Downtown Park's Enigmatic Art Honors 'Little Syria' and Its Literary Heritage

Sara Ouhaddou's new sculptural installation turns the heads of passersby on their way through Elizabeth Berger Park. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Puzzling but appealing. That’s the reaction of many who encounter a new permanent art installation in Elizabeth Berger Plaza, the small park at the triangular intersection of Trinity Place, Edgar Street and Greenwich Street.

“Al Qalam: Poets in the Park” by French-Moroccan artist Sara Ouhaddou, consists of a large sculptural piece on the east side of the park lawn and mosaic-tiled seatbacks along two curved benches. The work, unveiled on April 29, honors the vanished Arabic-speaking community of “Little Syria” and its literary heritage. The immigrant neighborhood, founded in 1880 and destroyed by the building of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in the 1940s, had extended along Washington Street from Albany Street to The Battery. 

For her art installation, Ouhaddou invented an abstract, unreadable alphabet that corresponds to Arabic letters. “Calligraphy that is not read, but felt,” is how she has described her lettering. Along the park bench seatbacks, multi-colored mosaic tiles, set against a gold background, form abstract representations of verses from nine writers of the vanished community. Most prominently, a gold-colored, 18-foot-long sculpture of her invented characters, as tall as 7 feet, is meant to represent the word Al Qualm, Arabic for The Pen.

A sign, currently removed for edits, will include a QR code connected to an augmented reality web app that translates and further explains the writers’ quotations on the seatbacks.

Tourists stream past the large sculpture and the garden below on their way to a Statue of Liberty cruise, occasionally stopping briefly to take a photo, then moving on. A couple visiting from Spain, Kuhal Pahujja and Rachana Benjamin, originally from India, paused longer than most to position themselves in front of the object for a picture. Asked for their impression, Pahujja recognized that the sculpture “had something to do with Arabic” and declared it “really good, something different, even not knowing what it’s about.”

“It’s kind of interesting,” remarked Flip Jackson, who attends a nearby worker training program and was seated facing the sculpture. Asked what it says to him, Jackson said he felt it was about “love and kindness or friendship, friends forever or something like that.”

“It looks pretty, I like the flowers and the art—what’s it called, abstraction?” said Ardita, who works nearby and declined to give her last name. “It’s very nice and comfortable to sit by at my lunchtime.” 

“I think the letters are Jewish,” she added.

Once told what the work represents, Elijah Foreman, a software engineer eating a slice of pizza on one of the art-enhanced benches, called it “a beautiful piece of art.”

“I didn’t know the history of this neighborhood but after hearing you speak about it, yeah, it’s really cool,” Foreman said. “I love seeing little gems like that pop up in New York. I mean New York’s a city of immigrants, a city of different communities, so it’s a really great way to honor the people that lived here in the past.”

Indeed, a large, enthusiastic gathering of “Little Syria” acolytes attended the installation’s unveiling, a celebration made more festive by the years of effort that preceded it. In 2011, Todd Fine, a scholar of Ameen Rihani, one of the Arab-American writers, began goading the city to erect a monument to Little Syria’s literary past and joined others in trying to preserve the old neighborhood’s three surviving buildings. 

That push got a toehold in the park in 2013 when the organization Fine co-founded, the Washington Street Historical Society, raised funds to repair six Superstorm Sandy-damaged benches in the plaza. The group placed plaques on the benches, each with a quote that honored Arab-American culture. In 2017, Ouhaddou’s concept won an artist competition for a monument design to memorialize the “Little Syria” writers in the then yet-to-be constructed park.

“It’s going to be a phenomenal monument that represents the greater Syria, Arabic speaking people that came to America,” said Bryan Zarou, a member of the Washington Street Historical Society with Palestinian roots. “To have a permanent structure like this really gives us an added voice and some permanence to the city that we all love.”

“Imagine an immigrant from Lebanon after a 5,000-mile voyage stepping into American soil and being greeted in Arabic, walking up Washington Street and seeing dozens of Syrian businesses and establishments,” said Washington Street Historical Society president Linda Jacobs, whose four grandparents lived in the community. “There was even a school where children could learn American history and adults could learn English. Though the conditions were as bad as any slums in the city, they not only survived, but thrived.”

The artist wiped away tears as she spoke to the gathering about the meaning of the work for her as an immigrant of Arab descent. “Through the discovery of the Syrian community, its artists, its people, their stories, their history, I encountered something that resonated profoundly with my own story,” Ouhaddou said. “For the first time, I became truly aware of my position in the world as the child of immigration.”

“Even though I come from a different region of the world,” she added, “the writing and stories from this specific place transformed the way I understand my own life, and therefore transformed my world.”