The intellectual centre of the Arab world in the 1960s, and still the place in Beirut with the best bookshops.
In the 1960s and early 70s, Hamra was the most intellectually alive street in the Arab world.
Beirut was the region’s banking centre, its publishing centre and its freest press. Cairo had Nasser’s censors; the Gulf had nothing yet; Damascus and Baghdad had their own arrangements. So the writers, journalists, exiles and political factions of the entire Arab world came to Beirut, and in Beirut they sat in the cafés of Hamra.
Café Horseshoe, Modca, Wimpy and the Café de Paris were where Palestinian, Iraqi, Egyptian and Syrian intellectuals argued out the politics of a region, alongside the students of the American University at the top of the street.
Most of those cafés are gone. Modca closed in 2003 and became a clothes shop, which was treated locally as a small national tragedy.
The war and after
Hamra was in West Beirut — the mostly Muslim half — during the civil war, and it was where the foreign press corps, the remaining universities and a great deal of political activity were based.
It survived better than downtown, largely because it was behind the line rather than on it, and it kept functioning throughout in a way almost nothing else did.
What it is now
A busy, worn, entirely un-touristy commercial and residential district.
Rue Hamra itself is ordinary retail — clothes, phone shops, pharmacies, banks — with cafés between them and a fair amount of empty frontage since 2019.
The bookshops are the reason to come. Antoine, Librairie Orientale and several smaller shops carry Arabic, French and English, and the range of Arabic publishing on sale is genuinely unlike anywhere else in the region.
The cafés — a mix of survivors, students from AUB and LAU, and a slow influx of newer places.
Bliss Street at the top, along the AUB wall, for cheap student food and the best manousheh stops in the city.
The bars — Hamra has a long-standing and unpretentious drinking scene, older and cheaper than Mar Mikhael, and considerably more mixed in age.
Cinemas, including Metropolis, the arthouse institution, which has moved premises more than once.
The honest bit
Hamra has been hit hard.
The 2019 collapse wiped out the savings of the professional middle class that lived here, closed businesses, and drove emigration on a scale that has changed the district. Streets that were busy are patchy. Empty shopfronts are common.
The electricity crisis is very visible: generators on every block, cables strung overhead, and the noise and diesel smell that go with them.
It is still one of the two or three parts of Beirut with a genuine street life, and it is where to stay if you want to be somewhere that is a neighbourhood rather than a nightlife strip.
Practical
Taxi or service; the Corniche is a ten-minute walk downhill.
Walkable, unusually for Beirut — the grid is dense and the distances are short.
Sanayeh Garden is fifteen minutes east, and Raouché twenty minutes west along the sea.
