The Grand Tour 05: Beirut and Kodachromes from Cairo, 1950

  

Beirut, Lebanon 

 

On the Avenue des Français, Beirut, Lebanon, October 14, 1950 (post card)

After leaving Delhi, my dad flew to Beirut on Pan American Airlines. It was a long trip, with stops in Karachi and Basra. Each stop wasted time with passport and cholera certificate inspections.  

Oddly, I did not see any slides from Beirut but came across a commercial post card. He never mailed it, and there was no location information. Was it Manila? Alexandria? Using the Google image search function, I saw a photograph taken by Mahmoud Hammad, a Syrian photographer featured in the Atassi Foundation for Arts in Damascus. He photographed some gents standing at the same balustrade with the same arched building in the background.

This was the famous corniche along the sea, the Avenue des Français. But it no longer exists because the bay was filled in with garbage during the horrifying Lebanese civil war of the 1970s. 

My dad wrote, "Beirut turned out to be a pretty clean place and the people looked European altho many of them wore the fez and there were some Arab costume." 

I vaguely remember Beirut from a visit with my mother some time in the late-1950s. She liked the city. It was sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and clean, and the women were modern and dressed stylishly. The cuisine was famous. It was known as the "Paris of the Middle East" prior to the 1975 Civil War. 

 

Cairo, Egypt

 

On the rent-a-camel

What do most tourists do immediately after they have checked into their Cairo hotel? They go to the Giza plateau to see the pyramids and the Sphinx. Where did the fez come from?

 

View west towards Giza

In this scene, this part of Cairo is a nasty collection of dirty 3- and 4-floor flats. As I recall from 1978, many parts of the city did not look much different, but some of the flats were crumbling. (One day, I will scan my 1978 Cairo slides.)

 

 Tea shop 

Tram - once one of the world's largest streetcar systems

Pet camel

Talaat Harb Street in downtown Cairo

Semiramis Hotel (built in 1907) on the left and the "new" Shepheard Hotel

My dad stayed in the Shepheard Hotel in 1950. My wife and I also stayed there in 1978. But by then, it looked rather tired and well-used. The original Shepheard Hotel, the one you see in mystery movies and Agatha Christs stories, was somewhere downtown, but it burned in a 1952 fire.

 

Mosque and madrasa of Sultan Hassan, Salah al-Din Square, built between 1356 and 1363 CE 

This ends a quick trip to 1950 Cairo. It is a fantastic destination. Go there as one of your life goals. Just do it.

My dad took these Kodachrome slides with his Leica IIIC camera and its 5 cm ƒ/2 Summitar lens. I scanned them with a Nikon CoolScan 5000ED film scanner running NikonScan 4.03. I made minor color corrections with Photoshop Elements 2024. 

 These were all real photographs taken by a real human 75 years ago - NO Ai GARBAGE.

 

Addendum 

 

My mom and dad returned to Egypt possibly in 1955, but I do not have an exact date. 

 

On the rent-a-camel

Happy rent-a-camel