The tenement at 109 Washington Street is one of the last architectural remnants of what was once a thriving and diverse Lower Manhattan immigrant enclave. From the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the area west of Broadway, and extending north from Battery Place roughly to Chambers Street, was home to New York City’s largest Middle Eastern community, as well as a large concentration of Central and Eastern European settlers. In the late 1800s, immigrants from the Arab World began settling in Lower Manhattan.