The City

The city is more chaotic than I remember. Not sure if that's because I'm remembering wrong or because it really is. It's now full of huge new buildings which didn't exist in my time, but there's no such thing as 24 hour electricity, which we had in the 70s. The streets are disastrous, the sidewalks non-existent. The number of cars and motorbikes clogging the streets is astonishing, it seems like orders of magnitude more than when I first lived here. Every possible space is used for parking. The sidewalks are unusable precisely because they have become impromptu parking. Because of the way the Lebanese drive (and the lack of traffic controls), there can never be the kind of gridlock we talk about back home. What could happen is 'parking gridlock', where no one can find parking anymore. Then what?

Large portions of the city are subdivided into militia fiefdoms, which means, in practice, that government authority is always questionable.

One result of the lingering effects of the war and the subsequent disorder is that everything that depends on what would be considered public services has been ceded even further than it was in my time to the private realm. You want clean water? Buy it. You want electricity? Get a generator. Security? Put up a bulletproof door with an iron gate in front of that!

There are thousands - I don't exaggerate - of desperate Syrians begging on the streets. Everywhere you go women and children are on the streets, homeless, shelter-less, food-less. According to May and Karma it's important NOT to give them money, because they are all run by syndicates that take the money and send them back out onto the streets. Apparently, the alternative is to give them food, but I'm not yet clear on how one would go about carrying that much food. Complicated.

Paris, by the way, was also FULL of beggars. Around St Michel there were three or four on every block, and people sleeping on the sidewalks at night. Near Denfert-Rochereau there were even TENTS set up on the sidewalks! One guy had a note next to his tent advising passers-by that he was in need of a new tent...

A correction to my lead sentence: Part of Beirut IS more chaotic than it used to be. But not all. Large parts of what used to be 'downtown' were so destroyed during the war that they've been essentially razed and reconstructed in a reasonable - if rather ersatz - imitation of the original.

Part of the rebuilt 'basta', where we used to go for cheap foul
mdammas. Now coffee costs $3

The effect is a little startling: brand new buildings in the Ottoman and traditional Lebanese style of the late 19th and early 20th century. I suppose this is no different than the reconstruction of cities all over Europe after the Second World War, but it's startling nevertheless. The reconstruction was spearheaded by billionaire businessman and former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, killed by a car bomb in 2005. As I recall, parts of the reconstruction had to be done more than once, as renewed fighting kept damaging rebuilt areas.

In the meantime, in much of the city there seems to be a general race on to eliminate all traces of the beautiful and graceful Beirut of old. Wherever one turns in what's called Ras Beirut, the formerly trendy but now visibly rundown area where AUB (American University of Beirut) is located, one sees the empty or disheveled hulks of formerly exquisite traditional Lebanese homes sitting in the shadow of 20 or 30 story new construction. In a city where power goes off every day for several hours at a time, the downside of this trade-off is particularly evident. The old houses had enormous windows and doors, high ceilings, wide verandahs and balconies. When power goes out in your apartment building, by contrast, you're forced to trudge in the heat up endless flights of stairs, only to arrive in an apartment made up of a few low-ceilinged concrete boxes baking in the sun. If you're lucky, you might have a small balcony to take refuge on while you look out at your darkened neighborhood and contemplate the wonders of modern life and its comforts.

Of course, since electricity is so spotty, most new buildings have generators or private sources of power (there are companies which essentially provide an alternate grid during outages). However, even before the influx of refugees from the Syrian civil war put enormous new pressure on the real estate market, rents for these buildings were already beyond reach for most middle class Lebanese. The only sure-fire way to stay cool is to be wealthy.

I got a rather unique explanation for the general level of dishevelment from a friend of Karma who's an engineer. Apparently, candidates for re-election to city agencies have developed an interesting twist on vote buying: in the run-up to elections they offer immunity from prosecution for all building code violations. What ensues is an orgy of unsanctioned building, renovation, and general jury-rigging that violates every conceivable standard of normal practices.