21 April 2011

BEIRUT: It really saddens me to see beautiful old buildings in Beirut being torn apart one after another, says Bilal El Khoury. Thats not the Beirut I want. Why cant we preserve old neighborhoods? Why cant we protect them?

One person may be unable to save Beiruts historic architecture alone, but Khoury has found a way to preserve some of Beiruts old heritage using new technology. Every day he posts several photos of the city on his website, Old Beirut. The images from the 1800s to the 1970s, mostly black and white, include buildings, streets, and squares, some familiar and some so altered by time that they are unrecognizable.

In one of Old Beiruts images, a sepia-tinted photo of the Place de LEtoile from 1930, the area is clearly much changed. For one thing, the photograph shows cars, now prohibited in the roundabout. Most of the other buildings visible behind the clock tower no longer exist, or have been renovated beyond recognition.

Khoury started his blog on March 8 of this year, and it is already widely viewed. In an email interview with The Daily Star, he says his website recorded 3,100 unique visitors in one month, with more than 16,000 total page views.

He says that he came up with the idea for Old Beirut while reading BBC journalist Nada Abdelsmads 2009 book Wadi Abu Jamil: Stories of the Jews of Beirut.

The blog certainly doesnt reflect [the subject] Nada was talking about, he says, but in her book, she tries to give the reader a clear image about how Beirut was during the last century, both socially and geographically.

That was when it really hit me that the old Beirut is nowhere near the current one. If we take the same area mentioned in Nadas book for example, Wadi Abu Jamil, it was so vibrant, it had a lot of interesting stories. But now look at it, its so fake and you can barely see a person walking around before getting kicked out by security guards.

Being born and raised in Beirut, the city means a lot to me all I wanted from this blog was to preserve something in Beirut, hence the websites tagline Preserving Beirut, one image at a time.

Old Beiruts photos come from Khourys own research, family, friends, various organizations, and viewer submissions. He says that he has some 1,000 photos, however he is careful to post photos only when he can acquire as much information as possible about an images provenance, so as to give proper credit to its photographer.

In making his an online project, Khoury potentially reaches a different audience than that of published collections of historical photography, the best-known of which is Beirut Our Memory, A guided tour illustrated with postcards from the collection of Fouad Debbas, published in 1986.

I think the Internet broke a lot of barriers in connecting people with each other, he says. Websites have a certain reach that physical books cannot get. I get visitors on it from all across the world so Id like to think that the blog is serving people that cannot be reached by physical products, or maybe Im just filling a need for such a topic online.

Some 40 percent of the sites visitors are in Lebanon. The U.S. is second with 17 percent. The UAE registers 11 percent. Now a resident of Dubai, Khoury is himself part of the websites international nature. He says he left Lebanon in 2007 because of the lack of job opportunities in my field.

Khourys goals are modest. All I want to achieve is to spread the word and let people, [both] Lebanese and foreigners, see what Beirut used to look like. Maybe someday we will be able to find a solution for protecting old buildings. He suggests legislation may be one way to achieve this.

For now, Khoury will continue to post his images daily, reminding his viewers of a Beirut that is quickly disappearing as new developments take the place of historic neighborhoods. Wadi Abu Jamil, which inspired Old Beirut, no longer exists in spoken language its now often referred to as Downtown or Solidere, after the company that redeveloped the city center.

People everywhere else are fighting so hard to preserve their precious history, Khoury says, and what are we doing? Deleting it, one building after another.

Visit Old Beirut at oldbeirut.tumblr.com/

Copyright The Daily Star 2011.