109 Washington Street is a five-story tenement in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City, within the area once known as Little Syria. Due to demolitions connected to the construction of the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel and the World Trade Center, it stands as the last tenement on a portion of lower Washington Street that has been estimated by Kate Reggev to have contained around 50 tenements. After September 11, 2001, its proximity to the World Trade Center site made it the subject of some media attention, including a nationally syndicated radio story about the experiences of its residents on the day of the attack. In recent years, community officials, activists, and preservationists have advocated for its designation as a landmark as part of a mini-historical district with the connected buildings of St. George's Syrian Catholic Church and the Downtown Community House.
Previous structures
A four-story, brick “public store” that received goods from the piers on West Street stood at 109 Washington Street since the early 1820s, if not before; several other nearby buildings on Washington Street at Nos. 97, 101, and 103 were also commercial structures serving the same purpose. Typically, public stores in large cities like New York housed goods coming directly from the wharves so that they could be appraised before being brought to the individual shops or markets where they would be sold. Owned at the time by Samuel Swartwout, a wealthy land speculator, an 1837 fire at the store led to a valuation of its goods at approximately $300,000, including pipes of lime juice; boxes of glass; cases of wine, brandy, and gin; boxes of cigars; and cases of cordials. By the 1850s, the property housed a residential building that was occupied by Irish and Irish-American families throughout the 1860s and 1870s; beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, German immigrants joined the Irish population. Common occupations were servants, sailors, cooks, machinists, laborers, longshoremen, and barbers.
“Old Law” Tenements
Tenement buildings are by legal definition a multi-family building housing more than three families, according to the Tenement House Law of 1867; the later association of tenements with lower-income, immigrant families is believed to have stemmed from the typical 25-foot-wide lots in New York City, creating narrow apartments with little access to light and ventilation except for in the front rooms. Most tenement houses built before the first tenement law in 1879, also known as the “old law,” were constructed with little to no building regulations; after 1879, the typical shape of tenements shifted to the “dumbbell” apartments, where three-foot wide light shafts on either side of the structure were an attempt at providing light and air to the inner rooms. Unfortunately, this did not provide the desired access to air and light but rather created what essentially became garbage shafts and fire flues and did little for residents in the way of privacy from neighbors in the buildings next door. 1901 saw the second wave of tenement reform, with requirements addressing both access to lighting for interior rooms, slightly larger air shafts, and indoor toilet facilities; many of these reforms became requirements for preexisting tenements that had to be brought up to code. Stylistically, the “old law” tenements tended to be four- or five-story red brick structures with stone or terra-cotta window details and a neo-Grec pressed metal cornice; later “new law” tenements could be up to six stories with brick and glazed terra-cotta trim, often with Renaissance or Classical, strongly projecting details.