After a few days in Beirut, I found out that the hole WAS the Summerland - it had been demolished, and what I had seen next door was actually Coral Beach. I was shocked. How could they destroy such a new, first-class resort, built only in the early 1970s? Why? The Summerland had been damaged by the Israeli invasion of 1982 and thoroughly restored after that at great expense. I had memories there - my graduation party from my high school, International College, had taken place there. We once owned a small changing room there and I have memories of the water slides (2 LL per run), the ice-cold pool below (bad idea, though, since it was using precious artesian water) , the warmer, near-Olympic sized pool higher up... In Summer 1985, it was the only outlet my brother and I had as war blocked off access to the rest of the country. The only drawback was the windowless domed restaurant that looked like the inside a disco ball. (It was built in the 70s, after all. But the food was good!)
(Google Earth shows that most of the destruction took place as far back as 2004, if not even earlier! The new highways on the south side of Beirut veer you away from that area.)
To me, this represented a needless waste of perfectly good. solid, reenforced concrete buildings that could have lasted centuries. Building them involved an expenditure of money, labor, fossil-fuel energy, wood, metal, marble, and, last but not least, a substantial amount of cement and gravel from the quarries defacing Lebanon. All of a sudden, all that has been wasted, with all the expenditures to be repeated. While in the US it is now en vogue to restore older buildings and build "green" buildings to LEED certifications, here they were practicing the "anti-green."
A search on the Internet reveals that it is being rebuilt as the Summerland Kempinski Hotel and Resort. While the architectural images of the project look nice, I don't see why they could not just have updated the style of the old buildings without demolishing them.
As if this weren't bad enough, I just found out a few days ago that an even more significant landmark hotel, the Carlton, had been destroyed. It had actually happened before my trip but had not been aware of it, since I'd somehow missed passing through that part of the Corniche during my stay. A close examination of a photo I took from the plane window confirmed it; again, you can only absorb so much of Beirut on final approach. Here's a photo I took in 2008. It's the third building from the lower left, with the annex tower also visible.
This hotel was built the year I was born. It witnessed several historical events, including the election of President Sarkis during the war in 1976 and an attack by gunmen. I remember going to at least two art exhibits there with my parents. See the You Tube video (in Arabic) I attached elsewhere on this site. The hotel was even refurbished after the war. Its website, dating from 1998, still roams the Internet like a ghost. With copyright obviously no longer an issue, I took an image of it:
Not only was the old hotel demolished; they even demolished a more recent high-rise wing that was started during the war and never finished. And, as icing on the cake, a modern, tall building in the triangular piece of land across the street was also brought down, as observed in Google Earth.
The replacement, from what I saw on some web sites, is a very interesting, if overly tall, building with hanging gardens at two levels. But I don't see why it couldn't have been built on one of numerous empty lots along the Corniche.
Here in Phoenix and its surroundings, not exactly a beacon of "greenness" (just look at the urban sprawl), it has become chic to restore "Midcentury Modern" 50s and 60s buildings to their former glory, with some modern touches added. This includes sleek houses by Al Beadle and cool hotels. (Read more here: http://www.modernphoenix.net/) The Valley Ho Hotel, built in the 1956, is now one of the hottest spots in Scottsdale. Go to http://www.hotelvalleyho.com/scottsdalehotels/index.html? and make your way to the photo gallery. Doesn't the exterior look a little like a scaled-down Carlton? The outsiders who bought the Carlton Hotel have little appreciation for the country's history, and obviously don't care - the bottom line is all that matters. They destroyed it and missed a golden opportunity to create a chic, retro hotel that would have attracted many people looking for something different. Even in Beirut, just up the road in Rawche and elsewhere, buildings of the same generation have been updated. That includes the ultra-luxurious landmark InterContinental Phoenicia Hotel, another product of the early 60s. Why not these two hotels?
Between the Carlton and Summerland, four perfectly good buildings have been wasted, and now Beirut has to put up with the noise, dust and traffic of construction sites that did need to be. Heaven save that city if more and more of its newer buildings of the 60s and 70s are going to be destroyed in the continuing wave of Dubaization. It will be unlivable for decades to come.
The Lebanese and their government need to put their foot down and say no to the destruction of old Beirut in the name of profit making. "Old Beirut" is no longer just the Ottoman buildings of the early 20th century or the Art Deco jewels of the 30s. Even if not all buildings of the 60s and 70s are of historical significance, they represent a huge investment of money and natural resources that is in danger of being wasted while at the same time dooming the Beirutis to years of living in a huge construction site.
