The other side
How highways divided Beirut’s neighborhoods
How highways divided Beirut’s neighborhoods
Mar Mikhael usually evokes images of a buzzing
nightlife and hip restaurants; what few of the neighborhood’s visitors realize, however, is that there is more to Mar Mikhael than Armenia Street. Even fewer are aware that Mar Mikhael is not bordered by Charles Helou Avenue, but that it in fact splits it in two.
Located in Medawar in east Beirut, Charles Helou Avenue was constructed in 1958 to link Beirut’s northern entrance to the Beirut–Tripoli highway. Highways and roads were central to planners’ attempts at shaping the city and managing urbanization. In fact, prior to the 1964 master plan for Greater Beirut, written by the French architect and urban planner Michel Ecochard, the only plan that was approved by the government was the 1954 one, which was a little more than an network of intersecting roads with no zoning regulations and high densification factors.
Ecochard himself was famous for his numerous highway projects, the most famous of which is the Lebanese coastal highway, built in the 1930s. He thought increasing the vehicular capacity of existing roads would facilitate the transport of workers into the city. This modernist approach to planning was common in the West in the first half of the 20th century; engineers conceived highways according to traffic trends to maximize the efficient circulation of goods and people. TORN COMMUNITIES
In theory, highways reduce transportation costs, allow for specialization in production, and enable regions to develop a competitive advantage. In practice, however, in addition to producing congestion and pollution, highways hollow out the communities they cross through. There is also evidence that suggests that highways are disproportionately routed through underprivileged neighborhoods. In the United States, former transportation secretary Anthony Foxx has claimed that most of those displaced by highway projects were low-income African Americans. Road projects destroyed 1,500 buildings and 200 businesses in the now-vanished neighborhood of Brooklyn in Charlotte, North Carolina, while inner-city highways led to a 30 percent decrease in the population of Syracuse, New York.
Similarly, the construction of Charles Helou Avenue meant that the efficient circulation of automobiles was prioritized over the wellbeing of Medawar’s communities. Parts of Nour Hajin, an Armenian camp in the north of Mar Mikhael, were wiped out as the camp shrunk from 25,000 to 18,000 square meters. The Saint Therese Church was demolished to make way for the avenue. The avenue also stood as an obstacle for those living north of it, as they were now blocked from reaching Mar Mikhael Church by foot.
Residents of Mar Mikhael’s port side recalled in the first few decades after the avenue was built that hundreds had died attempting to cross the avenue over to the other side where most shops, such as convenience stores and butchers, were located. According to the same long-time residents, those crossing the avenue were also easy targets for snipers located in towers in nearby Saifi during the civil war, further disconnecting the two sides. The only pedestrian bridge