"A crashed Ford T on Gouraud Street at the beginning of the 1920s. (Credit: Georges Boustany Collection.)
If you are reading these lines seated at Paul in downtown Beirut, you are exactly where this road accident occurred a little over a century ago. The camera is positioned on Gouraud Street — still called River Road — looking west.To the left, a street emerges, which will later be named Georges Haddad; for now, it bears a brand new name: Independence Street. Because before the independence of 1943, there was that of 1918, after four centuries of Ottoman occupation. The building on the left, with its arched colonnades and honeycombed plaster, is still there.There are photographs that are silent and others that still hum with echoes. This one, taken in the early 1920s, resonates with the murmur of onlookers. The crash must have awakened this neighborhood from its early afternoon stupor: the Ford Model T (the famous “Abou daassé” of our...
If you are reading these lines seated at Paul in downtown Beirut, you are exactly where this road accident occurred a little over a century ago. The camera is positioned on Gouraud Street — still called River Road — looking west.To the left, a street emerges, which will later be named Georges Haddad; for now, it bears a brand new name: Independence Street. Because before the independence of 1943, there was that of 1918, after four centuries of Ottoman occupation. The building on the left, with its arched colonnades and honeycombed plaster, is still there.There are photographs that are silent and others that still hum with echoes. This one, taken in the early 1920s, resonates with the murmur of onlookers. The crash must have awakened this neighborhood from its early afternoon stupor: the Ford Model T (the famous “Abou daassé” of...
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