Holiday Inn Beirut

The Holiday Inn Beirut is a ruined high rise hotel in Beirut, Lebanon on Omar Daouk Street in the central Minet el Hosn neighborhood of the north-western corner of the downtown district of Beirut overlooking the Corniche seafront area on the Mediterranean Sea. The Holiday Inn operated in full-fledged service for less than a year before the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975.[1]

History

The hotel was constructed between 1971 and 1974 by Lebanese developer Abdal Mohsin Kattan[2] and designed by French architect André Wogenscky, working with Lebanese architect Maurice Hindié.[3] The 26-storey hotel included a revolving restaurant on the top floor, a nightclub on the 25th floor, and 400 guest rooms.[4] It was part of a mixed-use complex known as St. Charles City Center, including a cinema, offices, shops, restaurants, a supermarket. It was constructed on the site of the Hospital St Charles, which had been founded by the German religious order of Saint Charles Borromeo in 1908, but had moved to Baabda, north of Beirut, in 1963.[5] The Holiday Inn opened in 1974, at the height of Beirut's economic boom, when the city was the glamorous tourist center of the Middle East.

The Holiday Inn operated normally for only a year before the civil war broke out in 1975, and by then, the hotel was in the focal point of a war zone beginning on October 25, 1975[4]

See also

• Battle of the Hotels
• Le Commodore Hotel Beirut
• Lebanese Civil War

External links

• War Hotels: How the Holiday Inn became a symbol of the Lebanese Civil War (Aljazeera English documentary)