By MICHAEL SPECTER

THE
DAY I ARRIVED in Beirut I was collected at my hotel by Huda Baroudi, a
cheerful woman who had offered to show me around. It was a lazy Sunday,
grim and gray, and I was jet-lagged. But her eyes were shining and she
was eager to take me to the Bechara el-Khoury Mansion, a 19th-­century
villa that long ago — before it had been abandoned, pillaged and finally
shelled during the civil war — was one of Beirut’s grand residences.

As
I settled into the passenger seat of her S.U.V., Ms. Baroudi, an
influential designer of textiles and furniture, propelled us at high
speed toward what looked like a four-way stop. Beirut’s streets are
narrow, potholed and anything but straight; a car was approaching
rapidly from the opposite direction, but Ms. Baroudi seemed unconcerned.

At
the last moment, the other driver swerved to let us pass. I was unable
to speak, but Ms. Baroudi laughed sweetly. “I looked into his eyes,” she
explained with a smile and a shrug. “And I could see that he would
yield the right of way.”

Somehow, I was not comforted. “This is how we do it in Beirut,” she continued. “All the road signs are in people’s eyes.”

That
turned out to be true, not just literally, but figuratively. There is
something singular about Beirut. It has one foot planted in the Middle
East and the other in Europe, but it doesn’t quite belong in either
place. Nothing seems permanent there; it is a perpetual transit point.
Generations have passed through its borders in search of fun, or out of
desperation. And for both reasons, they continue to come.

Perhaps
alone among great cities, Beirut has earned, and manages to maintain,
reputations both for wanton licentiousness and for utter terror. “There
it stands, with a toss of curls and a flounce of skirts, a Carmen among
the cities,” Jan Morris wrote in her great love letter to what she
described as “The Impossible City.” “It is the last of the Middle
Eastern fleshpots.”

That
essay was written in 1956, soon after Beirut hosted the World Water Ski
Championships in Saint George’s Bay. Like all clichés, the image of the
city as the Paris of the Middle East, was, at least in part, a fact.
From the time France reluctantly ended its mandate in 1943, and
particularly in the decades between the close of World War II and the
disaster that tore Lebanon apart in the 1970s, Beirut was more
cosmopolitan, more tolerant and, perhaps above all, more self-indulgent
than any Arab city. No other place could serve so effortlessly as a
luxurious pit stop for rich Europeans, Arab royalty and celebrities like
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The cafes were filled with radical
intellectuals, oil sheikhs and every kind of huckster. Even the
notorious have always felt at home in Beirut: Kim Philby, the MI6
officer who became the 20th-century standard-bearer for treachery, spent
many an evening at the bar of the Saint-George Hotel. The city was a
free port in the purest sense, a place where bars and clubs often seemed
at least as consequential as churches and mosques.

Even
today, Beirut, which is washed gently by the Mediterranean Sea and
ringed by mountains, remains unremittingly hedonistic. The city has a
Skybar, Le Sushi Bar and a nightclub named after the 1972 porn classic
“Behind the Green Door.” Beirut has Uber and a farm-to-table movement.
There are Prada and Hermès outlets on the Corniche, the city’s
magnificent seaside promenade, and a Virgin Megastore, too. In a single
week, I saw two lime-green Maseratis: one at the dealership, and another
parked outside Barbar, a snack bar in Hamra, widely considered to make
the best chicken shawarma in town.

Photo

Yet
Beirut is also the place where the car bomb and suicide vest emerged as
the quotidian weapons of jihad. It is the capital of a country that has
been without a president for two years. Hezbollah, based in Beirut’s
southern precincts, and the role model for many of the world’s terrorist
groups, is Lebanon’s only truly powerful and unchallenged political
organization. Today, more than a million Syrian refugees have swarmed
into the region, having fled the 10th-century carnage little more than
100 miles away. It is this constant tension that makes the city so hard
to understand — and such a fascinating place to visit.

“In
Beirut, precariousness is a form of identity,” said Christine Tohme, a
curator and director of Ashkal Alwan, a research, production and study
space that emerged in the 1990s as a place for artists to reclaim a
public identity. We were having fair-trade espresso at one of the city’s
many fine cafes. “Nothing works here — from communism, to socialism to
the big free market, to finding ways of being hipsters, or becoming
designers or artists or being in groups that are driven by social
media.”

Those
words, echoed often by people I met, certainly sound bleak. But Tohme
wasn’t so much complaining as explaining. This is common. Read a
transcript of what people say and you can see despair running through
every sentence. But if you listen to them speak, or better yet, decipher
their eyes, that desperation often vanishes. I asked if she ever
considered leaving the city where she has spent the bulk of her life.
“Of course,” she said. “But I don’t, and I am pretty sure I never will.
This kind of turmoil, this kind of volatility, this kind of
precariousness … ” She let the thought drift for a while. “I don’t
want to say that life in war zones forces us to be creative,” she
continued. “I know that is banal. But Beirut is a demanding city, and
that makes it vital and alive. And vitality produces greatness.”

Slide Show

Slide Show

BEIRUT’S
GREAT INTELLECTUAL passion, the search for identity, is on display in
almost every shop, museum and gallery. At Bokja, Ms. Baroudi and her
partner, Maria Hibri, create Modernist furniture with lavishly
embroidered textiles culled from dozens of regional sources. At the
recently renovated Sursock Museum, I saw an exhibition that presented
visions of the emerging city, from 19th-century Orientalist fantasies to
David Hockney’s arresting 1966 pen-and-ink rendering of the Rivoli,
Beirut’s Modernist cinema, which was demolished following the civil war.
But the show that most poignantly captured the effects of arbitrary
identity in Beirut was at the Sfeir-Semler Gallery. “Blazon” took Marwan
Rechmaoui years to produce. It consists of 59 ornamental shields, and
more than 400 flags — all elaborately embroidered by workers at Bokja —
and arranged by the city’s corresponding electrical districts.

While
I was in Beirut, I stayed at the Villa Clara, an idiosyncratic hotel
run by Olivier Gougeon, a French chef, and his wife, Marie-Hélene
Moawad. The hotel, really a house from the 1920s, has just seven guest
rooms, each decorated with antique furniture and paintings by local
artists. The floors are covered with boldly patterned artisanal Lebanese
tiles, most of them more than a century old, scooped up from houses
also on the verge of destruction. The public rooms are full of aesthetic
non sequiturs: There is an Andrée Putman table, hand-painted wallpaper
in the restaurant, a sculptured pink flamingo and a set of chairs that
had once occupied the French Senate. Each guest room is lit by a
hand-blown Damascene chandelier, all purchased from the old souk of
Damascus.

For
people who prefer small hotels that require visitors to think about the
city that surrounds them, Villa Clara is a treat. Most mornings, I woke
to the sound of twin songbirds at my window, then gazed across the
quiet, leafy street at a dilapidated villa, a remnant of the civil war
that somehow seemed more like a Brutalist sculpture than a house. The
surrounding neighborhood, Mar Mikhael, has the feel of Williamsburg in
the 1970s, before it became a hipster theme park, when big rigs still
rumbled through the streets at dawn. For every stylish bar and boutique
that sells copies of Nylon magazine, there is an industrial machine
shop, a tool warehouse or a company that wholesales lighting fixtures.
Like many neighborhoods in Beirut, Mar Mikhael could be swallowed any
day by the moneyed classes; for the moment, though, aided no doubt by
the difficult economy and a general reluctance to travel to the region
while so much of it is at war, young artists and writers can still
afford to live and work there.

The
food at Villa Clara is exceptional, particularly the breakfasts of
homemade labneh, the thick Lebanese yogurt that has been strained to
remove its whey, the freshly baked Levantine bread called manakish and
the eggs from chickens raised in gardens that the couple rents from the
Maronite Order in the nearby Chouf mountains. They cure their own ham in
the cellars of the St. Jean Maron Monastery — which had been closed
since the civil war. The hotel’s French restaurant is reliably
considered to be among Beirut’s best (and most expensive). Gougeon, an
ex-pastry chef at the Grand Véfour in Paris, arrived in Beirut in 1999,
to work as a cook at the French Embassy. He soon realized there would be
no turning back. “Here, there is total anarchy,” he explained, with a
look of pleasure in his eyes. “Chaos. You have to fight on a daily basis
for everything you get.” And like so many others I encountered, he
regarded that daily struggle as a benefit rather than an obstacle. “In
France everything is regimented,” he said. “There are hours and rules
and long vacations. Here there are no days off. And very little rest.
But we have something they no longer have: energy, desire and complete
freedom.”

IT
HAD BEEN NEARLY 20 years since I last visited Beirut. By then, the
hostilities, which ground on mercilessly from 1975 to 1990, had turned
the very name of the city into a synonym for war zone. More than a
hundred thousand people died; a far greater number were ripped from
their homes. Infrastructure — the telephone networks, the water system,
roadways — and most of the economy had all been crippled.

By
the 1990s, politics, war and hatred had run their course, at least for a
while. It was the perfect moment for the emergence of Rafik Hariri,
the blustery businessman who had moved to Saudi Arabia at the age of
21. Hariri entered the Saudi construction industry, advanced rapidly and
was soon running his own firm, becoming the personal contractor for
Prince Fahd. By the time he returned to Lebanon in 1992, to become the
country’s prime minister, he was a billionaire.

Hariri
set out at once to rebuild Beirut’s shattered urban center. An affable
man who liked things to be big and shiny and new, he had little interest
in sectarian fighting, but perhaps even less in preserving the essence
of what many people had long regarded as the Middle East’s most alluring
city.

Continue reading the main story

Hariri,
who was killed by a devastating truck bomb in 2005, loved yachts and
planes and, more than anything else, enormous real estate projects,
which is what the center of Beirut eventually became. To remake the
city, he created a company called Solidere, which is a French acronym
for the Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of
Beirut Central District. Squatters were removed from the city center,
which was then essentially demolished. In addition, more than half a
million square meters of land were reclaimed from the nearby sea.

Solidere’s
stated goal was to attempt to revive the memory of the days before
1975, when Beirut was pluralistic, prosperous and throbbing with
intensity. The company did retain and restore some of the bullet-riddled
facades that had withstood the rampages of the various militias. But
the development also wiped away centuries of history and most of
Beirut’s rich architectural heritage. To get a sense of that, one only
has to wander over to the Beirut Souks, which had functioned as a center
of commerce at least since the time of the ancient Phoenicians.
Solidere rebuilt the souks along its historical grid plan, which was
supposed to assure continuity. It didn’t: The souks today are filled
with shiny objects and marble floors. It is a great place to buy
moisturizer, a $10,000 handbag or a Patek Philippe watch. But the new
souks have far more in common with the Mall of America than with the
many Levantine bazaars that have dominated the Arab marketplace for
thousands of years.

“The
most urgent question here is not how a collection of Pizza Huts,
Safeways, McDonald’s and Body Shops gathered together as a ‘souk’ will
recapture any lifestyle other than that of a shopping mall,” Saree
Makdisi, who is professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA,
has written. Mr. Makdisi is of Lebanese descent and often writes about
the development and preservation in the Arab world. “The point is not
that this is a misnomer, nor that a traditional souk is necessarily more
genuine and authentic than a shopping mall, but that something strange
is happening to our sense of history when we can confuse a shopping mall
with a souk.”

George
Arbid agrees. A bearlike man with an oval face and a commanding beard,
Arbid is director of the Arab Center for Architecture, and an associate
professor at the American University of Beirut. Late one afternoon, he
took me on a walk in the center of the city, not far from his office.
Too often, he said, the word heritage has been used solely to describe
Roman ruins and ancient times: “When I studied architecture” — which he
did both in Beirut at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts and at the
Harvard University Graduate School of Design — “the only modern
architecture you could find in books was in the West. We were the
ancient place. But look around. This is a modern society, and you can
see that in the buildings, here and throughout the Middle East.”

THE
DAY I ARRIVED in Beirut I was collected at my hotel by Huda Baroudi, a
cheerful woman who had offered to show me around. It was a lazy Sunday,
grim and gray, and I was jet-lagged. But her eyes were shining and she
was eager to take me to the Bechara el-Khoury Mansion, a 19th-­century
villa that long ago — before it had been abandoned, pillaged and finally
shelled during the civil war — was one of Beirut’s grand residences.

As
I settled into the passenger seat of her S.U.V., Ms. Baroudi, an
influential designer of textiles and furniture, propelled us at high
speed toward what looked like a four-way stop. Beirut’s streets are
narrow, potholed and anything but straight; a car was approaching
rapidly from the opposite direction, but Ms. Baroudi seemed unconcerned.

At
the last moment, the other driver swerved to let us pass. I was unable
to speak, but Ms. Baroudi laughed sweetly. “I looked into his eyes,” she
explained with a smile and a shrug. “And I could see that he would
yield the right of way.”

Somehow, I was not comforted. “This is how we do it in Beirut,” she continued. “All the road signs are in people’s eyes.”

That
turned out to be true, not just literally, but figuratively. There is
something singular about Beirut. It has one foot planted in the Middle
East and the other in Europe, but it doesn’t quite belong in either
place. Nothing seems permanent there; it is a perpetual transit point.
Generations have passed through its borders in search of fun, or out of
desperation. And for both reasons, they continue to come.

Perhaps
alone among great cities, Beirut has earned, and manages to maintain,
reputations both for wanton licentiousness and for utter terror. “There
it stands, with a toss of curls and a flounce of skirts, a Carmen among
the cities,” Jan Morris wrote in her great love letter to what she
described as “The Impossible City.” “It is the last of the Middle
Eastern fleshpots.”

That
essay was written in 1956, soon after Beirut hosted the World Water Ski
Championships in Saint George’s Bay. Like all clichés, the image of the
city as the Paris of the Middle East, was, at least in part, a fact.
From the time France reluctantly ended its mandate in 1943, and
particularly in the decades between the close of World War II and the
disaster that tore Lebanon apart in the 1970s, Beirut was more
cosmopolitan, more tolerant and, perhaps above all, more self-indulgent
than any Arab city. No other place could serve so effortlessly as a
luxurious pit stop for rich Europeans, Arab royalty and celebrities like
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The cafes were filled with radical
intellectuals, oil sheikhs and every kind of huckster. Even the
notorious have always felt at home in Beirut: Kim Philby, the MI6
officer who became the 20th-century standard-bearer for treachery, spent
many an evening at the bar of the Saint-George Hotel. The city was a
free port in the purest sense, a place where bars and clubs often seemed
at least as consequential as churches and mosques.

Even
today, Beirut, which is washed gently by the Mediterranean Sea and
ringed by mountains, remains unremittingly hedonistic. The city has a
Skybar, Le Sushi Bar and a nightclub named after the 1972 porn classic
“Behind the Green Door.” Beirut has Uber and a farm-to-table movement.
There are Prada and Hermès outlets on the Corniche, the city’s
magnificent seaside promenade, and a Virgin Megastore, too. In a single
week, I saw two lime-green Maseratis: one at the dealership, and another
parked outside Barbar, a snack bar in Hamra, widely considered to make
the best chicken shawarma in town.

Photo

Yet
Beirut is also the place where the car bomb and suicide vest emerged as
the quotidian weapons of jihad. It is the capital of a country that has
been without a president for two years. Hezbollah, based in Beirut’s
southern precincts, and the role model for many of the world’s terrorist
groups, is Lebanon’s only truly powerful and unchallenged political
organization. Today, more than a million Syrian refugees have swarmed
into the region, having fled the 10th-century carnage little more than
100 miles away. It is this constant tension that makes the city so hard
to understand — and such a fascinating place to visit.

“In
Beirut, precariousness is a form of identity,” said Christine Tohme, a
curator and director of Ashkal Alwan, a research, production and study
space that emerged in the 1990s as a place for artists to reclaim a
public identity. We were having fair-trade espresso at one of the city’s
many fine cafes. “Nothing works here — from communism, to socialism to
the big free market, to finding ways of being hipsters, or becoming
designers or artists or being in groups that are driven by social
media.”

Those
words, echoed often by people I met, certainly sound bleak. But Tohme
wasn’t so much complaining as explaining. This is common. Read a
transcript of what people say and you can see despair running through
every sentence. But if you listen to them speak, or better yet, decipher
their eyes, that desperation often vanishes. I asked if she ever
considered leaving the city where she has spent the bulk of her life.
“Of course,” she said. “But I don’t, and I am pretty sure I never will.
This kind of turmoil, this kind of volatility, this kind of
precariousness … ” She let the thought drift for a while. “I don’t
want to say that life in war zones forces us to be creative,” she
continued. “I know that is banal. But Beirut is a demanding city, and
that makes it vital and alive. And vitality produces greatness.”

Slide Show

Slide Show

BEIRUT’S
GREAT INTELLECTUAL passion, the search for identity, is on display in
almost every shop, museum and gallery. At Bokja, Ms. Baroudi and her
partner, Maria Hibri, create Modernist furniture with lavishly
embroidered textiles culled from dozens of regional sources. At the
recently renovated Sursock Museum, I saw an exhibition that presented
visions of the emerging city, from 19th-century Orientalist fantasies to
David Hockney’s arresting 1966 pen-and-ink rendering of the Rivoli,
Beirut’s Modernist cinema, which was demolished following the civil war.
But the show that most poignantly captured the effects of arbitrary
identity in Beirut was at the Sfeir-Semler Gallery. “Blazon” took Marwan
Rechmaoui years to produce. It consists of 59 ornamental shields, and
more than 400 flags — all elaborately embroidered by workers at Bokja —
and arranged by the city’s corresponding electrical districts.

While
I was in Beirut, I stayed at the Villa Clara, an idiosyncratic hotel
run by Olivier Gougeon, a French chef, and his wife, Marie-Hélene
Moawad. The hotel, really a house from the 1920s, has just seven guest
rooms, each decorated with antique furniture and paintings by local
artists. The floors are covered with boldly patterned artisanal Lebanese
tiles, most of them more than a century old, scooped up from houses
also on the verge of destruction. The public rooms are full of aesthetic
non sequiturs: There is an Andrée Putman table, hand-painted wallpaper
in the restaurant, a sculptured pink flamingo and a set of chairs that
had once occupied the French Senate. Each guest room is lit by a
hand-blown Damascene chandelier, all purchased from the old souk of
Damascus.

For
people who prefer small hotels that require visitors to think about the
city that surrounds them, Villa Clara is a treat. Most mornings, I woke
to the sound of twin songbirds at my window, then gazed across the
quiet, leafy street at a dilapidated villa, a remnant of the civil war
that somehow seemed more like a Brutalist sculpture than a house. The
surrounding neighborhood, Mar Mikhael, has the feel of Williamsburg in
the 1970s, before it became a hipster theme park, when big rigs still
rumbled through the streets at dawn. For every stylish bar and boutique
that sells copies of Nylon magazine, there is an industrial machine
shop, a tool warehouse or a company that wholesales lighting fixtures.
Like many neighborhoods in Beirut, Mar Mikhael could be swallowed any
day by the moneyed classes; for the moment, though, aided no doubt by
the difficult economy and a general reluctance to travel to the region
while so much of it is at war, young artists and writers can still
afford to live and work there.

The
food at Villa Clara is exceptional, particularly the breakfasts of
homemade labneh, the thick Lebanese yogurt that has been strained to
remove its whey, the freshly baked Levantine bread called manakish and
the eggs from chickens raised in gardens that the couple rents from the
Maronite Order in the nearby Chouf mountains. They cure their own ham in
the cellars of the St. Jean Maron Monastery — which had been closed
since the civil war. The hotel’s French restaurant is reliably
considered to be among Beirut’s best (and most expensive). Gougeon, an
ex-pastry chef at the Grand Véfour in Paris, arrived in Beirut in 1999,
to work as a cook at the French Embassy. He soon realized there would be
no turning back. “Here, there is total anarchy,” he explained, with a
look of pleasure in his eyes. “Chaos. You have to fight on a daily basis
for everything you get.” And like so many others I encountered, he
regarded that daily struggle as a benefit rather than an obstacle. “In
France everything is regimented,” he said. “There are hours and rules
and long vacations. Here there are no days off. And very little rest.
But we have something they no longer have: energy, desire and complete
freedom.”

IT
HAD BEEN NEARLY 20 years since I last visited Beirut. By then, the
hostilities, which ground on mercilessly from 1975 to 1990, had turned
the very name of the city into a synonym for war zone. More than a
hundred thousand people died; a far greater number were ripped from
their homes. Infrastructure — the telephone networks, the water system,
roadways — and most of the economy had all been crippled.

By
the 1990s, politics, war and hatred had run their course, at least for a
while. It was the perfect moment for the emergence of Rafik Hariri,
the blustery businessman who had moved to Saudi Arabia at the age of
21. Hariri entered the Saudi construction industry, advanced rapidly and
was soon running his own firm, becoming the personal contractor for
Prince Fahd. By the time he returned to Lebanon in 1992, to become the
country’s prime minister, he was a billionaire.

Hariri
set out at once to rebuild Beirut’s shattered urban center. An affable
man who liked things to be big and shiny and new, he had little interest
in sectarian fighting, but perhaps even less in preserving the essence
of what many people had long regarded as the Middle East’s most alluring
city.

Continue reading the main story

Hariri,
who was killed by a devastating truck bomb in 2005, loved yachts and
planes and, more than anything else, enormous real estate projects,
which is what the center of Beirut eventually became. To remake the
city, he created a company called Solidere, which is a French acronym
for the Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of
Beirut Central District. Squatters were removed from the city center,
which was then essentially demolished. In addition, more than half a
million square meters of land were reclaimed from the nearby sea.

Solidere’s
stated goal was to attempt to revive the memory of the days before
1975, when Beirut was pluralistic, prosperous and throbbing with
intensity. The company did retain and restore some of the bullet-riddled
facades that had withstood the rampages of the various militias. But
the development also wiped away centuries of history and most of
Beirut’s rich architectural heritage. To get a sense of that, one only
has to wander over to the Beirut Souks, which had functioned as a center
of commerce at least since the time of the ancient Phoenicians.
Solidere rebuilt the souks along its historical grid plan, which was
supposed to assure continuity. It didn’t: The souks today are filled
with shiny objects and marble floors. It is a great place to buy
moisturizer, a $10,000 handbag or a Patek Philippe watch. But the new
souks have far more in common with the Mall of America than with the
many Levantine bazaars that have dominated the Arab marketplace for
thousands of years.

“The
most urgent question here is not how a collection of Pizza Huts,
Safeways, McDonald’s and Body Shops gathered together as a ‘souk’ will
recapture any lifestyle other than that of a shopping mall,” Saree
Makdisi, who is professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA,
has written. Mr. Makdisi is of Lebanese descent and often writes about
the development and preservation in the Arab world. “The point is not
that this is a misnomer, nor that a traditional souk is necessarily more
genuine and authentic than a shopping mall, but that something strange
is happening to our sense of history when we can confuse a shopping mall
with a souk.”

George
Arbid agrees. A bearlike man with an oval face and a commanding beard,
Arbid is director of the Arab Center for Architecture, and an associate
professor at the American University of Beirut. Late one afternoon, he
took me on a walk in the center of the city, not far from his office.
Too often, he said, the word heritage has been used solely to describe
Roman ruins and ancient times: “When I studied architecture” — which he
did both in Beirut at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts and at the
Harvard University Graduate School of Design — “the only modern
architecture you could find in books was in the West. We were the
ancient place. But look around. This is a modern society, and you can
see that in the buildings, here and throughout the Middle East.”