Beirut’s peculiar traffic conditions are among the first things a visitor notices in this congested seaside metropolis, which is slowly reviving from a devastating 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. Although the city now has hundreds of working traffic lights, Beirutis regard them with indifference or contempt. It’s not difficult to understand why. The lights didn’t work at all during the conflict; then, after the war ended, frequent bombing raids by the Israeli Air Force knocked out the city’s power grid for weeks, sometimes months. After a quarter of a century of negotiating their way through Beirut without electricity, few locals see any need to start heeding traffic signals now.
Beirut’s ineffective traffic lights aren’t the only legacy of the Lebanon conflict, which killed nearly 200,000 people between 1975 and 1990 and drove as many as two thirds of the population into exile. In many other ways the city-and the country-remains trapped between its chaotic past and its dreams of a revitalized future. Walk along the Corniche, a two-mile promenade along the Mediterranean, where well-dressed Lebanese families vie for space alongside teenage in-line skaters and dark-skinned Syrian immigrants selling succulent pitalike breads known as kaak, and you feel a once-vital city stirring back to life.
Stroll through the renovated Phoenicia Hotel, now filled with members of the Lebanese diaspora returning to survey their property, and you hear an echo of the era when big real-estate and banking deals were struck over Turkish coffee in opulent hotel lobbies like this one. Venture out at night to Ashrafieh, the most elegant district of Christian east Beirut, and you feel transported to a little slice of the sixth arrondissement: elegant apartment buildings with lattice-work balconies, chic boutiques, Parisian-style street signs and the ubiquitous sounds of French.
But Beirut still has a long way to go. Much of the city remains a wreck: The Holiday Inn, a seaside tower which was hit by mortar fire and burned just days after its 1975 opening, looms over the Corniche like an unsightly ghost, its exterior still pocked by rocket-propelled grenade blasts and bullet holes.
The expensive new hotels that have sprouted in the last year along the sea-the Palm Beach, the Intercontinental Le Vendome-compete for attention with abandoned structures that haven’t been touched since the war. A few blocks away, near the Port of Beirut, looms a giant mountain of trash and building debris-the wartime dumping ground during the decades when the city lacked any sanitation collection. The Israeli bombing raids that wrecked Beirut’s power plants stopped after the withdrawal from southern Lebanon a year ago. But Phantom jets still sweep low over Beirut, shattering windows and terrifying the population, to register Israel’s displeasure at the kidnapping of three of its soldiers by the radical Islamic group Hezbollah last October.
Beirut remains a city divided: Christians stay in east Beirut, Sunnis keep to the north, Shiite Muslims inhabit west Beirut and the southern suburbs. Clashes between the ethnic groups still break out periodically, as they did a few weeks ago between Muslim and Christian youths in the largely Christian stronghold of Damura. Ethnic divisions are reinforced in more subtle ways too: the separate TV stations for Sunnis, Shiites and Christians; the complex power-sharing deal that dictates the prime minister be a Sunni, the president a Maronite Christian, the speaker of the parliament a Shiite.
The ultimate litmus test of Beirut’s recovery may be its downtown renewal project, a grand-scale plan to knit the two halves of the capital together. Drive through this quarter-mile-square area, and you sense the possibilities of what Beirut could be-and how far it has to go. Before 1975, the city center was a vibrant neighborhood where Muslims and Christians lived and worked side by side. It was also the quarter where the war broke out and raged furiously for more than a decade. By the time the conflict ended, it had become a gutted no-man’s land filled with bombed buildings and packs of wild dogs that fed on human flesh.
Then came Rafik Hariri, a one-time schoolteacher turned multimillionaire builder, who became Lebanon’s prime minister in 1994. Forming a real-estate venture known as Solidere, Hariri, with the help of supporters in Lebanon’s parliament, bought up hundreds of buildings at fire-sale prices in downtown Beirut. Solidere began a vast rebuilding project including souks, ornate replicas of 19th-century architecture and a sprawling “Garden of Peace.”
Today, depending on whom you ask, Solidere’s scheme is described either as one of the most daring urban renewal projects in history or “the biggest land grab in Lebanon.”
So far, Hariri and Solidere have failed to deliver on their promise of a vibrant new downtown. Eight years after the project began, the city center is a ghost town. Thousands of square feet of office space remain empty, potential investors and tenants having been scared away by Middle East turbulence and Lebanon’s shaky economy. A few big-name tenants, including Virgin Records and Citibank, have rented space downtown. But Solidere’s shares have fallen from $13 a share to less than $5, and continued regional instability could ultimately doom Hariri’s dream.
On a recent warm spring afternoon, the restored-to-perfection Place de L’Etoile downtown was eerily deserted, with the exception of a handful of French tourists and United Nations bureaucrats sipping espresso in a cafe beneath the restored clock tower. Not a soul moved along Allenby Street, another replica of old Beirut that sloped down toward the port.
Solidere’s boosters remain upbeat, holding fast to the Hollywood mantra: if we build it they will come. But some locals say that even if the project does prove successful, it can never replace the messy vitality, the exotic mixture of Middle East and Europe, that characterized the heart of the city in the old days.
“This isn’t bad, but it can never be the old Beirut,” said George, the taxi driver, as he sped through another red light past the soon-to-open Virgin Records store just off Allenby Street. “We lost some of our soul, and I don’t think we can ever get it back.”
