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NYC built a monument to Khalil Gibran and Little Syria. Why was there global uproar?
Lebanese officials were furious, claiming the city erased Gibran’s identity. Yet there was a time when Arab immigrants in the US thought ‘we were all Syrians’
On the morning of 30 April, in the shadow of the financial district’s skyscrapers, a gold cloth slid off a bright yellow sculpture of painted stainless steel, 7ft (2 metres) tall, that spells an Arabic word: “al Qalam”, the pen.
The monument, Al Qalam: Poets in the Park, stands in Elizabeth H Berger Plaza and honors the writers of the vanished neighborhood that New Yorkers once called Little Syria: an Arabic-speaking immigrant community that ran along Washington Street, blocks from where the World Trade Center would later rise. The monument was the first commemorative artwork unveiled under Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Little Syria produced one of the most famous poets ever to live in New York: Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet, a book of poetic prose that has never gone out of print. The monument honors the Pen League, the circle of writers Gibran led in Little Syria in the early 20th century.
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© Photograph: Courtesy of the Washington Street Historical Society
© Photograph: Courtesy of the Washington Street Historical Society
© Photograph: Courtesy of the Washington Street Historical Society
