History
Washington Street was named for George Washington, first President of the United States. The land under the street was owned by Trinity Church, and was ceded to the city in 1808.
Until the 1940s, a stretch of Washington Street, especially from Battery Place to Rector Street, was the home of the city's Little Syria neighborhood, which consisted primarily of Christian Arab immigrants from present day Lebanon and Syria. The neighborhood and its homes, then described by The New York Times as the "heart of New York's Arab world", were condemned and razed to make way for the approaches to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which opened in 1950.
Read more about this topic: Washington Street (Manhattan)
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