Among the more famous performers was Carmen Paddy. "She was English or Irish and she used to sing Arabic songs, and of course she could not sing Arabic, so they used to teach her how to say things in Arabic," said Kamal Salibi, a Lebanese historian who lives in West Beirut. "She was very beautiful."
The 1975-90 Lebanese civil war drove up to a quarter-million Christians from West Beirut, but mostly spared Hamra Street, which was not ravaged like downtown Beirut or subject to the violence that afflicted other parts of Lebanon. Still, Christians who remained on Hamra during the war were afraid to sell Christmas decorations.
When peace returned, Christians began moving back, as did many foreigners, students and scholars teaching or studying at American University, Lebanese American University or nearby Hagopian College.
Today, foreigners mingle easily with locals in what has become the equivalent of the city's downtown commercial district, since the old one has been turned into an upscale outdoor mall. Artists, businessmen, prostitutes, shoe shiners, merchants, college students and engineers all call it home. Laughing, fresh-faced students fill cafes and bars, such as the ultra-hip Prague nightclub.
After a 2006 political crisis strangled Beirut's elegantly restored downtown, more and more businesses, nightclubs and bars moved here.
But the forces of the contemporary world have also hit hard. There are fewer poor and lower-middle-class people. In place of quaint old cafes, there are now Starbucks and Costa Coffee.
"That modernity is Western modernity," said Kherat Zein, a 50-year-old painter who regularly meets her graying friends at the Cafe du Paris, the last of the grand coffee shops, which cautiously reopened after the fighting settled down and the most onerous of the gunmen melted away.
"It's not for us," she said. "Lebanese culture is my modernity."
Some of her friends, sitting in a half-circle beneath the cafe's sidewalk awning, disagree.
They say Hamra retains its charm and international flavor. And it doesn't matter that the young now sip Starbucks lattes instead of Turkish coffee while discussing art and politics, that they write on laptops instead of in spiral notebooks. Hamra will continue to radiate light against the dark forces that surround it, they say.
"When I see the young people on the street, it makes me very happy that this will live on," painter Fawzi Baalbeki said with a sweeping gesture at the street.
Rafiq Hajj, an attorney in his 50s, lives and works on Hamra Street.
"Hamra is the phoenix of Lebanon," he said. "Nobody can touch this idea."
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daragahi@latimes.com
