New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s administration unveiled its first commemorative public artwork on Thursday, April 30, honoring Manhattan\u2019s initial Arabic-speaking enclave, \u201cLittle Syria.\u201d The mosaic installation and sculpture, titled \u201cAl Qalam (The Pen): Poets in the Park,\u201d was crafted by French-Moroccan artist Sara Ouhaddou over a decade. It celebrates nine members of the neighborhood\u2019s historic literary community, including Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran, co-founder of \u201cPen Bond\u201d in 1920.<\/p>\n
Located in the Financial District\u2019s Elizabeth H. Berger Plaza, the $1.6 million monument spans the area where Greater Syrian immigrants, hailing from modern-day Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, settled in the late 19th century. By 1900, the community housed around 1,500 individuals, who were displaced in the 1940s due to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel construction.<\/p>\n
Ouhaddou\u2019s work, the city\u2019s latest commemorative monument since Central Park\u2019s \u201cWomen\u2019s Rights Pioneers Monument\u201d in 2020, faced delays from the COVID-19 pandemic. The New York City Parks Department debuted the monument in a ceremony attended by city officials, including cultural affairs commissioner Diya Vij. The monument was supported by $1.4 million from the Mellon Foundation and partnered with the Washington Street Historical Society.<\/p>\n
The installation features mosaics symbolizing the linguistic and cultural translations immigrant writers faced in New York City. Ouhaddou designed these mosaics using a \u201cmade-up\u201d geometric alphabet inspired by Islamic architecture, assigning shapes to individual Arabic phonetics. Nearby, a yellow sculpture spells \u201cal Qalam\u201d (\u201cthe pen\u201d). Ouhaddou, who speaks several languages but cannot write Arabic, drew on her polyglot background for the work.<\/p>\n
Little Syria\u2019s residents established numerous Arabic newspapers, including the first U.S. Arabic newspaper, Kawab America. The enclave\u2019s literary significance is further noted in Gibran\u2019s \u201cThe Prophet,\u201d written in English and translated into multiple languages. Among the nine honored writers is poet Elia Abu Madi, whose grandson Bob Madey praised the monument’s abstract design, offering accessibility and provoking understanding of its meaning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s administration unveiled its first commemorative public artwork on Thursday, April 30, honoring Manhattan\u2019s initial Arabic-speaking enclave, \u201cLittle Syria.\u201d The mosaic installation and sculpture, titled \u201cAl Qalam (The Pen): Poets in the Park,\u201d was crafted by French-Moroccan artist Sara Ouhaddou over a decade. It celebrates nine members of the neighborhood\u2019s historic literary community, including Lebanese-American […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":556259,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-556258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/winklersart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/winklersart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/winklersart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winklersart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winklersart.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=556258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/winklersart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winklersart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/556259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/winklersart.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=556258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winklersart.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=556258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winklersart.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=556258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}