You can read an overview of how we came to map Boston’s Little Syria here on the site of the Leventhal Map and Education Center, which supported the development of the map through its Small Grants Fund for Early Career Digital Publications. This page offers more detailed answers to frequently asked questions.
I want to explore the map but I don’t know where to start.
The map contains six layers corresponding with different times in the life of the neighborhood. The icon in the upper lefthand corner of the map allows you to toggle between these layers. The map will display sites that were present, to the best of our knowledge, in or around the year you have selected. You can also filter by site type–if, for example, you would only like to see civic and religious organizations, or only restaurants. The icon in the upper righthand corner of the map allows you to do this. Once you have decided when and what you would like to view, you can navigate around the map and click on individual sites to learn more about them. Some sites have detailed descriptions and images, while only basic information is available for others.
Why a digital map?
A digital map offers the possibility of keeping the history of the community rooted in the physical space of the neighborhood while encouraging people to explore on their own, in person or online. The Boston Little Syria Project began with offline walking tours and these remain its core. But we don’t have the capacity to meet demand, nor is a walking tour accessible for everyone. The map makes visible, moreover, the growth and near-disappearance of the community from the space it once occupied.
What are the base maps you’re using?
Four layers of the map (1895, 1912, 1922, and 1938) are drawn from G.W. Bromley and Co.’s Atlas of the City of Boston, a fire insurance and cadastral atlas that was already georeferenced and accessible through the Leventhal Center’s free tool Atlascope. The final historical layer is composed of maps produced by the Boston Redevelopment Authority in the early 1960s, when the agency identified many properties as “blighted.” The contemporary layer displays Google Maps. These layers were chosen because they best approximated major stages of neighborhood transformation, from the emergence of an Arab presence to its near disappearance.
How did you decide which sites to include?
What you currently see visualized on the map reflects an initial dataset of 60 sites. These constitute only a fraction of the total number of sites we have documented related to Syrian and Lebanese history in the South Cove/Chinatown/South End corridor. We are aware that many important locations are not yet represented and the choice of sites should not be taken to indicate a strict hierarchy of importance. Curating the data and verifying locations takes time, however. If you don’t see a site on the map yet, there’s a good chance it is in the queue and will eventually appear.
Which tools did you use to build the map?
The map was built in Glitch using Leaflet, an open-source JavaScript library for interactive maps. We plotted the points you see on the map using QGIS. As noted above, our historical map layers come from Atlascope. Our content and code are stored in a Github repository. All of these tools are free to use.
Where did you source the information in the site descriptions?
Whenever possible, we’ve linked or cited sources in the site descriptions and image captions. For further information about where we’ve sourced our research, check out the bibliography on our project’s Learn More page.
I want to suggest a site I would like to see on the map, or I have a recommendation for making the map more user-friendly/more accessible.
Thank you! Please send us a message through our Contact page detailing your suggestion. If you would like to propose additions to the map, it helps if you provide sourcing (even if that’s your own memory!), site type, dates, etc. Images are welcome.
What are some of the map’s limitations?
The map is limited to displaying snapshots in time, rather than a continuum. It is thus difficult to accurately represent a restaurant, for example, that only existed between two of these snapshots. We’ve tried to indicate in the side panel what sort of data we have about years of operation, and how (un)certain we are. But it remains a major challenge to identify specific dates when points featured on our map came into and disappeared from existence. When giving a walking tour, imprecision be more easily conveyed; a dataset does not allow for best guesses, and placing a point on the map suggests a degree of certainty that may be impossible for us to reach.