Concern city’s fragile heritage will be lost forever to the bulldozers

The explosion in Beirut last week hit the 157-year-old Bustros Palace that houses the foreign ministry hard and damaged the 19th-century Sursock Palace, recently reopened after years of renovation.

Besides the damage it did to these symbols of Beirut’s heritage, it also tore through some of the city’s most vibrant neighbourhoods.

Urban heritage campaigners and experts worried that much of Beirut’s already disappearing historical architecture may be lost to demolitions that could bring down buildings too damaged or too costly to repair.

After the explosion, Beirut Governor Marwan Abboud estimated that at least 6,200 buildings were damaged and 300,000 people were left without homes. But a preliminary assessment by the Order of Engineers and Architects released on August 8 placed the number of damaged buildings much higher, at 200,000.

Naji Esther, the founder of Save Beirut Heritage – an NGO that works to conserve Beirut’s traditional architecture – said he was crushed to find that buildings he fought to protect were ravaged by the explosion.

“Now every single building that I’ve worked for and managed to save and had lawsuits against [me] while fighting for it, is either half gone or mostly gone or quarter gone,” Mr Esther said.

The most heavily damaged areas, including Ashrafieh and Karantina, also contain some of the densest clusters of heritage buildings, some of which date to the late 1800s, like the Bustros and Sursock palaces.

“This is an area of the city that people visit when they come to Beirut. It’s not just that there are a few heritage buildings,” said Mona Fawaz, a professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the American University of Beirut.

“It’s that it has a community of creatives. It has these bars, workshops and studios, but also elderly people who know the history of the city who make old buildings really live.”

For decades, activists campaigned to preserve the city’s historic structures even as abandoned buildings crumbled or were cleared for high-rises. Even the buildings legally protected by the culture ministry were often left to rot or fall down.

Campaigners largely blamed the destruction of salvageable buildings on weak enforcement of laws, politicians with vested interests, and property companies looking to build costly developments.

“This is an opportunity for people who want to get rid of old heritage buildings that they’ve been forced to preserve for variety of reasons,” Ms Fawaz said.

The exact number of heritage structures was not publicly known, but a 1997 study by the director general of urban planning catalogued 572 heritage buildings in Beirut.

Before the explosion, 150 may have come down, and the preliminary Order of Engineers’ report suggested that at least 100 remaining heritage buildings were likely to be located in areas that were severely affected by the blast.

Authorities said they will not allow the loss of Beirut’s old buildings. The Directorate General of Antiquities said it was inspecting the damage to listed heritage buildings as part of the Higher Relief Council’s assessment that will guide reconstruction efforts.

The directorate’s director general, Sarkis El Khoury, told

The National that authorities will insist damaged heritage buildings are repaired or rebuilt. What happens now that government resigned on Monday was unclear.

Mr El Khoury acknowledged that some damaged buildings may need partial deconstruction to be properly rebuilt, but he said there would be ministerial monitoring of such work.

“We all agreed that no building should be destroyed before the culture minister gives his authorisation. So even if it is a modern building, we should give them the authorisation,” he said.

Mr El Khoury also said the directorate would push the government to designate the grain silos at the port as a national monument, with a garden and access route.

But campaigners pointed to past experience or reconstructions after the 1975-1990 civil war and the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war as evidence that little will be done to stop the demolition of heritage sites.

On both occasions, once vibrant neighbourhoods were turned into gentrified ghost towns with the much of the city’s architectural history destroyed in the process.

Ms Fawas said Lebanon’s economic crisis was another issue for reconstruction.

“We were already scraping by to survive a very serious economic, monetary and banking crisis. People cannot access their money in the banks,” she said .

“Historical building seems like the least of our concerns. If I were in a historical building and I had recently restored it in some way and I have to now pay more money to do it [again], I would seriously reconsider that choice and maybe pack and leave,” she said.

With so much of Beirut’s future in flux, campaigners worried that the battle for the city’s heritage will be a long one and will be lost in a rush to reconstruction.

While the demolition of heritage buildings slowed in recent years as the property market reeled from recession, a building boom sparked by reconstruction money could unleash another wave of destruction.

We were already scraping by to survive a very serious economic, monetary and banking crisis MONA FAWAZ American University of Beirut