Lebanon Restaurant (Syrian), 88 Washington Street, Manhattan. Photographed by Berenice Abbott, 1936.

From the 1880s to 1940s, Manhattan’s Lower West Side was home to Little Syria, an enclave of storefront businesses and tenements occupied by immigrants of Levantine origin. At the time of Abbott’s photo, present-day Lebanon was part of the post-Ottoman French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon (hence the parenthetical reference in Abbott’s caption).

Shortly after this photo was taken, much of the neighborhood was cleared for the construction of the Manhattan entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which broke ground in October 1940.