BEIRUT - We know construction is booming here because we awaken to the whine of the saw used to cut tiles for the apartment tower going up between us and our view of the sea. We know the building will have balconies, because in Beirut all buildings have balconies.
We don’t know whether it will be what Beirutis call a “good’’ building. If it is, our daughter Sonya tells us, the balconies will come with planting basins filled with soil. “Beirutis have become construction experts,’’ she says.
The daily wake-up call is our introduction to the building boom here. But “booms’’ are better than “bombs,’’ and the residents of a city that has known both are experiencing the noisy blessings of peace and prosperity. A growing number of tourists and part-time residents are enjoying them, too.
A 10-year resident of a capital still trying to live down its reputation as the onetime cosmopolitan mecca (“the Paris of the Middle East’’) that destroyed itself in a disastrous civil war, Sonya attributes the boom to visitors from oil-rich Persian Gulf states choosing to bypass the West in the post-9/11 environment of difficult traveling for Arabs.
“Many wealthy tourists from the Gulf countries have started spending summers, Ramadan, New Year’s, and other holidays here,’’ Sonya says. Citizens of more conservative societies, they want apartments of their own for regular sojourns to this tolerant, fun-loving city with a mild climate, an ocean on its doorstep, and great cuisine.
“And they tend to want deluxe high-rise tower apartments decked out in marble and fancy fixtures,’’ she adds.
We take in the visual density of this resurgent Beirut, its blue skies striped with construction cranes, from our daughter’s fifth-story balcony in the Ain el’Mreisse district. New apartment towers are rising to our left and right. We watch workers jimmying the scaffolding and winching down bucket loads of debris, no one wearing a hard hat. Straight ahead, the denizens of a charming, old-fashioned, flat-roofed house are repotting dozens of rose bushes and other plants in their extensive roof garden.
Behind them, other buildings of varying sizes and shapes interlaced with palm trees and a gigantic pine fill the receding horizon. The view is “Rear Window,’’ but with mosques, bougainvillea, and Arabic voices, the call to prayer rising at intervals above the clamor. We also glimpse a blue strip of the Mediterranean Sea, with a cloudless sky above and a statue of Gamal Abdel Nasser (the would-be Arab unifier) below.
