Battery Tunnel Construction Wipes Out Historic Neighborhood

While the demolition of Manhattan's Gashouse District to make way for Stuyvesant Town was the most visible sign of history yielding to progress this month, the Sunday Herald Tribune drew attention to a significant loss in lower Manhattan where wrecking balls were about to make way for an approach to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, one of Robert Moses' most controversial and destructive projects. The area was not as large as the Lower East Side demolition but it had a 150 -year-old history. Some 400 families who lived in dingy red brick houses, most of which were more than a century old, were being displaced. Only a skyscraper at 19 Rector Street would be spared. Among the losses would be the city's shortest street, Edgar Street, where Trinity Place met Greenwich Street. The tunnel was expected to be completed in 1949.

According to the newspaper, the blocks housed a close-knit community. Many of the residents already had left and the remainder were now being cleared out. Most were from Czechoslovakia. Many of them worked in the office buildings of the neighboring financial district, the men as custodians and handymen and the women as cleaning ladies. Along Washington Street a remnant of the city's “Little Syria” still existed. Some Poles and Greeks also lived in the area, as well as a few Irish families.

Several buildings on lower Greenwich Street were of historical interest. They dated back to the end of the 18th century when a bluff along the Hudson River was leveled and landfill linked Greenwich Street, which led to rural Greenwich Village, to the city, still concentrated then in the southern tip of Manhattan Island. The river was pushed successively westward to create Washington Street and then West Street. For the first 40 years of its existence, lower Greenwich Street was an elite residential address, inhabited by the families of prosperous merchants and shipowners. Members of the Roosevelts, Schermerhorns, Aspinwalls, Delafields and Beekmans were among them. Number 2 Greenwich Street, which was occupied in 1946 by small stores on the ground floor, had been the mansion of John E. Livingston, mayor of New York. Alexander Hamilton was a frequent guest of merchant Isaac Bell at number 4 in the early days of the Republic. The American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society had appointed a committee to salvage any worthwhile architectural features such as cornices and lintels from the surviving mansions as well as anything of historical interest that might turn up during the excavation.

By 1840 the wealthy had moved further uptown. Some of the stately homes became boarding houses or warehouses. As the immigrant throng began arriving mid-century at nearby Castle Garden, the forerunner to Ellis Island, tenements replaced many of the original buildings. The Irish were the first immigrants to move in, as they did all along the Manhattan waterfront where unskilled laborers could find jobs. The Syrians came in 1880, an ethnic category which then included Lebanese, Palestinians and other Arab-speakers of the Ottoman Empire. Most of them were Christians. The Greeks arrived soon after. The Central Europeans arrived at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

Reporter Howard Skidmore interviewed Papa Abaid, a Syrian who operated a well-known confectionary shop at 53 Washington Street. Abaid remembered the neighborhood as it was in 1891 when he had arrived from Damascus as a boy. “This was a very tough street,” he said. “Every place was saloons and flophouses. The American lady used nerve to pass through this street.” The Syrians started out as traveling peddlers (as in "Oklahoma," then playing on Broadway) then became store owners. Some entered the linen business and became prosperous, sending their kids to college. Most had long since moved away, many to Brooklyn.