Ottoman History Podcast - Layers of History in Downtown Beirut

Episode Date: July 29, 2021

with Rayya Haddad | The modern history of Beirut has been defined by periods of intense construction, destruction, and reconstruction. In this episode, we explore the layers of history in Beirut's cityscape through a walking tour with Rayya Haddad. We chart Beirut's transformation from its rise as a late Ottoman capital through the expansion of the port during the French Mandate period, its golden age as a commercial center in independent Lebanon during the 1950s and 60s, the long civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990, and the postwar reconstruction carried out by the company Solidere. We also explore the history of Beit Beirut, a unqiue building designed by Youssef Aftimus--Beirut's foremost architect of the late Ottoman and French Mandate period--from its Mediterranean revivalist origins to its redesign as a sniper's haven during the war, ending with its rescue and renovation by activists in recent decades. We conclude with some thoughts on what this layered history of the city means for the new layer of destruction and reconstruction created by the port explosion during August 2020. « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman History Podcast, and I'm Chris Grayton. You're hearing the sounds of one of Lebanon's most serene spots, the Shouf Biosphere Reserve. Graham Pitts, a historian of Lebanon and a regular on the podcast, brought me here after a long morning of walking around Beirut in summer of 2018. We're trying to figure out the story of a cedar tree that's been advertised as an attraction. But this is not, this is not it. It's not a dead tree. And then there is a sculpture. This is for Shadrach. Some of the best quiet I've ever enjoyed has been in the mountains of Lebanon. But this episode isn't going to be quiet. What you'll be hearing is based on a walking tour

of downtown Beirut. Our guide to the city's history will be Raya Haddad. There was so much more graffiti. Like, here onwards, even on these blocks, they removed them. It was like, just, it's not been more than three or four months, but they really like pressured... This is a special episode that explores the layers of history in downtown Beirut today. For the full visual experience, you'll need to visit our website,

OttomanHistoryPodcast.com, to check out the images associated with this podcast. Because this is first and foremost a sonic exploration. with this podcast. Because this is first and foremost a sonic exploration. Over the course of the next hour, you'll be bombarded by power saws, drills, and a chorus of machines involved in the maintenance and construction of the city. You'll also hear the shouts of pedestrians, the chants of protesters, and sonic elements of urban life ranging from church bells to silence. Throughout, you'll be accompanied

by a never-ending symphony of motorcycle engines screeching tires, car horns and the commotion of near collisions on the city streets. Downtown Beirut isn't an ideal recording space but these noises are actually essential for any discussion of its urban experience and these layers of sound are as intermingled as the layers of the past we'll be exploring in this tour of the city. Stay tuned. This is actually a nice part of the downtown. Yeah, it's nice. It was destroyed seven times and we built only five of those seven times, the last of which

was in the 90s when the civil war ended and the rebuilding process began in the early 90s. We're going to be spending a lot of time in the downtown area which was rebuilt by a project which is the brainchild of Rafiq Hariri who was assassinated in 2005 and that project continued after his death and is still continuing actually the project, the project is a 25-year contract with the municipality of Beirut which could have been could be renewed but those 25 years end next year in 2019.

Everybody's waiting to see what's going to happen. In summer of 2018, I was tagging along with Graham on some research in Lebanon. We took a walk one morning with Raya Haddad, a photographer, artist, and architecture buff who offers historical tours of the city. The walk was mostly for fun, but we had the tape rolling. We certainly didn't consider that what we recorded at the time would itself become a historical document. On August 4, 2020, in the afternoon, a massive explosion in the port devastated the center of Beirut. More than 200 people died, thousands were injured, and hundreds of thousands were at least temporarily displaced.

The explosion was close to the historical heart of Beirut. Entire blocks in the vicinity of the blast have been destroyed beyond repair. Some of the buildings within the radius had been there for more than a century. Many are considered precious cultural sites. All in all, the damage has been estimated at more than $10 billion. The explosion sparked debates about causes and culpability. It also revitalized the ongoing protests calling for the wholesale reform of Lebanon's government over the past years. In the months since, Lebanon's financial

crisis has spiraled, and public figures of the deeply entrenched political class are as unpopular as ever, though they remain resistant to change. Karim Emel Bitar recently described them as, quote, squabbling over a field of ruins. These events are still unfolding, and this podcast won't directly address the political and economic situation in Lebanon today. What we'll focus on is the history of the areas affected by the explosion last summer. Shocking as it was, this was not the first period of destruction in downtown Beirut, and the reconstruction that has followed is not the first and probably won't be the last radical rebuilding of the city. Throughout this podcast, we're going to examine a few key layers

of Beirut's history. We'll explore the foundation of modern Beirut as a provincial capital of the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century. We'll also highlight the formative period of French colonial rule during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Another key period will be the Lebanese Civil War, which lasted from 1975 to 1990. But arguably the most crucial period for understanding our discussion will be the period of post-war reconstruction in downtown Beirut, which began during the mid-90s and has remained contentious to this day. Solidaire, the name of the company created to oversee that reconstruction, is used colloquially to refer to the transforming area of the city center under the company's jurisdiction.

What do you do? What do I do? I'm a photographer. Photographer, okay. I'm an artist, yeah. So this building up here… Raya Haddad has spent her life between the US and Lebanon. I was born here.

I was born in Hamara. I was born in a hospital that's now… it's like a… dad has spent her life between the US and Lebanon. You know where Socrates is? Or like Marouche? Yeah, it's right by Marouche. In the years before our visit, Raya worked in the archives of Solidaire, a company formed to redevelop and rebuild the downtown of Beirut after the war. It was created in 1994 following the vision of Rafik Hariri, the prime minister at the time, who was also its largest shareholder. In the process of rebuilding the downtown, Soledad came into possession of a large number of photographs, maps, plans, and documents pertaining to the

city's history. Working in the archives of Soledad gave Raya Haddad a unique perspective on the urban landscape of Beirut. The city has radically transformed many times over the past century, and many of those changes are not that easy to track. There was so much controversy about what buildings were demolished and were not. Based on the archive that I was working on for three and a half years in Saudi Arabia, I saw many buildings that were in perfectly good shape that don't exist anymore. I don't only have the argument of, oh, but that's such a pretty building. But no, it's a very structurally sound building.

In 2018, it seemed like that transformation was still accelerating. New construction, renovation, and gentrification were the dominant trends. It's very interesting to look at how quickly things turn over here in the city. First you had Mono, then you had Mar Mkayayel, then Hamra in 2009-2010 especially. And then property values shot up so high during the financial crisis that Mar Mkhayel, the extension of Jamayzeh grew and is now one of the main... Beirut is a relatively new city. At the beginning of the 19th century, it was just a small port town with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants.

From the 1860s onward, it grew thanks to Mediterranean trade and Beirut's eventual position as the most important Ottoman provincial capital in the Levant. By 1914, Beirut's population was approaching 200,000. And so Beirut is essentially a late Ottoman city. Unlike in Cairo, Damascus, and most of the other large cities in the Middle East, there are few architectural traces that predate the 19th century. Most of the oldest buildings in Beirut date to the beginning of Beirut's rise as a capital. A great example of such structures is the Sarai, which has been a government building since the late Ottoman period. built in 1853. The serai, it was two floors. And then during the reconstruction in the 90s,

it was open like 96, 97. When they did it, it was, they added the third floor. And as you see, even architect, it's Ottoman architecture with the colonial, typical colonial window, yeah, pins. But then you have like double the, so you have usually the three arches here, you have six. And this even more famous, Aftimos clock tower, is a typical Ottoman period.

You can actually see it better, a little bit better from here. And Aftimos is the same architect who built the hospital, Haghazian University and Beit Beirut, which we're about to spend some time, we're gonna end the tour actually. So this is the idea of that.

And it was built just after in 1867. The renovated form of the Saray has introduced new elements alien to its late Ottoman origins. But Beirut's architecture was stylistically eclectic from the beginning. There are a few terms that come up again and again in conversations about the city's buildings. There's the modifier of Ottoman, and then there's Mediterranean. These are in fact both modern architectural styles rooted in 19th century revivalism. During the period in which modern Beirut was born, architects, city planners, and the growing mercantile elite became interested in exploring and reintroducing what they saw as archetypes of local motifs. The figure most associated with architectural revivalism in late Ottoman Beirut is Yusuf

Aftimos. Jens Hansen provides an excellent discussion of Aftimos' work in his book Fond de siècle Beirut, The Making of a Modern Ottoman Capital. Aftimos was trained in schools operated by Western missionaries in Beirut, and then he studied in the US. He worked as a civil engineer on railroads and canals there. His Wikipedia page also suggests that he was the inventor of the U-turn, though I couldn't find a source to substantiate this claim.

Optimus first made a splash in the world of architecture through his work at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, where he designed a number of buildings in an Orientalist style. Optimus' designs embodied the spirit of Ottoman revivalist architecture, which drew on elements from different periods of Ottoman history, including the Baroque of the 18th century, as well as European neoclassical styles that gestured to Hellenic and Roman imperial architecture. Optimus eventually returned to the Ottoman Empire to work for the Beirut municipality at the turn of the 20th century. His revivalist blend of architectural elements would come to define the Beirut style.

He completed many of his most iconic works during the early Mandate period of French rule. Thus, his architectural style may also be seen as a continuity between the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods in Beirut's history. Architects in Beirut have had to grapple with this style, sometimes adopting it as a source of inspiration for subsequent revival, and sometimes resisting its revivalist clichés. There's no consensus on what the revived revivalism of more recent reconstruction has meant for Beirut's architecture. Where some see in the

pastiche of Solidaire a historical erasure, others see stylistic innovation that remains faithful to the architectural character of Beirut. What that means is that you see an architectural conversation of sorts between buildings constructed as long ago as the 19th century and as recently as the 1990s and 2000s. In such buildings, you'll often find neo-Ottoman elements, like arches, and neoclassical elements, like columns. And in many ways, like arches and neoclassical elements like columns. And in many ways, optimos began this conversation. Okay.

You can see even better. The three arches, the red tiled rooftop, the balconies, the colonial windows, colonial style windows. So when Soledad came about, they really wanted to give this Mediterranean feel to the buildings that they renovated. So they added these marble grounding onto the balconies.

And the cast iron, the fer-forger, black balconies themselves. So those arches are an Ottoman feature. So we're going to see much more of this. This is another building here on the right that's from the Ottoman period. It's CTR, the Centre pour le Développement et la Reconstruction, which are meant to work alongside Solidaire, the reconstruction of the downtown. Beirut is bounded by the sea on its north and west. The heart of the city since the late Ottoman period has been the port in the adjoining

downtown area on the north side. The current shoreline is a zone of land that has been reclaimed from the Ottoman period onward. By raising the level of the shore with soil and concrete and removing water from the marshy or semi-aquatic areas naturally found along the coast, the Ottoman, French, and independent Lebanese governments have carried out a transformation

common to modern port cities. Land reclamation has pushed Beirut northward beyond the original limits imposed by the sea. So we would be in the water right now had it been the free French Mandate period. But we're going to cross the water. You guys see this little church? Have you noticed it before? Do you think?

See how tiny it is and how overshadowed it is by all these massive towers? Why don't we just tear it down and build a tower there? Yeah. I mean, we don't need more churches! So yeah, it's really charming, isn't it? We're going to walk right past it, along the old shoreline. And look, it's going to cross the street. It dates back from 1867.

Basically, what's interesting about it is that it was on the shoreline. So, we're right through here. It was on the shoreline. So the water made its way all the way to the edge of the church. And it's one of two evangelical churches in Beirut and four in the country, supposedly. The first part of our walk with Raya started at the Corniche of Ain Marese and continued east into the neighborhood of Minat al-Hosn, home to Beirut's hotel district. During what is often thought of as the city's golden age, the 1950s and 60s, this part of

the city earned Beirut an international reputation for its cosmopolitanism. We've shared a couple images on our website from the Charles Cushman collection at Indiana University. As the finance industry enriched independent Lebanon, Beirut grew as a tourist destination. you know up and standing along with the phoenicia and the san jorge is up and standing but and running on a basis but not functioning as a hotel anymore um and otherwise there's a ton of other ones inside the excelsior um the this the parallel um all the way to the holiday yeah the holiday was kind of right on the edges of that, exactly. It's like at the top of the hill of the hotel district.

Something interesting that has gone up is this non-hotel structure called the Citadel. Rumor had it that when it first had gone up, people were really annoyed with it because it's this massive tower that blocks a lot of the people who live in Hamra and Klamasul's view. And the rumor was, oh, you know, there's one person of each of the 17 sects has a stake in this building. And so it's so symbolic that it would be called the Sinuza. It turns out it's completely false. It's a Birdi project from one of the Birdi families.

I think it's actually the wife of Malik Birdi who's gone up with this. And the ironic thing about it, after annoying so many people, it's actually like half empty still. I mean, nobody wants to, for some reason, it's not selling well. And if you walk up this street or the next one, you'll see a bunch of just abandoned hotels. And this neighborhood was famous for its nightclubs and stuff. One of Beirut's iconic tourist destinations was the Saint-Georges Hotel. famous for its nightclubs and stuff.

One of Beirut's iconic tourist destinations was the Saint-Georges Hotel. So this is the Saint-Georges Hotel, as you guys know. It was built in 1939. It was inspired by the architect, by a French architect, and built by four Lebanese architects, one interior architect. architects and one interior architect. It has since been famous for its water sports, its marina, its beach.

The interior was very lavish and also very, you know, if you've read in books, if you've read any books about Lebanon that were written before the Civil War in the 50s, 60s, 70s, during the Golden Age, it was probably cited at some point. A lot of famous celebrities, singers, even some very well-known journalists, and some now, you know, some spies that stayed here when they would come to Beirut. The owners of the hotel have been in a legal battle with the Solidaire company for many years. On the side of the hotel, a prominently placed sign reading Stop Solidaire has itself become a fixture of the urban landscape. At the time of our visit,

the sign accused Solidaire of, quote, the rape of the century. It's always a work of art, you know, like it's just a public piece of art. Public intervention, let's say. The dispute revolves around Solidaire's building project at a site called Zaytuna Bay, adjacent to the hotel. The St. Georges ownership claims that the property was illegally seized from them. Zaytuna Bay, why is it called Zaytuna Bay? Because this is an area over here that was called Zaytuna. There are lots of Zaytunas, olive trees in this area.

And we're about to go, we're going to end end up in a moment in a place that was called Zaytuna Square so something interesting about this project you see the Yacht Club over there yeah okay do you guys see these these great poles kind of these gray so those were meant to be we were meant to be able to continue our walk all the way to the top of the yacht club. Does that make sense to you guys? Like this wall. It's kind of cool right? Like had we had to continue with the construction. And there's a green area on top of the yacht club. Yeah so I mean if you think about it yeah it's usually pretty empty. People walk more along the

corniche but they were like oh private public and then we don't that does not serve our interest we don't want anybody and their babies or their erguiles or whatever making their way up to the roof of the Rayak club. Whether Zeytuna Bay, the Saint-Georges Hotel, or the many other hotel properties in the area, much of the reclaimed land and shoreline development in Beirut's downtown went towards cementing the region's area as a center of luxury and commerce that attracted many tourists but had little use for the broader public. They did, however, become central to the economy of the nearby neighborhoods. Many locals worked in the hotel.

For some, the illustrious individuals who continually passed through the area were a source of pride, as the urban ethnography of anthropologist Asil Sawalha has described. But if the hotel district has been a site of battles over property, it is more infamous as a site of actual battles during Lebanon's 15-year civil war. In the next section of this podcast, we'll have a look at how the war and political ruptures have shaped Beirut's cityscape. This was once the richest part of the richest city in the Middle East. Now it's the front line of the war in Lebanon. Buildings where last year the money makers of the Western world exchanged their millions are now the barricades of Beirut.

The civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, took an incredible toll on Lebanon and its inhabitants. Over 100,000 people were killed and many more displaced. But the experience of the First World War, 1914 to 1918, was perhaps even more devastating, as the region was gripped by famine. Tens of thousands of people died in the city of Beirut alone. Just as the civil war remade Lebanon, the First World War was a foundational event. Lebanon exists with its current boundaries as a result of the French Mandate,

created in 1920, when centuries of Ottoman rule came to an end. In the 1930s, a large plaza in the center of the city was renamed Martyrs' Square to commemorate political prisoners who were hanged there by the Ottoman government in 1916. So this is Saht al-Shahada, as you guys know. Why is it called Martyrs Square? Martyrs Square, also related to the Ottomans. The Ottomans were very controversial and not liked by the locals at all. There was a lot of protests and a lot of attempts to get them out.

And among those, one of the times that this happened, some of the Arabs, Lebanese Arabs at the time were hung and shot at, so the public hangings took place here. And so this is when, sorry, after that is when it came to be known as Martyr Square. That was during World War I, right? Yes. Martyr Square became a center of urban life, but the image of martyrdom it projected became a subject of controversy. It was once home to a limestone statue featuring two women holding an urn, one bearing the Muslim Shahada of La Ilaha Illallah and the other a cross.

It was commissioned by the French government to commemorate a shared history of suffering. As you mentioned, so during the 60s, wait before actually, so this came up in 1960. Before that, there was a lot of like palm trees of palm trees here, public space, cars parked, old whatever. And there was a statue of two women called the crying women. And the statues of two ladies made of limestone, one is a Christian woman and the other is a Muslim woman, and they both have their hands out holding an urn, which is supposed to be the ashes of the martyrs. So there was a lot of protest about that.

Like, what is this? And these are women and the valiance of the men whose lives were taken. And how could you represent them in this, you know, cheap, this whatever fashion that is just not at all, does not merit, their lives don't merit this piece, this artwork, which was a sculpture that was made by a Lebanese, very well-known Lebanese artist named Youssef Khwayek. So after a lot of protests and after even the sculpture was vandalized and one of the women was destroyed,

they removed it and eventually replaced it by this statue. It's in the Sursat Mansion now. Didn't they move it there? It's on Esplanade. And you can find out by the year it was made. The crying women were ultimately replaced in independent Lebanon by a more triumphant sculpture by an Italian artist. During the civil war that broke out in the 70s,

that sculpture would be so badly damaged that it required restoration. Downtown Beirut was a center of fighting during the civil war. In the early years of the war, different militias occupied hotels in the hotel district as bases. During the war, Beirut became increasingly divided between the predominantly Muslim West and the predominantly Christian East. But Beirut was much more complicated than that, home to 18 different religious communities recognized in the constitution who all had representatives spread out throughout the downtown.

There were Christians living in Hamra, Muslims in Ashrafieh, and of course many people frequented many different neighborhoods of the city in any given day or week. With roadblocks, checkpoints, and battle lines cutting through the heart of the city, living and moving in Beirut became a nightmare for ordinary individuals. As you might know, Damascus Street was the demarcation line during the war, the green line. Do you guys know why it was called the green line? An important symbol of the war's impact on the cityscape was the green line. While we were standing on Damascus Street, which runs north-south through the center

of the city, Raya pulled out her phone. So this is Damascus Street during the war. Yeah, yeah. center of the city, Raya pulled out her phone. During the war, the no-man's land in between East and West Beirut became so deserted that bushes and trees flourished there, hence the appellation of the Green Line. Many buildings in Beirut were once abandoned, ruined or pockmarked by bullets. Three decades later, there are fewer traces of the fighting. But one building that has remained standing as an improbable monument to the war is a former movie theater affectionately called The Egg.

In the October Revolution of 2019, it provided a sheltered space for teach-ins and discussions. What do they call it? They call it The Egg. The Egg. There's the egg, like the page, the egg movement on Facebook. Some people call it the potato. The Egg. It doesn't look pretty much like an egg at all.

It was a theater. It used to be a movie theater. So actually it was built in the early 80s. It's still in the early 90s. It people call it the potato. The egg. It doesn't look pretty much like an egg at all. It was a theater. It used to be a movie theater. Actually, it was built with the intention of having, and you can still see the construction, you can still see that there was,

they were beginning to go up with the building, a tower, there was supposed to be a commercial center that was going to go up right behind it. And the war happened. So this was only open for about a year. It was a local, two architects, one Tebet and another man,

who built this structure. They used it more afterwards, so they did use it quite a lot for art exhibitions, during Fedora Musique, that one annual... They used it for art exhibitions? I had photos up there once. They had a bunch of exhibitions actually. And then they just decided to stop for some reason.

I don't know why. There was a rumor that they were going to demolish it, and of course the people went and protested, and the whole thing happened again. Why would they protest this demolition if they were going to demolish any building? Yeah, well, the thing is it's a super unique building. Any designer that comes here, not just architects,

but designers are like, whoa, what is that? Now you can't see it as well since these buildings have gone up. But when they see it, they're all like, what is this? It's a very unique structure. So foreign people, I mean, it's just, you know. Beirut's cityscape, of course, still contains many reminders of the war, as well as reminders of its long shadow. A good example is a memorial to Samir Asir, to Google him type Qasir,

located just a minute east of the municipality, across from the new headquarters of the famous Nahar building and the Mir Asaf Mosque. Asir was a historian who wrote about Beirut and a journalist who argued forcefully in favor of secularism, democracy, and the end of the Syrian occupation in post-Civil War Lebanon. He was killed by a car bomb in 2005. So this is the Brantwini, this is the Brantwaini Memorial, a journalist that was just broken in heart, that was assassinated.

And this is Samir Asir Memorial. And that fountain has actually won some awards. These are some of the old trees I was mentioning that have actually remained in the city. And yeah, Samir Asir now has a, there is something now, an association that was started after he died called SKIs and it's meant to safeguard and protect journalists

who are being harassed by multiple entities it could be the army, it could be politicians and they still do really well and they also, there's a Samir Asir Freedom of the Press award that also is given annually.

I don't know if you know the Beirut Report, but he won twice in a row. He's written about a few of the things that have been mentioned. He's a writer and a journalist. Exactly. Historian here with the history of Beirut. And he wrote another book called Being Arab. Yeah, so he's somebody who really kind of was really considered to be quite a critical thinker

and interesting mind. The most high-profile assassination in recent history also occurred in 2005, when the former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafiq Hariri, was killed by a car bomb detonated as his motorcade passed the aforementioned St. George Hotel. In front of the hotel, in Mater Square, and elsewhere in the city, there are now memorials to Hariri. But the greatest mark that Hariri left on the city was the downtown itself,

which has radically transformed since he first came to power in the 90s. In the next section of the podcast, we'll talk more about post-war redevelopment and the debates surrounding the most powerful player in the downtown, Soledad. But the waterfront is privately owned. Like most of downtown area, this is the main kind of rumor about it, is that most of downtown is not owned by Saudi Deg. They own about 20%, they owned at one point about 20% of the property of downtown, but they privately manage it. Okay, but nobody knows exactly who owns what.

Yeah, it's not a transparent... Yeah, I mean, if you know, oh, this is like, you know, so-and-so that owns this building, and you know that. But some buildings are well-known. Okay, but there's no database. Beirut was a tiny place at the beginning of the 19th century. But in other periods of history, the region supported larger populations. A good example of this history

is the Omri Mosque, a former church built on the site of Roman baths by the medieval crusader states. There's two sections to it, the one that you're seeing right here, and then there's a back part, which is new and open air. So yeah, there's two minarets. There's the old minaret and the new one. It was renovated, this new minaret went up in the early 1990s. So we're going to walk down this way and you'll see more. So imagine a Roman bath became a church then was turned into a mosque. So it's kind of the most historic of the Beirut mosques here.

In fact, Beirut's ancient history stretching back to the Roman and Phoenician periods frequently bursts to the fore as the city rebuilds. The paradox of reconstruction in the downtown is that in removing the ruins of the war, developers bump up against the ruins of the case here. The Al Mawar Bank was meant to build their headquarters here. And as they began with their dig, they found half of a Roman hippodrome. And so they were like, OK, we have to this controversial situation.

But they also found all kinds of, before that, beautiful arches or something more so more Roman there's actually a post about it but so this happens all the time what they have to do is the Ministry of culture your your obliged to record you know everything they draw and sometimes they photograph what they find and more than half the time it's demolished and then they begin to build. But if they find something, this is one of the two sites that we're going to pass where they find something significant, they say, you know, you just can't demolish it. It's a historic site.

Building projects may be halted by the discovery of archaeological sites beneath the city, though often construction simply plows forward as planned. For the developers who have invested in the future returns of the buildings they are constructing, halting construction or the classification of part of the site as archaeological remains poses a threat to their investments, and so much construction proceeds quietly. You're hearing a track called Aranis from the early 2000s by Lebanese trip-hop outfit Soap Kills. It's an archive of the urban experience in Beirut when the city was just coming back to life. The singer, Yasmeen Hamdan, is performing the sounds of the city like the call of corn

on the cob cellars or shoe shines. Soap Kills found inspiration in reconstructed Beirut, but it was an ambivalent relationship. Beirut regained its reputation for flashy nightlife, but the downtown in particular reeked of empty consumerism. Zaid Hamdan, the other member of Soap Kills, described the sentiment in an interview about how the band got its name. Quote, the name Soap Kills is linked to the day-to-day situation in our country, how people deal with problems, how people deal with the reconstruction of the city, the quote unquote cleaning up of the city, just a big cleaning up.

The whole procedure is just so brutal and inefficient. We're all lost without an identity, and without any knowledge of our history. For the post-war generation that shares this sentiment, Solidaire is synonymous with Beirut's loss of identity and soul. Now we're in a commercial space called the Souks. As you might notice from the recording, it's one of the quietest places in the downtown. Here it's important to mention that while the civil war ravaged Beirut's cityscape, more buildings were destroyed in the process of reconstruction by Solidaire than during the war, in a process that some call creative destruction. A big part of Soledad's reconstruction project has involved constructing spaces

that will bring money into the downtown, which means luxury apartments and office space. Not all of the renovated downtown is of this variety. Saifi Village, which was formerly right on the Green Line, was designated as the Art and Design District, built on a smaller pedestrian-friendly scale. While some art galleries and Lebanese designers have set up shop in the area, high rents and the general exclusivity of the renovated city center still keep the local shops precarious and the area never really that bustling. So Saifi is interesting for two reasons. First, Saifi, this neighborhood was known as Hayy al-Najjarin.

So this is where carpenters used to hang out. We can come on this side. It's an area where a lot of carpenters used to, I like to say, spend their time. But they used to work, their studios, they used to design here. And so most of these buildings have been renovated by Solider and their residential buildings. As I was saying earlier.

It was intended to be this quartier des arts, this artistic, artsy neighborhood. Many galleries had opened here. And there's only one, I'm sorry, two of like five or six original galleries. They hiked up their rent. People, like I was saying, they weren't coming here as much. So that affected, you know, as the economy was affected, as were the art galleries, clearly one of the more kind of delicate businesses to have. This is one of them. There's another one on the other side. Perhaps the biggest imprint of the Solider era is the Al-Amin Mosque, eventually sponsored by Rafiq Hariri, despite his early quiet opposition to the project. It was like who's the strongest who won who's the victorious? Yeah. Yeah, you had the total of agreements that said that made some of that

They tried to divide some of that power up Martyrs Square is a place where you know this public space that everyone comes to it has access to So he was the one with the money at the time. He was Prime Minister. He decided to put his big mosque right here It was modeled designed after the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey So Al-Amin mosqueque was opened in 2009. It was, well, if modeled after the Blue Mosque, it's also an Ottoman style, based on that fact, it's an Ottoman period structure.

Neo-Ottoman. Neo-Ottoman. I wanted to just say two more things. One thing about the dome in a moment, but then also about Al-Amin Mosque. It was opened in 2009, finally, the mosque. So almost 15 years or so after it started being built. And something interesting is when they opened it, there was a big, sharp green laser pointing out in the direction of Nesta.

No matter anyone who had view of the laser to know which way to, you know, everybody knows where to, which direction to play anyways, but it was just another exercise of strength and power, right? So not even 10 days within after that started, they, you know, globally were asked please remove the laser because it was rumored to be able to have been seen from outer space that was so big and it was really massive. I can't even begin to fathom how much money was spent on it. But that's just another example of the ridiculousness of these different parties and how they try to exercise their might essentially.

So the laser was pointing at Mecca? In the direction of Mecca. It could actually hit Mecca? No, no, but in that direction. No, it wasn't. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to argue that Beirut didn't need a reconstruction. And it's not that everything Soledad has done looks bad. But the process by which smaller owners and tenants were forced to give up their property for company shares

remains a sore point of contention. After the war, many parts of the city were too badly damaged to be merely restored. But how many buildings were demolished that could have been preserved? How many properties could have been restored if ownership had not been legally transferred to Solidaire via eminent domain? These are the types of challenging questions facing present-day critics and future historians of Beirut's reconstruction. Our walk with Raya Haddad in downtown Beirut was a celebration of the city's history and architecture, but with a critical eye.

It's hard not to critique the lack of green space or even shade, the class implications of privatizing the shoreline and the city center, the sterile and hollow consumerism of the souks, or the corruption surrounding the decisions about construction and demolition. But how would one go about rebuilding a city like Beirut? I think he mess a message here. About you wearing stripes? Yeah.

Because we were in front of the New General's. Our tour ended at a place called Beit Beirut. That's its current name. It's also been known as the Barakat building or the Yellow House due to the color of its stone facade. It's a relatively modest building, but it has a remarkable history, and it's been restored in a unique way. It's also a building that might not have survived reconstruction if not for the efforts of activists. The so-called Yellow House was commissioned as a residential space by the

Barakat family. Its original design in the 1920s was by none other than the aforementioned Yusuf Aftimos, the Mediterranean revivalist architect responsible for so many buildings in modern Beirut. Its reddish-yellow limestone is reminiscent of towns in the Chouf region of Lebanon where Aftimos was born. Its open, airy layout reflected the sensibilities of Beirut's emergent upper-middle-class families. So this is the Buttercat Building, also known as the Yellow Building, now officially known as Beit Beirut. And originally it was two floors, and then they added to it. The architect is

Aftimos, the man who built the Ottoman clock tower next to the Saray. This building is quite interesting. As you can imagine, during the war, all kinds of different things happened with families they were split the Barakar family the couple had several children daughters and sons they

had more daughters than sons and each each had an apartment in the building the the daughters usually all usually they all married and want to live in new buildings or in their husband's family's buildings. The men stayed and the women ended up renting their apartments. There was a dentist who was working here. There was a hairdresser which was kind of interesting. This blue part of the building is where there was a photo studio. So a lot of people would come to the hairdresser next door and have their photos taken at Studio Mario. They were next to each other. And the story is, if you go inside it's kind of interesting.

The lady of the house wanted a more traditional home. She left him and said, please can we have the arches? And he's like, you can't keep doing this, this is kind of an old system, we're going to do something new for you, something interesting. So inside you'll find one of the rooms has the three arches on the inside, it's like a kind of separator for the space. Because he was like, no, we're going to do something interesting, and he made these unique columns

as if he knew that the building was going to be eventually split between two sides because this is the green line, as we said, Damascus Street and it's split between this side which is referred to more as East Beirut and that side which is West Beirut he never knew this at the time, but it was like that so there's a rooftop to the building. There are four stories, and there's also, when they renovated,

they built a little conference space at the bottom. By the 1970s, the Barakat building stood quietly as an artifact of the architectural transformation of Beirut that had begun a century prior. Then the war started. The building was eventually taken over by snipers and remodeled to suit their needs. So what's interesting, I just want to show you real quick the staircase. This is the staircase going to this side of the building, and this is the staircase going to the other side. East side, west side. So you see how they demolished how the snipers destroyed the

staircases so nobody can access the building it's like oh well i can only make it the ground floor they wanted to so you can see that how the balconies were destroyed yeah but what's interesting and most important about this building is why was it used as a sniper table not just its location it's it's designed so if you were to be if you were down this hallway that's like inside if you go you could see down the street and if you were if you were at the end of on this in this of this room, you could see down into the west side of Eru. So it was perfect for them. And so when they found it, the snipers during the war, they actually redesigned the building. They destroyed the second and two to three stories of staircases and they built their own private staircase in the back

and they made these incredible like sniper alcoves. They made actually 27 of those within the building and there are only three that remain. So it's one of the buildings that was on the news a lot because people it was it was a crossroads of east and west you have go Damascus Street goes through it and you have Independence Street which which is like the crossroads of those two main roads and so that's why it was such a good exact location geographically for the snipers and there's just one story which has been shared by Mona Halla who's one of the people who's so safeguarded the

building and started an association for it. And she tells the story. She remembers just being a child watching the news. Not a child, like a teenager. And she, you know, this was all kind of being taped. There was somebody who had, they just, live footage showed him being shot. And the man fell.

And so there's all these people in the neighboring buildings that had these kind of sticks that they would throw out with white cloths at the end of them to allow, you know, like kind of these, you know, don't shoot at us kind of whatever sticks and we're just going to help somebody from, khalas, you know. So somebody threw on these cloth ropes,

they're not sticks, they're ropes, out. And the guy held onto it. And as they were reeling him in, like pulling him in, somebody shot the rope. And there was no way of saving this man anymore. And he just died, ended up dying like that. Nobody knew what his religion was or what his story was, but he was there at the wrong place in the wrong time. Do the people who sniped at him know anything about his origins or do they care to even have known?

Or was it just that he was trespassing or willing to cross this area at the wrong time. But yes, so that's just one example of somebody who wasn't at a checkpoint, who maybe potentially was going to get water or bread for his family or himself and just didn't make it back. But there's so many stories like that of people that I've heard from my family recount or different people that just needed to go out and buy like diapers or milk for the baby

and were completely scared out of their wits or sometimes didn't make it back. After the war, the Barakat building was left badly damaged and vandalized. So essentially, after the war was over, a bunch of architects, they used to walk around, they were AUB students, and they were like, kind of just curious about this building and others,

so they would go inside, and you know. One of them was this woman named Mona Monahalla among some of her peers and friends so she one day in 1997 noticed that the balconies had been removed the windows had been removed and she was like okay this she knew as an architect and somebody studying and caring someone who cared about you know these unique buildings in the city but this meant something the place structure was going to be demolished so she ran down to the nahara building she had previously taken pictures of it she ran down to the hard building and she said listen this is what's happening with this building

it's a historically important building it was very important during the civil war do you know you know it he's like yeah of course we know what you're talking about so it's going to be demolished we can't allow this to happen it seems like it's going to happen anytime so they said listen we've just gone to press we can't help you we can't we can't allow this to happen, it seems like it's going to happen anytime. So they said, listen, we've just gone to press, we can't help you, we can't write an article, but do you have an image or something that we can use? She said, yes, I have a photograph that you can use. So they used, they published her photograph, underneath they basically wrote, they told the people that they could contact her and this phone number.

And after, so since then, from that point on, an association was created to safeguard Barakat, the Barakat building. It was, you know, long story short, essentially, finally the Barakat family were convinced to donate it to the municipality of Beirut. The municipality hired Youssef Haydar, the architect, who renovated it.

And some people like what he did, others don't something kind of unusual that he did do if you notice so you have the facade of the building and you have these kind of cream bone colored sections that have been filled in and they put like these artificial bullet holes in them which is very strange oh wow

oh the bullet holes are artificial why would you do that? yeah, they're fake why would you put fake bullet holes up? everyone's trying to cover bullet holes up, and he put up some fake, exaggerated bullet hole effect. All of those bullet holes are fake? The ones that are like the, where those kind of,

you see the lighter colored filled in? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's all fake. OK, but there are real bullet holes in the building, too. Yeah, yeah, there are some. They match them. They match them to the, yeah. Yeah, they are. They match them. They match them.

It was said that it was going to be turned into a cultural center or a museum on the history of the city. Not the history of the war, but the memory of the city, but the memory of Beirut. Different from the museum we passed earlier which is being built on Water Square, which is the history of the city of Beirut. So, everyone's waiting to see if they're actually going to do this the construction ended two years ago in april of 2016 and the first exhibition start happened about a year after that and now they've just had private private exhibitors come with their own funders and

their own support uh with all kinds of photography exhibition, painting exhibitions. The UNICEF had an exhibition here. There was most recently one on Christian iconography. So we're waiting to see what's gonna happen now. And that's kind of Beit Beirut in a nutshell. When we visited in 2018, the thoughtfully restored Beit Beirut was being used as an exhibition space. It's been about a year since the explosion that tore through the port and residential neighborhoods like Jemezeh, Mar Mikhael, and Karantina. The colossal cleanup, as well as the enormous humanitarian effort and compensation for those displaced by the damage, many of whom are Syrian refugees or migrant workers who are

already living in a precarious state, is still ongoing. Meanwhile, protests resumed in Beirut with demands for reform and accountability. The Prime Minister Hassan Diab and his cabinet quickly resigned. In almost any other country, that would be a momentous event. But this was only seen as a small step for the protest movement that over the past year has rallied around the call to remove, quote, every last one of the entrenched political elite of Lebanon, which has maintained a game of musical chairs since the end of the war in the 90s.

Given the scale of the destruction, it seems inevitable that 2020 will become a new layer of history in the city center of Beirut, joining Solidaire, the civil war, the so-called golden age, the French mandate, the port's birth as an Ottoman provincial capital, and the more ancient past, much of which is still waiting to be uncovered during the next big building project. And a major reconstruction effort is already underway. The process of deciding how that plays out will be a struggle. Less than a week after the explosion, developers were already trying to buy out property.

Activists immediately started campaigns to encourage people to hold out and not sell their property. This means that, to some extent, since the explosion, it's been business as usual. However, Beirut's recent history may hold a few lessons for thinking about how reconstruction will take place. It tells us that it will be political, and that there's an immense potential that the net result will be further displacement and dispossession of ordinary people to the benefit of wealthy developers. In the aftermath of the explosion,

Diyala Latif argued that a new beginning for Beirut would mean foregrounding the concerns of, and directing aid towards, those who have been historically oppressed. The Karantina neighborhood, which has long been a home to refugees and migrants, Armenians, Kurds, Palestinians, and rural people from the south, bore the brunt of the damage and the blast. A reconstruction that imagines Beirut as a city for everyone and targets the improvement of the conditions in such neighborhoods, rather than perpetuating the pre-existing inequality and exclusion they face, could not only undo the damage, but address much older issues that have defined the historical experience of Beirut. In this regard, another lesson of post-war reconstruction might be that a damaged building or neighborhood is not necessarily a ruined space

meant to be rebuilt from scratch. There may be many worth restoring and preserving, especially if those who currently live there see them that way. And given that so many areas affected by the blast were lively downtown neighborhoods, yet another lesson of the post-war cleanup should be that even if the debris is swept, the windows are replaced, and the whole downtown is reconstructed anew, Beirut won't feel the same if reconstruction does not stay faithful to the spirit of its residents. Pigeons have split brains, like they don't... they have... They're really interesting. Pigeons are really smart. Why? What do you mean they have split brains? So you know how we have two sides to our brains, but they communicate with each other? Pigeons and dolphins have split brains and that's what allows them to...

You've never seen a bird sleep, right? Like you don't ever see them with their eyes closed? That's because they're sleeping while they're doing other stuff because they sleep with half their brain. I just found this out, so I thought I'd have to share this really cool information. I just found this out earlier, too. I'm going to go up this way. Yeah. Memory. Apparently they're really good at detecting music, too.

Like, they can detect different kinds of classical music. That's all for this episode. We'd like to remind you about a few resources on the Ottoman History Podcast website. There's a bibliography for further reading about the history of some of the topics we've discussed in this tour of the downtown, as well as some resources on the present situation. There are also plenty of images and other episodes related to this topic that you might enjoy. Historical anthropologist Neda Mumtaz served as a consultant on this episode. You can find out more about her work on our website. Special thanks as well to Raya Haddad, Graham Pitts, and Sam Dolby for collaborating on this podcast. And thanks to all of you for tuning in. I'm Chris Grayton. So long for now.