109 Washington Street is a five-story tenement in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City, within the area once known as Little Syria. Due to demolitions connected to the construction of the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel and the World Trade Center, it stands as the last tenement on a portion of lower Washington Street that has been estimated by Kate Reggev to have contained around 50 tenements. After September 11, 2001, its proximity to the World Trade Center site made it the subject of some media attention, including a nationally syndicated radio story about the experiences of its residents on the day of the attack.109 on 9-11: An Audio Documentary. PRI. August/September 2003. Radio. In recent years, community officials, activists, and preservationists have advocated for its designation as a landmark as part of a mini-historical district with the connected buildings of St. George's Syrian Catholic Church and the Downtown Community House.
Previous structures A four-story, brick “public store” that received goods from the piers on West Street stood at 109 Washington Street since the early 1820s, if not before; several other nearby buildings on Washington Street at Nos. 97, 101, and 103 were also commercial structures serving the same purpose.New York City Board of Health. A History of the Proceedings of the Board of Health, of the City of New-York... New York: P & H Van Pelt, 1823; Jones, Andrew A. Jones' Digest: Being a Particular and Detailed Account of the Duties Performed by the Various Offices Belonging to the Custom-House Departments of the United States. New York: G.F. Hopkins & Son, 1835. p. 53. Typically, public stores in large cities like New York housed goods coming directly from the wharves so that they could be appraised before being brought to the individual shops or markets where they would be sold. Owned at the time by Samuel Swartwout, a wealthy land speculator, an 1837 fire at the store led to a valuation of its goods at approximately $300,000, including pipes of lime juice; boxes of glass; cases of wine, brandy, and gin; boxes of cigars; and cases of cordials.New York City Department of Finance, Conveyance Liber #6, Prior to 1917, Block 45-54; United States Congress House. “Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury.” House Documents, 27th Congress, Third Session. January 19, 1843. p. 2; “Domestic: Fire and Loss of Life.” The Boston Recorder. June 9, 1837. American Periodicals, p. 91. By the 1850s, the property housed a residential building that was occupied by Irish and Irish-American families throughout the 1860s and 1870s; beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, German immigrants joined the Irish population. Common occupations were servants, sailors, cooks, machinists, laborers, longshoremen, and barbers.“To The Anniversary folks.” The New York Daily Tribune. May 13, 1857, p. 7; U.S. Census, New York, New York. 1860.
“Old Law” Tenements Tenement buildings are by legal definition a multi-family building housing more than three families, according to the Tenement House Law of 1867; the later association of tenements with lower-income, immigrant families is believed to have stemmed from the typical 25-foot-wide lots in New York City, creating narrow apartments with little access to light and ventilation except for in the front rooms.Information in this section is based on the following sources: Dolkart, Andrew. Biography of a Tenement House in New York City. Santa Fe: The Center for American Places, 2006; Stern, Robert A.M. New York 1900. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc, 1983. Most tenement houses built before the first tenement law in 1879, also known as the “old law,” were constructed with little to no building regulations; after 1879, the typical shape of tenements shifted to the “dumbbell” apartments, where three-foot wide light shafts on either side of the structure were an attempt at providing light and air to the inner rooms. Unfortunately, this did not provide the desired access to air and light but rather created what essentially became garbage shafts and fire flues and did little for residents in the way of privacy from neighbors in the buildings next door. 1901 saw the second wave of tenement reform, with requirements addressing both access to lighting for interior rooms, slightly larger air shafts, and indoor toilet facilities; many of these reforms became requirements for preexisting tenements that had to be brought up to code. Stylistically, the “old law” tenements tended to be four- or five-story red brick structures with stone or terra-cotta window details and a neo-Grec pressed metal cornice; later “new law” tenements could be up to six stories with brick and glazed terra-cotta trim, often with Renaissance or Classical, strongly projecting details.
In 1881, the existing pre-1879 tenement was sold in foreclosure for $5,000 and then subsequently resold that same year to Lawrence O’Connor, resident of 115 Washington Street and employee at a local liquor store.“The Real Estate Market: Recorded Real Estate Transfers.” The New York Times. March 4, 1881. p. 6; New York City Department of Finance, Conveyance Liber #6, Prior to 1917, Block 45-54; U.S. Census, New York, New York, 1880. Much of the tenement construction during the late 19th century was carried out by local entrepreneurs with a small amount of savings who sought an opportunity to become landowners and landlords; these entrepreneurs, like the Irish-born Lawrence O’Connor, typically were members of the same ethnic or religious groups as those who would occupy the tenement.Dolkart, Andrew. Biography of a Tenement House in New York City. Santa Fe: The Center for American Places, 2006. p. 26. Four years later in 1885, O’Connor demolished the existing brick building and hired architect John P. Lee to construct an “old law” tenement of five stories, with a storefront and perhaps two or three apartments on the ground floor and four three-room apartments on each of the upper floors. Typical of most tenement buildings constructed after the 1879 “old law” regulations and before the 1901 “new law” requirements, No. 109 Washington Street was designed for 19 apartments, each with two windows in the largest of the three rooms and little to no light or ventilation in the other rooms, except for a narrow three-foot wide airshaft on the southern wall as required by the “old law” of 1879. An airshaft was never constructed on the northern side of the building, perhaps, according to Kate Reggev, because of the tenement at 111 Washington Street that was a front-and-rear style tenement in 1885 and thus had a small courtyard in the middle of the lot, providing some access to air and light for its neighbors.
Most of the tenements further south on Washington Street were of a lower class, considered “foul,” while the tenements further north on Washington Street near Rector Street, like No. 109, were for the slightly better-off immigrants and were viewed as “better class,” most likely because they were newer than the many converted warehouses and rowhouses further down on Washington Street.Childe, Cromwell. “Exiles of the Orient: Queer Types Found in New York's Syrian Quarter.” The Washington Post. August 21, 1899. p. 4. Once a pervasive building type in the area, these “old law” tenements were “low, red brick tenements whose fronts [were] scrawled over with fire escapes” and consisted of apartments of three or four rooms and “whose rears opened down into desolately dark courts.”“A Bit of Syria Between the Skyscrapers: Lower New York.” The Baltimore Sun. March 22, 1931, p. SM 16.
Like most other tenements in Little Syria, No. 109 Washington Street had a commercial space of two large rooms on the ground floor. Although there is little documentation of the tenement's early inhabitants or the use of the ground floor storefront, three Syrian immigrants ran cigar factories at 57 and 109 Washington Street in 1894 and were caught for fraudulently putting on revenue stamps for tax purposes on their products.The majority of the census records from New York in 1890 (the first year that census record would be available for this 1885 tenement) were lost in a fire. Records from 1900 are the earliest ones to account for residents of the current structure at 109 Washington Street; “Notes From the Courts.” The New York Times. August 21, 1894. In the late 1910s, the space was occupied by Pedro Caram, an immigrant from Syria, who specialized in the exportation of cotton and silk goods, hardware, dry goods, tools, shoes, and jewelry to South America.Hough, Benjamin Olney. American Exporters' Export Trade Directory. New York: Johnston Export Publishing Company, 1912. p. 22. By 1917, Caram's business was in trouble, and the storefront was occupied in the early 1920s by another merchant of Syrian descent, Leon Labe, who sold silk and cotton textiles, including silk kimono, embroidery, curtains, hosiery, and sweaters to the Dutch West Indies, Peru, Puerto Rico, Chile, Honduras, Brazil and Argentina.“Business Troubles.” The New York Times. April 10, 1917Hough, Benjamin Olney. American Exporters' Export Trade Directory. 6th Edition. New York: Johnston Export Publishing Company, 1920. p. 146. By 1940, a retailer selling glass occupied the ground floor store.Sperr, Percy Loomis. Manhattan: Washington Street - Rector Street. c. 1940. Courtesy of New York Public Library Digital Gallery.
Inhabitants Beginning in the mid- to late-1880s, Washington Street near Rector Street began to see an influx of immigrants from the Middle East, but No. 109 in particular remained largely populated by Irish and German immigrants. By the turn of the century, the buildings adjacent to No. 109 were home to Greek, Turkish/Syrian, Russian, Italian, German, Austrian, Welsh, Norwegian, English and Irish immigrants. Most of the Syrians, often referred to as Turks because of their Turkish passports from when Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria were part of the Ottoman Empire, lived with extended family—brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles. Their occupations ranged from machinists, peddlers, cigar makers, shoemakers, and grocers to the occasional dealer of jewelry.US Census, New York, New York. 1900. Women were sometimes employed as dressmakers or embroiderers.
No. 109 was home to 37 people in 1900, roughly 75% of whom were Irish or first generation Irish-American; the rest were German or first-generation German-Americans, and most males worked as laborers, longshoremen, truck drivers, or bank clerks. Depending on the family, women were also sometimes employed, usually as scrubwomen in the nearby office buildings of the new skyscrapers in the Financial District. By 1905, about 60% of the block's 47 families (196 people) were Syrian immigrants; Greeks and Egyptians also began to move into the area, but the tenement at 109 Washington Street was inhabited by 34 residents of Irish, Hungarian, or Austrian origin.New York State Census, New York, New York, 1905; Miller, Lucius Hopkins. A study of the Syrian population of greater New York. [New York?: s.n., 1904?]. p. 8.