NY Times: Beirut Gets Its Groove Back

[La_Serpiente]

Beirut Gets Its Groove Back

TWENTY-THREE years ago, Annabel Karim Kassar left a dinner party here and stepped into the street as it suddenly echoed with machine-gun fire. Unable to get to her car, she cowered in a doorway for two hours. Back then, Lebanon was being savaged by a civil war that lasted 15 years, and Beirut had been split into warring Christian and Muslim enclaves. When the guns fell silent that night, Ms. Karim Kassar, a visiting French architect then living in London with her Lebanese husband, swore that she wouldn't be coming back to Beirut anytime soon.

Having spent the war years in England, France and Morocco, the Karim Kassars are now back, part of a flood of Beirutis who returned when the war ended in 1990. "It was time," said Ms. Karim Kassar's husband, Radwaan Karim Kassar, 53, who grew up in Beirut. "So much had been destroyed, but now there was peace. We had a certain hope that life would get better here."

The postwar landscape was scarcely promising. The fabled souk was blown to bits. The columned shopping arcades that once lent a Rue de Rivoli sparkle to the Centre-Ville, or downtown, were devastated by mortar fire. Churches, mosques and synagogues were gutted, and thousands of Beirutis were dead; thousands more had fled the country. Mr. Karim Kassar's parents, for instance, went to Paris, where his father, a manufacturer of women's shoes, slowly slid into an unshakable depression. "He died of cancer, but really his heart had been broken," said Mr. Karim Kassar, an oil entrepreneur. "He had no home anymore."

Today, the capital of Lebanon is fast reclaiming its prewar reputation as the cultural capital of the Middle East. Grand hotels and boulevards planted with half-grown magnolias have replaced the rubble. But electrical service here remains temperamental; every few nights, some corner of the city inexplicably plunges into darkness. Wealthy Arabs from more restrictive societies have embraced the city as a Levantine St.-Tropez — a secular playground where miniskirts are worn, alcohol is served and nightclubs rock — and are paying millions of dollars for high-rise apartments on the waterfront, which is being expanded with landfill. Political tensions in the region remain high, but Beirut is booming with architectural projects by Philippe Starck, Jean Nouvel and other boldface European designers, encouraged by Solidere, a real-estate development company whose largest shareholders include Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

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Beirut Gets Its Groove Back

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