“It was dizzying, quite honestly, the number of people on Hamra. He pointed to a corner where two of the greatest Arab singers of the time, Abdel-Halim Hafez and Farid el-Atrash, had a regular seat, along with Nizar Qabbani, an iconic romantic poet from Syria.
He spoke sitting in a café that, in the 1970s, was called the Horse Shoe. “Hamra Street is an international avenue,” says Mohamad Rayes, who has worked on the street since the early ’70s and owns three clothes and lingerie shops in the area.
Its cafes were hangouts for artists, intellectuals and political activists, caught up in the leftist, secular Arab nationalist spirit of the times. Located in the capital’s western neighborhood of Ras Beirut, Hamra was - and still is - a place where Christians and Muslims live side by side. World stars held concerts in Lebanon, including Louis Armstrong and Paul Anka. You might see the international diva Dalida strolling down the avenue before one of her shows at the Piccadilly. At its Piccadilly Theater, Lebanon’s most beloved singer Fayrouz performed.
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Hamra had the capital’s finest movie houses. Arab, European and American tourists flocked to its swanky shops, restaurants and bars. This was Lebanon’s cosmopolitan pre-war era - and Hamra Street was its elegant heart, Beirut’s Champs Elysees. In Hamra’s heyday, in the 1960s and 1970s, the street was lit up with colored lights during Christmas and New Year’s, with Santa Clauses up and down the avenue offering candies to passers-by. Hamra, which used to stay lively into the night, feels deserted before midnight - even during the recent holiday season. Many streetlights don’t work because of electricity cuts. After nightfall, the shops that are still operating close early.
Many shops have shut down because owners could no longer afford high rents and huge monthly bills for private electricity generators. Refusing basic reforms, they have made no progress in talks with the International Monetary Fund.Ī walk through Hamra Street shows the impact. The same leadership, entrenched in power, has done virtually nothing to address the crisis. While the economic system collapsed, the political one hasn’t. The crisis was made worse by the coronavirus pandemic and a massive explosion at Beirut’s port that killed 216 people, wounded thousands and destroyed parts of the capital. As much as 82% of the population now lives in poverty, according to the U.N. The currency’s value evaporated, salaries lost their buying power, dollars in banks became inaccessible, prices skyrocketed in a country where nearly everything is imported. The scheme finally collapsed in what the World Bank calls one of the world’s worst economic and financial crises since the mid 1800s. They ran an economy that at times boomed but was effectively a Ponzi scheme riddled with corruption and mismanagement. The war’s militia leaders became the political leadership and have kept a lock on power ever since. Lebanon’s economic meltdown, which began in October 2019, was the culmination of the country’s post-war era.