Hamra- “Champs Elysées” of Beirut

Once known as the “Champs Elysées” of Beirut, the Hamra district has evolved with the passing decades, rising and falling with the changing fortunes of the city around it. Although its spotlight as the city’s culture capital has been partially eclipsed by the rise of Monot, Gemayze and Verdun, Hamra remains, now as ever, quintessentially Beirut.

Whereas Gemayze and Monot follow a nocturnal cycle, slumbering during the day and roaring to life at night, Hamra teems with life at any hour. During the day its sidewalks are packed with shoppers visiting the area’s high-end retail stores, businesspeople taking the air or hurrying to their next appointment, and a colorful array of passers-by with no business on the street but to see and be seen.

As it did in golden years of Beirut’s past, Hamra remains an ideal spot to duck into a shady café or sit out on a restaurant’s veranda, watching the unceasing parade of Beirut’s latest fashions ebb and flow around you. Few districts can claim to be more cosmopolitan, or more diverse – Hamra hosts an amazing variety of restaurants and lounges, and the discerning passer-by can find any genre to suit their tastes, from the musky interior of a dim wine cellar to the tropical flare of a Cuban café. Languages and cultures intermingle on the street in a dizzying collage of international clientele.

As the day wanes, the crowds of shoppers and businesspeople thin. For a few brief hours Hamra’s traffic becomes a steady trickle, as if the district were drawing the teeming streets into its heart for the space of a few, drawn out beats. At night, those streets return in force, a very different animal indeed.

While Gemayze and Monot provide a linear course, packed street to sky with bumping music and reeling nightlife, Hamra’s secret’s are often tucked away in the folds of it’s criss-crossing streets. It is a place to get lost, as new discoveries await around almost every corner.

The main Hamra street gets most of the night-time traffic, of course. Chic and sensual, glittering in the bright light of street lamps, passers-by are transformed into the cast of a cinematic screenplay, and it is possible to feel a little of the old Beirut still resonating up from the streets.

Traversing the streets at night, there is little doubt that Hamra is well on its way to attaining its old prominence as a center classy dining and lively nightlife. Many of Beirut’s biggest names in fine dining – the Italian-styled La Rouge, to name only one – have recently opened branches in Hamra, and more are scheduled to arrive in the future. Any evening of the week, restaurants tend to see a healthy flow of clientele, particularly in pleasant weather when diners can take their meals outside in the fresh air. Jazz stirs the air from the narrow alleys of Bread Republic and underground hall of the Mojo Jazz club.

Despite its apparent resurgence, Hamra maintains a more mature personality than its younger counterparts; jazz supercedes techno, elegance rises above erotic shock-value. And yet all tastes are on display as the night wears on – the elegant, the edgy, the dashing and the dispossessed cross paths in this, the heart of the city.

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Posted by Mahmoud Abdullah on March 18, 2010. Filed under Featured, News, Tourism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry