The best street in Beirut for a night out, flattened by the port blast in 2020 and largely rebuilt by volunteers.
Armenia Street and the lanes off it are the centre of Beirut’s nightlife, and have been since the scene moved east from Gemmayzeh in the early 2010s.
What it was
A working-class district of workshops, garages and small nineteenth-century houses, with a large Armenian population — hence the street name, and the neighbouring quarter of Bourj Hammoud, which was built by survivors of the 1915 genocide.
From about 2010, artists and bar owners moved in, priced out of Gemmayzeh. Within a few years Mar Mikhael had the best concentration of independent bars, galleries, design shops and restaurants in the city, in ground-floor spaces that had been mechanics’ workshops.
The gentrification argument is the usual one and it was already being had loudly by 2018.
4 August 2020
Mar Mikhael is less than a kilometre from the port.
The explosion hit this street and Gemmayzeh harder than anywhere else in the city. Bars were full at six in the evening. People were killed at their tables and in the street. Almost every building lost its windows, doors and often its facade.
The photographs from the following morning — glass, rubble and blood on Armenia Street — are the images most people outside Lebanon associate with the blast.
What happened next
The state did essentially nothing.
The clearing and rebuilding of Mar Mikhael and Gemmayzeh was carried out by volunteers, neighbourhood groups and NGOs, working with donated money, in the weeks and months after. Young people came from across the country with brooms. Organisations like Offre Joie, Beb w Shebbek, the Lebanese Red Cross and dozens of smaller groups did the reconstruction, building by building.
Heritage organisations fought to stop damaged historic houses being demolished and their plots sold, which developers moved quickly to do.
Some of it came back and some of it did not. Many bars reopened. Many businesses never did, and the economic collapse that had already begun in 2019 finished a great many of them.
What it is like now
Busy again, particularly Thursday to Saturday. Bars, natural wine places, small restaurants, galleries and design shops along Armenia Street and up the stairs into the lanes.
It is loud, it is young, and it goes late — Beirut’s nightlife has a reputation that survived the war, the collapse and the blast, and this is where you find it.
There is also visible unrepaired damage, empty shopfronts and buildings still shored up. Both things are true at once, and that is Beirut.
What to look for
The stairs. Several long public staircases climb from Armenia Street up towards Achrafieh — Escalier Saint Nicolas is the best known, and hosts an art event most years.
The galleries — Mar Mikhael and neighbouring Karantina hold much of Beirut’s contemporary art scene, including Sursock-adjacent spaces, artist-run studios and design showrooms.
Train station remains. The old Mar Mikhael railway station is behind the street — Lebanon’s railways stopped running during the war and the rolling stock is rusting in the yards, which is a strange and rather affecting thing to see.
Practical
Evenings, Thursday to Saturday for the full version; quieter and pleasanter earlier in the week.
Taxis are the way in and out. Ride-hailing apps operate in Beirut.
It is a residential street as well as a bar street, and the noise dispute between residents and venues is longstanding. Be reasonable on the way home.
