UNTOLD AMERICA 5z6818

Is this the new Main Street, USA? 4c5d4s

By Eliot Stein 712nt

After a series of deadly floods ripped through a small US town, 5y1h2m

newly arrived Syrian immigrants banded together to help rebuild it. 63c2y

Now, they’re hoping to help heal a divided country. 1p3v6a

Ellicott City, Maryland, looks like what America was, not what America is becoming.

Located 13 miles west of Baltimore on the Patapsco River, the town was founded in 1772 and soon grew into the largest flour-milling centre in colonial America. Rows of Federal- and Gothic-style buildings built with local granite wind up the town’s Main Street, past the nation’s oldest surviving railroad station at one end and a one-room log cabin built in 1780 at the other. American flags hang proudly from family-owned ice-cream parlours, furniture stores and antique shops.

The town’s small historical centre is largely white and working class, with a lot of families who have lived here for generations. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows each other, where people deliver homemade casseroles to their neighbours and where you check in on those you didn’t see at church. It is, perhaps, the essence of Americana on a 3,000-person scale.

Yet, when Rasha Obaid and her husband Majd AlGhatrif first laid eyes on this most American of mill towns in 2013, they each thought the same thing: “It looked like Syria,” Obaid ed.

The town’s centuries-old stone structures wedged into the Patapsco Valley reminded them of the basalt buildings nestled in foothills of their hometown of Suweida in south-western Syria. And they found the comion and decency of its residents to be a welcome change from the resentment they had heard some people on TV express about Syrian immigrants like themselves, after they came to the US for AlGhatrif to pursue his doctorate.

“We fell in love with the community along Main Street. Even when people here didn’t know us, they’d stop to say hi,” AlGhatrif said. “So, when we were looking for our first home in America, we knew it had to be here.”

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“When we were looking for our first home in America, we knew it, had to be here.” 13f15

The couple bought a house near Main Street, and AlGhatrif, who initially studied medicine back in Damascus, became a doctor at The John’s Hopkins Hospital and the National Institutes of Health. But in 2016, as the Syrian civil war raged on, the family wanted to show Americans what AlGhatrif called, “the other face of Syria, the beautiful face of our distressed nation that most don’t see on the news”, and they knew the perfect place to do so.

Of all the buildings along Ellicott City’s Main Street, the three-storey Walker-Chandler House reminded the couple the most of Suweida’s ancient architecture. Built in 1790, it’s one of the oldest surviving duplexes in the US, and the first floor of its granite facade is anchored directly into the rocky hillside, just as some buildings are in Suweida. Until the early 19th-Century, it was the largest private residence in the area, and because of this, weary travellers and those seeking shelter stopped there frequently, with the custom of the day calling for no-one to be turned away.

The building later became the Ellicott’s Country Store, which was owned by the same family for 54 years before closing in 2016. Obaid, AlGhatrif and his newly immigrated brother, Khaldoun, leased the building and transformed the shuttered space into the craft boutique Syriana. The plan was to import handmade textiles, mosaics and copperware from Syria to the war-torn nation’s few remaining craftsmen, and to showcase the country’s millennia-old artistic heritage to Americans.

“We opened in July 2016,” Obaid said. “And three weeks later, it happened.”

On the night of 30 July 2016, 6.5 inches of rain fell in less than two hours in Ellicott City, unleashing a violent flash flood that tore through Main Street, ripping up sidewalks, carrying cars (including AlGhatrif’s) into storefronts and leaving the area looking – in the words of then-Howard County executive Allan Kittleman – “like a war zone”. The storm – which the National Weather Service calculated as a once-in-a-millennium phenomenon – killed two people, gutted many of Main Street’s shops and flooded Syriana’s ground floor. It took some shop owners four months to reopen. It took Syriana 17. But after assessing their own damage, AlGhatrif and Khaldoun went outside to help their neighbours shovel mud and debris from their stores, because it felt like the right thing to do.

“This is already a very, very close-knit community, and when there’s a disaster, it draws you even closer,” said Ed Lilly, whose family has lived in Ellicott City’s historical centre since 1859 and is known as the unofficial “Mayor of Main Street”. “We’ve never had another Syrian family here before, but they just seemed to fit right in from the start. They love the town like we do.”

As the three family worked to remove mould and recover lost inventory from their ground-floor showroom, they had an idea: “We have three floors, why don’t we use them to [better] tell our country’s story?” Obaid said. The money from their handicrafts business was helping Syria’s craftsmen, but what could they do to the more than 12m Syrians who had either been displaced or forced to flee since 2011 – an estimated 19,000 of whom had been relocated to the US? Obaid suggested a cafe run by Syrian refugees.

In the 17 months Syriana was closed, the family renovated the building, added a kitchen and turned the building’s top two levels into dining rooms. AlGhatrif hand-built 20 wooden tables and lined the walls with traditional Syrian mother-of-pearl-inlay motifs, while Obaid went around to local immigrant centres to hire and train newly arrived Syrian female refugees to cook and serve the food.

“Most of the ladies spoke no English and had never worked before – not even in Syria. But they were very ionate and learned fast,” Obaid said. “We reopened in December [2017] and business was going great. It was like our dream was coming true.”

And then, it happened again.

Less than two years after the once-in-a-millennium flood ravaged Ellicott City, another one struck – only this time, it was worse. On 27 May 2018, just days before the town’s new flood emergency system was to become operational, 9.6 inches of rain fell in the valley in a three-hour period, sending a six-foot-high torrent shooting down Main Street that killed a National Guardsman and triggered a state of emergency.

“We endured damage, but what was heart-wrenching was to see our neighbours – people who had put all their resources into rebuilding after the last flood – have their belongings come pouring out of the buildings,” AlGhatrif said. “You cannot look at people and see their agony and not empathise.”

Soon after, AlGhatrif went online and sent out a nationwide appeal for help to a network of other Syrian immigrants – many of whom were already struggling to their families back home. “Our project as Syrians [is] to contribute to the beautiful story of America,” he wrote, continuing, “we see this as a responsibility to pay back those who embraced us and help them rise up again.”

Within three days, Syrian-Americans from across the country raised $10,000 to the town’s relief efforts. AlGhatrif and Obaid donated the money to the Ellicott City Partnership non-profit, asking that it be distributed among the shop owners on Main Street most affected by the flood, excluding Syriana. “It was a small gesture, but it was a message from all Syrian-Americans expressing our gratitude to this community that has welcomed us,” AlGhatrif said. “We’re saying, ‘we empathise with you and we share your pain, just as you have shared the pain of our people as well.’”

Cindi Ryland, who runs the vintage store Taylors Collective across the street from Syriana, didn’t think it was a small gesture. “It was unbelievable,” she said. “It shows that we’re not red or blue or purple; we’re not Christian, Jewish or Muslim; we’re all here, we’re all Americans and we know what it’s like to be in trouble.”

Ellicott City has seen more than its share of trouble over its 248-year-history. According to Shawn Gladden, executive director of the Howard County Historical Society, the town’s location at the bottom of a granite valley where four river branches feed into the Patapsco was the perfect place to harness water for a mill in 1772, but it also makes the town “pretty much designed to flood”. Whenever there’s a violent rainstorm anywhere in the area, billions of gallons of water shoot down the valley’s steep, stone funnel, dumping it at its lowest point: Main Street. As a result, Gladden said that 27 significant floods have ravaged the town since its founding – including some when it didn’t even rain a drop in Ellicott City.

But while the flooding is nothing new, it seems to be getting worse. In the past 50 years, the historical district of Old Ellicott City that includes Main Street has become surrounded by the sprawling 70,000-person suburb of greater Ellicott City. More big-box stores and four-lane highways means less forest, farmland and permeable soil, making the “top-down floods” that shoot down the valley more violent and more frequent. “It’s a perfect storm of factors: climate change and too much development, plain and simple,” Gladden said.

Today, some residents fear that the same water that helped build this mill town may soon destroy it. Warning sirens and yellow signs showing people how to reach higher ground now dot the historical district. The county is also moving forward with a contentious plan to demolish four centuries-old buildings on Main Street in order to widen the drainage path and prevent further destruction when – not if – the next flood happens.

“This is already a very, very close-knit community, and when there’s a disaster, it draws you even closer.” a2j4w

The two employees working at Syriana the night of the 2018 flood witnessed this destruction first-hand. One was Reema Al Faheed, 21, who had fled to a refugee camp with her parents along the Iraqi-Syrian border after seeing abductors shoot her uncle in the head. As she watched cars floating down Main Street from Syriana’s second-floor window, she thought back to the tent where her family lived for four years, and how it was her job to prop it back up when heavy rains knocked it over.

Another was Safa Alfares, 18, whose memories growing up in Aleppo during the Syrian civil war still haunt her. “I felt like I was still in Syria,” she said, looking away. “I had never seen flooding. I had seen people dying, I had seen blood, but it was like nothing had changed.”

Nearly two years later, there are still a few weatherworn sandbags and plywood windows along Main Street, but most businesses have gradually come back to life, including Syriana.

Under a sail of damask fabric draped over the wooden beams on the cafe’s first floor, Obaid prepares cardamom-flavoured Syrian coffee by placing a copper pot in a tray filled with hot sand to brew it. Behind the counter, there’s a menu of Arabic specialties made using recipes ed down from Obaid’s mother and grandmother: falafel with hints of pomegranate; manakish flatbread pizza topped with thyme-and-sesame za’atar; sweet phyllo dough-encased kenafa pastries; and kebabs spiced with Aleppo pepper. Upstairs, imported brass coffee pots, brocade silk purses, hand-carved backgammon sets and beaded tapestries line the walls. And in the kitchen and dining rooms, the family has now hired 10 Syrian refugees to work as chefs and servers – many of whom, like Al Faheed and Alfares, have become fluent in English in less than two years.

“We’re not red or blue or purple; we’re not Christian, Jewish or Muslim; we’re all here, we’re all Americans and we know what it’s like to be in trouble.” 5q425v

“[It’s] a fantastic space and has brought a much-needed diversity to the town,” said Alicia Jones, executive director of the Ellicott City Partnership, of Syriana. “It’s a way for the community to see another side of the world, especially at a time of divisive politics, and make a connection as people.”

Mark Baugh, who lives nearby, says he’s been coming in once a month for the past year. “I didn’t know anything about Syria until I came here. Nothing. And then I talked to them,” he said. “Now, I feel at home here. I can come and sit and talk for four hours at lunch and they’d be happy.”

This, according to AlGhatrif, is the whole idea of Syriana: it’s a place for people to meet, talk and try to find a common narrative in a time when many Americans have turned inwards. To that end, the cafe has started hosting communal meals inspired by the themed Jeffersonian dinners that US founding father Thomas Jefferson organised in his Monticello home in the neighbouring state of Virginia. Once a month, residents with differing opinions come to discuss everything from religion to philosophy to how to save historical Ellicott City from washing away.

While AlGhatrif and Obaid say that Main Street “has restored that local feeling we lost in Syria”, they recognise that something is still missing. The US travel ban that took effect in January 2017 has kept the couple’s parents from coming to see their three young grandchildren. It also means that their parents have never stepped foot in the cafe whose food they helped inspire, met the neighbours AlGhatrif and Obaid now call friends or seen how much this rocky valley resembles their own. Still, the couple maintains that there is nowhere they would rather be.

“Communities are stories, and between the floods and the comebacks, we now have a lot of shared stories with the people here,” AlGhatrif said. “We feel like we belong to the story.”.

Credits 381243

Writer: Eliot Stein
Video journalist: Erin Clare Brown
Editor: Anne Banas
Video producer: Alba Jaramillo
Designer: Laura Llewellyn
Picture credits: Erin Clare Brown & Eliot Stein

Untold America is a BBC Travel series that celebrates the many traditions and cultures within this vast country, and highlights the stunningly diverse cities and landscapes that have shaped America and the American spirit. From the voices of relative newcomers to those with legacies spanning generations, Untold America aims to show the world a different side to the United States, and perhaps show the United States a different side to itself.

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