Former St. George's Syrian Catholic Church

History and architecture

The former St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church is the most significant remnant of the Lower Manhattan immigrant enclave known as the “Syrian Quarter,” the “Mother Colony” of Syrians and Lebanese in America. Immigrants from the former Ottoman province of Syria, which included modern-day Syria and Lebanon, began coming to this country in the 1880s, and over the next 40 years, thousands of them settled on and around lower Washington Street in a neighborhood that was their commercial and cultural center in the United States.

Nearly half of these immigrants were Melkite Greek Catholics, who recognize the primacy of the Pope but worship using the Byzantine Rite. In Lower Manhattan, in 1889, they formed America’s first Melkite parish; by 1925, as St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church, they moved into this building, which had been purchased for their use by George E. Bardwil, an importer of fine linens and embroideries. In 1929, the church engaged Harvey F. Cassab, a young Lebanese-American draftsman, to design a new façade for the building. Cassab’s vibrant neo- Gothic composition, executed in bright white terra cotta, features a polychrome relief of St. George and the Dragon, and remains remarkably intact today.

The former St. George’s Church building was constructed around 1812; three stories high with a peaked roof, it served as an immigrant boardinghouse by the 1850s. In 1869, it was raised to its present five stories and continued to function as a boardinghouse and tenement until Bardwil’s purchase. With the decline of Lower Manhattan’s Middle Eastern population after World War II, St. George’s was converted to a Roman Rite church for a period, and in 1982, the building was sold to Chapel Moran, Inc., which has owned and maintained the building and its unique Washington Street façade for the past 27 years. It remains Lower Manhattan’s most vivid reminder of the vanished ethnic community once known as the Syrian Quarter, and of the time when Washington Street was the Main Street of Syrian America.