According to an article on Now Lebanon and another on Beirut Report, it seems like the post I wrote back in March on the new highway in Achrafieh connecting Hazmieh to Charles Helou is true, since the project has already been given a green light and works might start in a month or so.
And ever since the news was spread, “Save Beirut Heritage” has been opposing the project as it requires destroying 28 old buildings. But how true is that?
I mean let’s assume each building has only 3 to 4 families living in it, then the government should currently be in the process of buying a minimum of 90 apartments in order to later destroy them and be able to go forward with the project. But 90 isn’t a small number, that’s 90 families who can easily coordinate a protest or at least appear on TV to oppose being evacuated from their apartments, which is not the case right now.
That means the number of buildings is either much lower than 28, and therefore a large chunk of the highway will be underground, or the government is offering a really large sum of money for the families and they’re simply happy with it.
And let’s be real for a moment, the highway might be seriously endangering Beirut’s heritage, but old buildings in the areas of Achrafieh and Mar Mkhayel are rapidly disappearing anyway to make way for high rise towers! So are we over-reacting a little bit here..?
Anyway, I personally don’t really see the need to connect Charles Helou with Hazmieh through a highway passing by Achrafieh, since there’s already another highway connecting Hazmieh to Karantina which is pretty close to Charles Helou!
It would have been great if it was all underground, especially at the level of the Gemmayze/Mar Mikhael main street.
It would be much better to finally work on real and modern public transportation instead of building highways which will be no solution for all the cars we have in beirut specially because alot of them come to work from outside beirut. The other thing that bothers me is that the governments dont care for our heritage and they dont save them by law and the greedy developers destroy hundreds of years so easily just for money and Lebanon looses what distinguishes it from other countries and thats the history
What about a subway system. I came across this article by a Lebanese architect:
http://marounkassab.com/?p=268
The project sounds viable don’t you think?
Only a 229 meters of 1.3Km will be underground, so the majority of the road will be above ground: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Local-News/2013/Jun-04/219337-activists-decry-boutros-highway-project.ashx#axzz2Vk4YMFlD