New York City unveiled its first commemorative public artwork under Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration on April 30, honoring the historic "Little Syria" neighborhood in Manhattan's Financial District. The monument, titled "Al Qalam (The Pen): Poets in the Park," is a mosaic installation and sculpture by French-Moroccan artist Sara Ouhaddou, created over the past decade. It celebrates nine members of the enclave's literary community, including Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran, who co-founded the writers' association Pen Bond in 1920. The $1.6 million artwork sits in Elizabeth H. Berger Plaza, within the blocks where immigrants from Greater Syria settled in the late 19th century before being displaced by tunnel construction in the 1940s.
The monument matters because it recognizes a historically overlooked immigrant community that played a vital role in New York's cultural and literary landscape, publishing the first Arabic newspaper in the United States and fostering a vibrant literary scene. It is the city's first new commemorative monument since the "Women's Rights Pioneers Monument" in 2020, and reflects a broader effort to diversify public art and honor marginalized histories. The work also engages with themes of language, translation, and cultural identity, using a geometric alphabet inspired by Islamic architecture to convey the experience of navigating multiple languages.