Still Inhabited: An Arab American Museum in New York

Three buildings are all that remain of Little Syria: St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church at 103 Washington Street, the Downtown Community House at 105–107, and the tenement at 109, which is still lived in. The museum starts from that last fact and makes it a rule: the tenants stay. Instead of clearing the site, it keeps the church’s terra-cotta façade and the occupied tenement, and grows back and up from them, the way the street itself was altered for a century. The brief asks for more than 110,000 square feet on three narrow lots, so the museum rises as a tower behind the old fronts: the brief’s own contradiction, made visible.

The first Nahda, the Arab cultural awakening, was partly made in New York. Kawkab America, the first Arabic newspaper in the United States, was printed a few blocks from the site, and Gibran’s Pen League made the city a center of modern Arabic writing. The collection is organized around Nageeb Arbeely, the paper’s co-founder, not as a biography but as a device: a recurring hub room, modeled on the Kawkab America office at 45 Pearl Street, that reads differently depending on who enters it. The same rooms hold today’s Arab American writers and artists, so the first awakening is read against the current one.