Exploring the Lost Secrets of 'Little Syria'

New exhibit shines spotlight on how the Chinatown area of today was once a hub of Syrian, Lebanese immigration

Nick Haddad, 82, has fond memories of visiting his grandfather’s Middle Eastern import shop at Harvard and Hudson Streets as a child.

“I remember going to the store until it was abandoned in the 1950s, because of the expressway construction,” he told Sampan recently, noting how he and his cousins would play behind the old Quincy School building nearby at the time.

Though Haddad was living in the South End during his childhood, many of his family members still resided in the area that today is considered Chinatown. His mother was born in 1917 on Tyler Street and his grandparents on both sides moved to the South Cove area after arriving from Lebanon in the late 1880s and early 1900s. Haddad’s grandparents, in fact, were part of a wave of immigrants from Syria and Lebanon who began moving into the area starting nearly a century and a half ago.

“I think a lot of people are surprised that Arabs have been in Massachusetts for that long,” said Kyle Wynter-Stoner, the content and research manager at the Arab American National Museum in Michigan.

This early immigration to the region is a subject Wynter-Stoner has been focused on for a few years, after the Arab American National Museum put a priority on the history of immigration from the Middle East to Massachusetts. The museum began collaborating with the Pao Arts Center in Boston’s Chinatown and local researcher and curator Lydia Harrington for the traveling exhibit “Arab Massachusetts: Building Community in the Commonwealth.” The exhibit runs Nov. 19 through Feb. 13 at the Pao Arts Center and will make stops in Quincy and other cities.

"This has been three years in the making," said Diana Abouali, director of the Arab American National Museum, as she stood inside the Pao Arts Center the day before a private reception for the exhibit. She said the Dearborn-based museum got the idea for focusing on Massachusetts after presenting a similar Little Syria exhibit in New York City several years ago. "There is a longstanding Arab American community here in Boston."

From left: Kyle Wynter-Stoner and Cynthia Woo stand at the corner of Hudson and Harvard Streets, where a Middle Eastern imports shop was once located; the vase that was given to the Haddad family; Woo and Diana Abouali look at an exhibit at the Pao Arts Center on Nov. 14. Abouali poses next to an exhibit display. Photos by Adam Smith.

A Diverse Little Syria

Much of the “Arab Massachusetts” exhibit starts in Little Syria, an area that roughly overlaps with today’s Chinatown.

When people think of early Arab communities in the U.S., said Wynter-Stoner, “usually you think of enclaves.”

But that was not the case in Little Syria.

“There was a lot of interaction between the Arab community and the Chinese community in the Chinatown-area,” said the researcher. That observation jibes with Haddad’s childhood memories, as he said his grandparents’ grocery shop served both communities and his parents befriended some Chinese immigrant families at the time.

But today, very few clues remain in Boston’s Chinatown of its role in early Syrian and Lebanese immigration. The old shops and nearly all the families that had occupied the neighborhood from the 1880s to mid-1900s have since moved away or died. Highway construction uprooted much of the area decades ago, clearing many neighborhood homes and shuttering businesses. And many Lebanese and Syrian immigrants who lived in the South Cove – starting around what is today Ping On Alley and Oxford Streets – would in the mid-1900s move deeper into the South End and eventually to the suburbs like West Roxbury and beyond.

This loss of neighborhood landmarks posed a problem for researchers Wynter-Stoner and Lydia Harrington as they set out to uncover the neighborhood’s history. Harrington, however, had a head start from her ongoing work on the Boston Little Syria Project with researcher Chloe Bordewich. But to dig deeper, she had to further examine street records, newspaper archives, and build more relationships. She met with Haddad and families still familiar with Little Syria.

“We looked at many different types of materials,” said Harrington. Part of her history-hunting included digging up written family stories contained in self-published pamphlets or short books and reaching out to community churches.

“Those are really important, and a lot of that stuff is hard to find unless you are connected to the right people, since these really personal histories don't typically get published widely and you won't necessarily find them in a library.”

Fire insurance maps also provided a wealth of information, she said.

“They show you, over the years, how one property, one street, has changed,” she said. “You can see the surname of who owned it; you see over time, how that what is now Chinatown went from having a lot of English and Irish names to Syrian to Chinese names. It’s very fascinating how it changes, and also how some areas are very mixed. Little Syria was never 100% Syrian. People talk about living side by side with Chinese or Jewish families or Irish ones.”

Cynthia Woo, director of the Pao Arts Center at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, said the exhibit is a way to showcase the shared immigrant history of the city.

“There are a lot of narratives that are not known,” said Woo. “In many ways, by hosting this exhibit … it’s an opportunity to share a more complicated and fuller history of the community.”

Christian Roots, Xenophobic Barriers

By the late 1880s, according to Harrington, Syrian and Lebanese immigrants – virtually all Christians – began to make their way to the area of what is now considered Chinatown and parts of the South End. The community was vibrant, eventually forming associations and churches.

But the history of the neighborhood was tangled up in the xenophobia and racism of the time. Chinese and other Asian immigrants faced obstacles like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and other discriminatory policies of the time. Many people coming from the Middle East, meanwhile, faced their own immigration roadblocks and discrimination.

“It was very hard to get past immigration security if you were Muslim,” said Harrington. “We have evidence of people who were asked by immigration officials, ‘Does your religion permit polygamy?' And they might not even understand the question in English, or in Arabic. And if they said, ‘Yes,’ they might be deported immediately.”

Another obstacle for immigrants was that the path to naturalized citizenship was thorny until a set of landmark court rulings in the 1900s. The U.S.-born children of these immigrants were protected after the Supreme Court’s ruling of the U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, which had reaffirmed the guarantee of birthright citizenship for children born on U.S. soil. But it was still difficult to become a naturalized U.S. citizen if you were not considered “white” or “Black,” noted Harrington. That changed for Arab immigrants with two major rulings. First was the 1915 ruling of Dow v. the United States in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which allowed Syrians – but mainly only Christians – to become classified as “white” and thus become naturalized. Nearly 30 years later came the Massachusetts Circuit Court case of Ex-Parte Mohriez that would effectively open the door for Arab Muslims to become naturalized, said Wynter-Stoner. While local exceptions could be found prior to those cases, the two rulings set legal precedent, said the researchers.

Then, later, as Little Syria was fading from Boston, the Immigration Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, put priority on skilled employment and reuniting family members, thus greatly opening up immigration to non-Europeans, and many more Arab Muslims began to arrive in the U.S.

But, said Wynter-Stoner, a major reason for so much early Syrian and Lebanese Christian immigration was likely because of prior missionary work in the region, so there was a connection between those parts of the Middle East and U.S. Christians that naturally led to increased immigration early on.

“So, the Little Syria population was pretty much all Christian,” Harrington said. And fitting in was a priority.

“I think there was a lot of desire to assimilate and not stand out,” she said, especially after the 1915 ruling. “You know, there’s a long American tradition of that. And I think people, a lot of people, were proud to be Arab but also wanted to fit in and not stick out too much.”

As Chinese men early in Chinatown’s history in Boston were often vilified, she said, Syrians also faced questions over who really counted as American.

“Who looks more white, or who's Christian?” she said.

Early Muslim Immigration

Decades prior to the 1965 law, however, said Harrington and Wynter-Stoner, a small community mostly Muslim men from the Middle East had already started moving to Quincy. The men found work in the shipyards, said the historians, by the early 1900s.

Unearthing their history, however, is more challenging, said Wynter-Stoner, because most of the men were poor and fewer records are available.

“They didn’t leave a lot of written documents,” he said. “But we can trace how they went from these very humble beginnings to creating the first purpose-built mosque in New England.”

Many early Muslim communities in the U.S. relied on informal rooms where people would pray with an imam, he said, so the Quincy mosque marked a significant milestone.

“We have the building permit from it,” he said, and “it’s classified as an ‘Arabian church.’”

That historic document, said Wynter-Stoner, shows how little understood the religion and immigrant community was at the time.

Many decades later, of course, stereotypes about immigrants from Arab-majority nations and from China persist. And in some political and social circles, xenophobia and prejudices are once again bubbling over. Some lawmakers have pushed bills that would block Chinese foreign students, for example, and several prominent colleges and universities have within the past year purged and disciplined Middle East studies professors. Then there's the barrage of videos and photos of immigrants -- including parents and children -- getting detained and deported by the administration of the same president that during his first run in office referred to Covid-19 as the “Kung Flu” and promised a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

These kind of stereotypes, said Harrington, make it all the more important to show a more representative history of immigrants and immigrant communities.

“I think it’s really necessary to show the nuances of these communities,” she said, and “how they've contributed positively to the country. I think exhibitions and programming like this not only can educate people who want to know more about another community, but also, I think, it's very good for the self confidence of people to see that their own history is important and positive.”

The exhibit, say its organizers, also shows how immigrant communities got along years ago. The Pao Arts Center exhibit, for example, contains some objects loaned out by families that reflect how Syrian and Lebanese families got along with Chinese families at the time. One example is a vase from China that was given as a wedding gift from a Chinese family to Haddad’s parents.

“There was a nice comfortable relationship,” said Haddad, “between the Chinese community and the Syrian and Lebanese community.”

For more information, see paoartscenter.org/events/2025/aanm-exhibit. A walking tour is set for Nov. 22 at 2 p.m. and a concert event on Dec. 6.

This story contains some edits made within in a few hours of going live.