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Cairo: Looking at central Cairo's Talaat Harb Square, it's hard to imagine that British lords and Egyptian princes once mingled there with songstresses and movie stars, that ladies strolled in sun dresses, and men in linen suits gambled away nights and fortunes in elegant casinos.
These days, unemployed youths shout vulgar catcalls at women shoppers walking past crumbling facades. Vendors on pot-holed sidewalks peddle Chinese-made T-shirts.
Legless beggars grab the ankles of passers-by for alms.
There are graver ills in Egypt's megalopolis of 18 million people: Outlying neighbourhoods thirst for drinking water, ramshackle houses collapse on shallow foundations and trash clutters miles of dirt alleyways.
Still, the district Cairenes known simply as downtown provokes a kind of longing for possibilities lost in a once cutting-edge and even glamorous city.
"The Talaat Harb district represented Cairo as a fresh capital of a European country," says Ala'a al Aswany, author of the 2004 novel Yacoubian Building, a chronicle of Cairo's moral decay set downtown. "It symbolised a vigorous, cosmopolitan Cairo."
It's hard to pinpoint any one reason for the decline. Rent controls have made it unprofitable to renovate the buildings' flowery stone fronts and Art Deco design.
Cairo's penchant for informal housing hurts: Squatters have taken root on rent-free rooftops.
Lack of zoning rules has also contributed: Kiosks, whose owners pay as little as $50(Dh183.50) a month to do business, fill once-spacious arcades.
If you look behind the wall-to-wall traffic jams and exploding population of the destitute, you'll discover a district originally created to resemble the glories of 19th century Paris, then the height of urban design.
Conception
"Downtown was a place of firsts: paved streets, gas lamps, underground sewers, the stock market, bars and grand hotels; everything that was new," says Abbas Tarabili, who has written two books in Arabic on Cairo neighbourhoods.
Talaat Harb Square was conceived by Esmail, an Ottoman viceroy who ruled from 1863 to 1879 and was given the hereditary title 'khedive.'
During a visit to Paris' 1867 Exposition Universelle, Esmail was impressed by the French capital's broad avenues, roundabouts and palaces.
"Egypt is no longer part of Africa," he declared, according to "Egypt's Belle Epoque," a history published in 1989. "It is part of Europe."
Esmail marked the eastern edge of his new district with an opera house. (A replica of Milan's La Scala, it burned down in 1971; a multistorey parking garage replaced it.) The Nile flowed by the west end.
Wide streets radiated a few blocks on either side of what was then known as Sulaiman Pasha Square.
"Esmail's Cairo has to be seen in the context of a larger, ambitious project of modernising Egypt," says Mahmoud Sabet, a historian and documentary filmmaker who lives in a mansion in Garden City, a khedivial-era housing area adjacent to downtown. Esmail established a public-school system that, for the first time, included girls.
He created Egypt's postal service, celebrated the opening of the Suez Canal by commissioning Verdi's opera "Aida" and revamped the army with advice from US Civil War veterans.
Even after Esmail was overthrown by British colonials, downtown thrived. Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Levantines cavorted with "native" Egyptians, British administrators and German bankers.
Many of these "foreigners" considered themselves Egyptians; Jews had lived in Egypt for more than two millennia. Agatha Christie flitted from tea dance to tea dance.
Entranced society
Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir stayed at the Semiramis, a palatial grand hotel on the Nile supplanted by an InterContinental.
Sabet recalls how an entranced Cairo society debated whether Rita Hayworth was too beautiful to be so uninteresting or too uninteresting to be so beautiful.
In 1952, riots centred in downtown led to the overthrow of King Farouk, Egypt's last reigning monarch. Foreigners fled the juggernaut of Arab nationalism sparked by Farouk's military successor, Jamal Abdul Nasser. Beyond downtown, socialist-style apartment developments arose for government functionaries.
A massive influx of rural job- seekers - Cairo's population was 2 million in 1952 - remade the city into a vast collection of villages.
In 2003, the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology moved west across the desert to a newly developed area, October 6 City.
Next on tap is emptying the Mugama, a huge government complex at the edge of Talaat Harb district, and dispersing its offices to outlying areas.
This fall, downtown faces another blow: The American University in Cairo, founded by Americans in 1919 and set two blocks from Talaat Harb Street, is moving its 5,000 students to a new 260-acre campus on a desert plateau east of the Nile Valley.
The moves reflect Egypt's embrace of a new symbol of modernity: Paris is out. US-style suburbs are in. They have names like Moon Valley, Swan Lake and Beverly Hills; and they boast malls and multiplexes, English-language private schools, and even - in October 6 City - an amusement park.
Exclusive residential compounds are also gated, with their own security guards and garbage collection.
They are distant from downtown in spirit, rues author Al Aswany. "The new Cairo is for a fearful elite," he says. "Downtown was a much more self-confident place."
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