for the Arabs who lived in Little Syria were Christians. So their faith they had in common with their Irish and Slovak neighbors, if little else.

The bulk of the population was Melkite or Maronite Christian, and three churches served the community. The cornerstone of St. Joseph’s, the Maronite Church on Washington Street, was discovered in the rubble during the recovery operation at the World Trade Center. It is now housed in Our Lady of Lebanon, the Maronite cathedral in Brooklyn Heights. St. George’s Chapel at 103 Washington Street, a Melkite parish, is one of the only Little Syria buildings that still stands. Declared a landmark in 2009, the building was originally built in 1812, making it not only a reminder of Little Syria, but one of the oldest buildings in the neighborhood. In 1869, it was raised to its present height of five stories and became a boarding house and, later, a tenement. In 1925, the Melkite parish bought the building and Harvey F. Cassab, a Lebanese-American architect, designed a new facade for its conversion into a house of worship.

The church, however, would have a short lifespan at this location. In January 1939, city planner Robert Moses announced his plans to build a bridge from Battery Park to Brooklyn. Six months later, the U.S. Department of War nixed the idea, saying that as "the proposed bridge is seaward of a vital Navy establishment" (the Brooklyn Navy Yard), it would be a detriment to national defense. (There’s a also a chance that President Roosevelt’s long-running feud with Moses scuttled the project.)

Moses then switched to building a Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel—the approach roads for which would have to be built through the heart of Little Syria.

While white-collar New Yorkers fought to save the historic fort that once housed the Castle Garden Emigrant Landing Depot, none of them focused on the neighborhood of those actual immigrants. Like many working class New Yorkers in other parts of the city, the residents of Little Syria were no match for Robert Moses.

As John Kuo Wei Tchen wrote in his essay "Whose Downtown?" in the book After the World Trade Center, the Little Syria residents’ protests "were to no avail. Expediting auto traffic to suburbia took priority over the community of politically powerless city dwellers. The Syrians had to leave and restart their businesses and their lives somewhere else. Many moved across the harbor to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn." By the time the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel opened in 1950, Little Syria was essentially gone.

At the end of World War I, while Little Syria was still at its peak, a new neighborhood began to coalesce around its northern edges. With Manhattan’s west side docks "awash in surplus military and ship-to-shore radio parts," enterprising merchants began to deal in radio components for amateur tinkerers and customers who needed to purchase or buy retail radios. In 1921, City Radio opened on Cortlandt Street (just down the street from the Syrian-run Hotel Lebanon). By the time Robert Moses was beginning the process of bulldozing Little Syria, there were over 300 businesses located in the 13-block area surrounding the Hudson Terminal of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad. By 1927—when the local merchants held a "jubilee" to bring people into their shops—the term "Radio Row" was in common use, and it would remain that way until 1966.

While a 1930 directory lists some Syrian businesses on Washington Street that sold records and radios, it seems that Radio Row didn’t have a large Syrian presence, though precisely who worked at the shops can be hard to research. Certainly, by the time Radio Row was well established, many Syrian residents and businesses had already relocated to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. What the shopkeepers of Radio Row didn’t realize as they watched Little Syria dismantled was that their days in the neighborhood were numbered, too.

Like many working class New Yorkers in other parts of the city, the residents of Little Syria were no match for Robert Moses.

The beginning of the end for Radio Row began at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. On April 30, 1939, NBC began regular television broadcasting by showcasing President Roosevelt and the opening of the fair. While it would take decades for television to supersede radio, another element of the fair—one that was almost an afterthought—would immediately impact Radio Row: the International Chamber of Commerce’s "World Trade Center."

Backed by the Rockefellers, the World Trade Center exhibit was supposed to bolster "world peace through world trade," an idea that the family was also incorporating into Rockefeller Center, where various European nations were invited to have shops, offices, and consulates. After World War II, the Rockefellers donated the land for the United Nations at Turtle Bay and continued to look for ways to use money to help bring about world harmony.

In the 1950s, David Rockefeller began floating the idea of a downtown World Trade Center. It would help revive the area’s fortunes in an era when many companies were relocating to Midtown, as well as give a new home to the New York Stock Exchange. In theory, the complex was to be built on the East River, near the Fulton Fish Market, which would not have affected Radio Row. As the WTC project was getting off the ground, Rockefeller created a new newspaper, the Downtown Courier, as a PR mouthpiece for the development. In 1959, the paper praised Radio Row—which it recast as "Electronic City"—as a vital attraction for businesses that would relocate to the World Trade Center.

However, as plans developed, Rockefeller partnered with the Port Authority so that he could build atop the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, which the Port would acquire and refurbish as the PATH train to serve the scores of downtown commuters the WTC would bring to the area.

Radio Row was now in the way.

Downtown merchants, led by Oscar Nadel, formed the Downtown West Small Business Survival Committee to fight the World Trade Center project. Nadel, who had opened Oscar’s Radio Shop in 1925, not only organized legal proceedings against the Port Authority, but also—taking a page out of the Jane Jacobs playbook—staged a mock funeral procession, complete with a black-draped coffin representing the death of the small business owner, in July 1962.

By the time the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel opened in 1950, Little Syria was essentially gone.

Though Nadel and his organization made the sensible argument that demolishing their shops and livelihoods so that skyscrapers full of private offices could take their place was not in the public interest—and thus not eligible for eminent domain—the courts disagreed. When the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the matter on appeal in 1963, Radio Row was essentially dead.

Nadel vowed to fight on. Groups of protesters dogged New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, as he campaigned for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, but like Little Syria before it, Radio Row was no match for the march of government progress.

By August 5, 1966, when construction of the World Trade Center finally started, most electronics and radio stores had relocated up to 45th Street, though the idea that the area was an electronics destination persisted, particularly with the establishment in 1971 of the recently departed J&R electronics store on nearby Park Row.

Similarly, the DNA of Little Syria still runs through the streets of Lower Tribeca, where Arab-run restaurants and shops are peppered along Church Street. Though only faint echoes of the past, they show that there’s a resilience to New York City neighborhoods, even in the face of projects as massive as the World Trade Center.

From now through September 16, 2016, a small exhibition tracing the history of Little Syria is on view at the New York City Department of Records and Information Services at 31 Chambers Street. Starting October 1, an expanded version of the exhibition will open at Ellis Island and run through January 9, 2017.

Editor: Sara Polsky