31 August 2005

Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series looking at the changing face of the old Beirut neighborhood of Gemmayzeh.

BEIRUT: "The neighborhood used to be quiet and calm past 9 or 10 p.m.," recalls Pierre Comati. "I'm not against progress, but we have had an invasion of people that we don't know and this has completely changed the soul of Gemmayzeh." Comati has been a resident of the Beirut quarter of Gemmayzeh since 1941. The change at the root of his anxiety is as global as the symptoms are local.

Nightlife in this town is a moveable feast. When the Civil War divided their city, Beirutis watered themselves either in Ras Beirut or in the northern suburbs of Kaslik and Zouq. In the late 1990s, restless clubbers migrated to Monnot Street, near Beirut's old Green Line between West and East Beirut.

For the last couple of years evening migrations have focused on Gemmayzeh, named after a sycamore tree that was once a landmark here. Since 2003, boutique-sized spaces - some derelict, others housing daytime businesses like butchers and magazine shops - have been turned over to miniature bars and bistros.

The change has been remarkable. In 1998 Gemmayzeh boasted two places to buy a drink - Qahwat al-Azaz (which has since been renovated beyond recognition and renamed the "Gemmayzeh Cafe") and Le Chef, which has changed only in the death of one of its senior partners. Today Qahwat al-Azaz and Le Chef share their street with some 15 different cafe-bar-restaurants with that number again preparing to open. The increase in street traffic has been commensurate.

Recent developments have been conspicuous, but these restaurants are not the first "outsiders" to enter the neighborhood - this newspaper has had its offices here since the mid-1990s and young couples have been drifting in, looking for cheap flats, for years. Changes in commercial usage can be ephemeral or they may signal more lasting social changes. Gemmayzeh had identities before its most recent metamorphosis, and there is evidence to suggest it will acquire others.

Wedged between Mar Maroun and the Ottoman mansions of Sursock Quarter to the south and Beirut Port to the north, Gemmayzeh is most likely recognized as the neighborhood on the eastern edge of Solidere's downtown reconstruction project.

Place names slide around over time and these days "Gemmayzeh" has come to refer to Rue Gouraud, named after the general who proclaimed the birth of "Greater Lebanon" and became the first High Commissioner of France's Lebanon Mandate. Before it became "Gouraud" it had a more functional name - the Tripoli Road.

A nebulously defined quarter, Gemmayzeh is sometimes mentioned in history books as a predominantly Greek Orthodox mercantile district. Others argue that, given the fact that the Ottoman tramline ran through here, it seems unlikely that it ever had the religious uniformity of Sursock, for instance. Nowadays its older residents are Orthodox, Maronite and Armenian, the latter seeming to have arrived after  World War I.

"We were the pioneers of the area," says Salim Hermes, chairman and general manager of Hermes Electrical store. The company opened in Gemmayzeh in 1956 and Hermes says his family is famous locally for erecting the Hermes Building, one of the first buildings in the neighborhood.

Hermes depicts a quarter largely untouched by changes radiating from the nearby city centre over the years, something that inspired people to leave. "The people who used to live here are either very old, or dead," he says. "Their children are leaving because they don't want to live in a building with no lift, or central heating ... This old neighborhood has known a revolution in its mentality lately because of the opening of all those restaurants."

People ate out in Gemmayzeh before 2003, of course, and there seems no uniformity of opinion among veteran restaurateurs about the recent changes.

The owner of the 50-year-old Snack Harik, Mrs. Harik, complains that people who've lived in Gemmayzeh for tens of years are now selling their houses and leaving because daytime street life is extinct. "Sure they increased the night-time activity," she says, "but they killed the movement of the daytime in the process."

Francois Ephrem Bassil, chef and owner of Gemmayzeh's landmark Le Chef Restaurant, is pragmatic about the changes. "Now there are many restaurants, and it's better. They're replacing old places with bars and restaurants, resulting in more activity at night."

Apart from the original Qahwat al-Azaz, he says, his was the first restaurant to open in this area in 1967. "When I opened Le Chef," he recalls, "one of my neighbors asked me, 'Why are you opening a restaurant? There's nothing here.'"

Times have changed. The proliferation of new bars and restaurants has changed the social makeup of the night-time traffic moving through the neighborhood. This has had its inevitable impact on the business environment.

Gemmayzeh Mukthtar Elie Nassar estimates that residential and commercial rents in Gemmayzeh have increased by 2000 percent in the last three years. He hastens to add, though, that this increase can't be attributed to the restaurant boom alone.

Like everyplace else in the country where residency has been stable since before 1975, Gemmayzeh operates within the "old rent" regime. Lebanon's currency was remarkably stable until the 1982 Israeli invasion, being much closer to parity with the U.S. dollar than it is today. After 1982 the currency underwent radical devaluation.

Consequently, anyone who made rental arrangements before the currency started going terribly wrong may still pay at the old rate - LL250.00 per month, for instance. No legal provision has yet been passed to allow landlords to bring rents up to speed with today's exchange rates. Tenants have the prerogative to stay at the old rates until they leave (landlords can charge new tenants at market rates, of course) or to renegotiate their rates voluntarily. Solvent landlords sometimes buy out the old rent contract, effectively paying their tenants to leave.

Most of the rate increases, Nassar says, derive from landlords' re-negotiating old rental agreements. One of the first of the new restaurants to open in the quarter (Barouie), for instance, rents a space that used to go for $100.00 per month. The present tenants pay $2000.00 a month.

If the rents had been fair to begin with, Nassar continues, the recent increase would be a mere 100 percent.

In the moral economy of what tenants should have been paying all along, a rent increase of 100 percent may be modest. In real terms, though, an opportunity to increase earnings by the margin separating old rents from market rates - in otherwise sleepy Gemmayzeh, no less - would be tempting for any landlord. There is a market engine behind social change in this quarter.