Alexandria of the heart's mind

Alexandria of the heart's mind
Alexandria is about to be hit by two million tourists. Keeping ahead of the crowds, Fatemah Farag looks at the current drive to rehabilitate the "bride of the Mediterranean" and finds a contest in which conservation, profit and the demands of a growing population vie for space profit and the demands
"The one city which for me always hovered between illusion and reality, between the substance and the poetic images which its very name aroused in me. A memory, I told myself, which had been falsified by the desires and intuitions only as yet half-realised on paper. Alexandria, the capital of memory! All the writing which I had borrowed from the living and the dead, until I myself had become a sort of postscript to a letter which was never ended, never posted ..." Lawrence Durrell, Clea
Yes, I know. to begin an article on Alexandria with a quote from Durrell is a cliché. Whether or not Durrell's Alexandria ever existed, the city has moved on and we should now come to grips with today's reality. There is a "new city": people and cars jostle for space, there are livings to be earned, a plethora of development concerns to address and choices in between. But glance down a narrow alleyway with a flight of stone steps climbing among old buildings with shuttered French windows; look up at graceful, iron-wrought balconies; or stand in what used to be Cavafy's bedroom and gaze over the old city and down towards the sea, and how can you not think of "light filtered through the essence of lemons"? (Durrell, Justine).
It is the remnants of the not-so-old city that pull our heartstrings. Alexandria is not just another developing-world case, suffering growing pains. In the words of Adel Abu Zahra, head of the local NGO, Friends of the Environment, "Alexandria has grown, and there is a new city in areas such as Mandara and Maamoura. Fine. But the heart of Alexandria is the old city, the cosmopolitan city. If this is not preserved, Alexandria would become indistinguishable. It could become just any other city."
But the "heart" of the city is heavy with modern burdens. The drive for profit and high real-estate value has repeatedly beaten the logic of conservation. A population that used to be 600,000 in 1927 is projected to reach 4.6 million by 2017. Over one in three of the current population lives in Alexandria's 57 shanty areas, while population density in middle-class areas such as San Stefano has reached 211 persons per feddan (by law each feddan should support no more than 150). Without proper zoning, it has become common for people to complain about coffee-shops and restaurants opening up beneath their homes bringing noise and hygiene and security problems to their dwellings.
Three hundred and fifty-five thousand cars throng streets designed to accommodate only 100,000. Pollution pervades the city, as illegal high rises on the corniche prevent the sea breeze from cleaning the inner city air. Forty per cent of the city's garbage is not collected and, although the city is proud to house 40 per cent of the nation's industry, many factories have yet to comply with the environment law. As a result, the areas of King Maryout, Khalig Al-Max and Abu Qir have been identified as international "hot spots," ( i.e. environmental disasters), by the 1997 Barcelona report, which also blamed the city for a staggering 30 per cent of the Mediterranean's pollution. Of the city's one million cubic metres of daily sewage, 250,000 are released raw into the Mediterranean through an outlet near the Qayt Bey Fort; 600,000 cubic metres are released into the already over-polluted Maryout Lake after primary treatment. The remainder is siphoned into trucks which, it is alleged, release their cargo into the sea, anyway.
Alexandria, however, is not one of those cities easily intimidated. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina will soon open its doors. In 1998, the Université Leopold Senghor, the world's first international Francophone university, opened. The corniche is expanding, fly-overs are built, palm trees are sown into the pavement near Anfoushi, and much ado is made about the "beautification" of public squares. But many argue that, at best, much of the effort only grazes the top of the list of things that need doing, and at worst is in bad taste. "The current efforts are a face-lift, not real development," argues Mohamed Awad, head of the Alexandria Preservation Trust (APR). "Core issues, such as housing, opening the port area, linking up with new towns such as Borg Al-Arab, relieving the congestion in the city centre of Ramleh, still demand serious work. The city is also poor in terms of recreation and tourism facilities."
According to Abu Zahra, "There has been little development of the real Alexandria, the Alexandria of the people. Turn off the corniche and streets are broken and garbage piles high. But perhaps the most disheartening thing is the tearing down of old villas and buildings. The charm of this once cosmopolitan city lies in its architecture and there are wonderful examples of baroque, art-deco and even neo-Pharaonic buildings. But it is not only that they are being demolished. Many are run down and licences are given for extra floors which mar their beauty. Not a week passes without something being torn down and the result is urban disharmony."
Awad, a member of a committee appointed by the governor to review demolition requests, told Al-Ahram Weekly that the committee had not convened in months and that, in the meantime, there was an obvious escalation in demolition. "Demolition was under control until recently. However, in the past three months, buildings on the Heritage List, which comprises 1,750 structures, have been brought down."
The Weekly was unable to ascertain which houses were recently demolished but, as far as Abu Zahra is concerned, it is a moot point. "Look everywhere and you see violations. On Nabi Daniel street [a narrow downtown street] a building has been brought down in favour of a high-rise. On Safiya Zaghloul street the same, indeed, everywhere," he says with a sad shake of the head. "What committee can be effective in this day and age where money and a kind of vulgarity seem to reign? The committee is pour la forme but it has no real authority." He tells us a story to validate his point. "There is a committee member who had the villa next to his house illegally pulled down and the owner obtained a licence for a 10-storey building, which is illegal. The committee member has been unsuccessful in remedying the situation," recounted Abu Zahra.
To deal with a quickly deteriorating situation, Abu Zahra's NGO runs from one court-house to another: a case against the people who pulled down San Stefano Hotel and want to build a high-rise complex; a case against the rebuilding of private clubs on the new corniche; and one against the privatisation of 50 per cent of the International Garden. Awad is setting up an independent Heritage Management Unit, in collaboration with the governorate and the Natural Centre for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage. They know they must move fast, or the things they care for will soon join many others as so much rubble. "One of the things that continues to break my heart is a small garden that used to be in the Bab Sharq area. It was called 'the Garden of the Fellaha' because it had a statue of a farmer woman at its centre and it had wonderful trees that were planted in 1932. The governor decreed that the Ministry of Culture could build an administrative building on the land. When we made a fuss, it was converted into a mosaic museum. Now the garden is lost forever."
But it is not just about the buildings or the parks. "I miss a city which was a bourgeois city of finance. An elite upper-class has been usurped of its commercial and financial resources and (Alexandria) has been transformed into a workman's town based on industry and services. Today the city is ruled by the culture of the petite-bourgeoisie," lamented Awad.
The argument may sound crude, but this was a city where women rode the tram in evening dress and Edith Piaf came to sing. To get a better idea of that elusive "something" that is missed by so many, take a look at what happened to Pastroudis, restaurant and patisserie. At first, there was the cosmopolitan city, a haven for minorities fleeing Europe and Asia. The Egyptian government also found refuge from Cairo's heat, moving to Alexandria for the summer. Pastroudis was established in 1920 by Khawaga Pastroudis, a Greek. It was inherited by his son, Atanach Pastroudis, in 1927. Atanach married a Swiss woman who came to work at a famous shop named Gabrielle. Together they ran a restaurant of the highest calibre. King Farouk is said to have dined there, and when Umm Kulthoum came to sing in Alexandria once a year, she had to go to Pastroudis. At first, the Pastroudis pair were famous for their restaurant and bar but soon they added a bakery. Every morning, people lined the street waiting for their bread. But between 1950 and 1956, the influence of the foreign communities decreased and, in 1956, after the Tripartite Aggression, many Jews, French and British left. In 1961 came the nationalisations and, during that year, Atanach Pastroudis' shipping interests were nationalised, and he died. His wife held on until 1972 but it was too much and her only daughter wanted to go back to Switzerland. She sold to Fayed Kasabgy, a Cairo-based accountant, who handled the affairs of Trianon and Athenious. Kasabgy sent his recently graduated son, Faris, to Alexandria, to manage the shop. "When I arrived the place was really run down. Madame Pastroudis stayed with me a year and a half teaching me the trade and soon the place was booming again. We expanded by taking a place on the water in Glym. It was the first self-service restaurant in Egypt," recounted Faris Kasabgy with pride. Fast-food and the infitah were changing people's tastes. "Recently, I decided to leave Glym to set up a new place at the International Gardens. After all, that is the future of Alexandria," says Farid Kasabgy. The downtown Pastroudis is once again run down, and Kasabgy is the first to accept the demise. "What can I do? The clientele downtown is no longer the same and to keep the place intact has already required large investments for little return. I am trying to get a big-name caterer such as Marriott's to come in and take over the management." I look at him in amazement and he smiles. "Well, it is fair enough. I didn't pull it down like the Beau Rivage Hotel or San Stefano Hotel. I stuck it out and took the Pastroudis name out to the new Alexandria elite." And so another chapter. A new elite and international management.
It is after all a battle of survival, the question being how much can be preserved along the way.
Mohamed, my cab driver, is hopeful. "The Alexandria of my childhood was beautiful. I remember that when it rained, the streets shone and you would swear that someone had polished them by hand. Today, when it rains, the city becomes a dirty swamp. But I see things getting a bit better and I hope that after having reached the dumps we will be able to pull the city together. I want my children to have the opportunity of seeing at least a bit of the city of my childhood." And as I look towards the sea, beyond the colourful fishermen's boats of Anfoushi and the wet stone of Qayt Bey, I, too, am again overwhelmed by that bittersweet constriction of the chest known as nostalgia.
"The city, half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory..Have I not said enough about Alexandria?"
Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar
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