4e Ras Beirut Hamra

Hamra Cafe has a new slogan that goes "Then. Now." with pictures of Piccadilly (a street perpendicular to the center of Hamra Street)! There was an artist when downtown was first renovated who had taken mass pictures of the downtown area before it was reconstructed and placed them exactly parallel to the new ones. I saw an art exhibit at the Tate Modern when I was living in London of an Arab Artists renditions of the Lebanese civil war with pictures of car explosions on the streets compiled from 1975 to date.

Lebanon's history is not a sympathetic one to the ears. It is as bloody as any history should be, and there is no surviving winner, so it is not as concise. Hamra in so many ways epitomizes the Lebanese experience as it is one of the few areas (though this is changing as the area is being gradually gentrified) that is for everyone.

Though this may be a biased perspective,  I do believe most people will agree that Ras Beirut is more diversified than Greater Beirut and that Hamra is the most diversified area in Ras Beirut. I say this carefully because it can be really difficult to measure the way the city is cut up and what area belongs to what sect especially in Ras Beirut, here there tends to be an assumption that the whole area is very Sunni, (city spaces in Lebanon usually are) but the area: is a shopping district, is filled with schools, is residential and buisness oriented at the same time. It caters to everyone's demands and needs, thus i will walk on egg shells and say the area is not purely Sunni.

I am afraid there are not enough statistics to validate my claim, and if there were their reliability would be questioned! If I am right about Hamra, I hope this is the outcome of the rest of Beirut by the time I pass.

(Hamra means Red in Arabic, and on a street parallel to Hamra is a cafe called Le Rouge, which means the Red in French, perpendicular to it on a corner is Olio, a pizza place designed and surrounded by green paint and trees, I find the mesh mash to be highly witty)

:)