Event Registration

Joe Svehlak will show us what is left of Downtown Manhattan's Lower West Side, once a thriving unique immigrant and commercial area before two acts of eminent domain wiped out the ""Little Syria"" area and Radio Row, the city's first electronics district. There was even an area noted for selling religious goods. As the approaches to the Battery Tunnel were being built, Joe remembers walking the old narrow streets where his immigrant family used to live over a hundred years ago. Hear his family stories about life on the Lower West Side before the Battery Tunnel and the World Trade Center. View a former Syrian church, the Downtown Community House, and a few remaining tenements and Federal style townhouses. Learn about the struggle to preserve the memory and few remaining buildings of this former melting pot area where 27 nationalities were counted living here in 1917. Joe remembers great buildings like the Singer Tower and the Hudson Terminal Buildings being torn down. We'll see the rampant redevelopment after 9/11/2001 and end at New York's first Catholic parish, St. Peter's, where noted New Yorker's and various immigrant groups worshiped. Cost: $30 /$20 Members