BEIRUT: “It really saddens me to see beautiful old buildings in Beirut being torn apart one after another,” says Bilal El Houri. “That’s not the Beirut I want. Why can’t we preserve old neighborhoods? Why can’t we protect them?”

One person may be unable to save Beirut’s historic architecture alone, but Houri has found a way to preserve some of Beirut’s old heritage – using new technology. Every day he posts several photos of the city on his website, Old Beirut. The images from the 1800s to the 1970s, mostly black and white, include buildings, streets, and squares, some familiar and some so altered by time that they are unrecognizable.

Houri started his blog on March 8 of this year, and it is already widely viewed. In an email interview with The Daily Star, he says his website recorded 3,100 unique visitors in one month, with more than 16,000 total page views.

He says that he came up with the idea for Old Beirut while reading BBC journalist Nada Abdelsmad’s 2009 book “Wadi Abu Jamil: Stories of the Jews of Beirut.”

The “blog certainly doesn’t reflect [the subject] Nada was talking about,” he says, “but in her book, she tries to give the reader a clear image about how Beirut was … during the last century, both socially and geographically.

“That was when it really hit me that the old Beirut is nowhere near the current one. If we take the same area mentioned in Nada’s book for example, Wadi Abu Jamil, it was so vibrant, it had a lot of interesting stories. But now look at it, it’s so fake and you can barely see a person walking around before getting kicked out by security guards.

“Being born and raised in Beirut, the city means a lot to me … all I wanted from this blog was to preserve something in Beirut,” hence the website’s tagline Preserving Beirut, one image at a time.

Old Beirut’s photos come from Houri’s own research, family, friends, various organizations, and viewer submissions. He says that he has some 1,000 photos, however he is careful to post photos only when he can acquire as much information as possible about an image’s provenance, so as to give proper credit to its photographer.

In making his an online project, Houri potentially reaches a different audience than that of published collections of historical photography, the best-known of which is “Beirut Our Memory, A guided tour illustrated with postcards from the collection of Fouad Debbas,” published in 1986.

“I think the Internet broke a lot of barriers in connecting people with each other,” he says. “Websites have a certain reach that physical books cannot get. I get visitors on it from all across the world … so I’d like to think that the blog is serving people that cannot be reached by physical products, or maybe I’m just filling a need for such a topic online.”

Some 40 percent of the site’s visitors are in Lebanon. The U.S. is second with 17 percent. The UAE registers 11 percent. Now a resident of Dubai, Houri is himself part of the website’s international nature. He says he left Lebanon in 2007 because of “the lack of job opportunities in my field.”

Houri’s goals are modest. “All I want to achieve is to spread the word and let people, [both] Lebanese and foreigners, see what Beirut used to look like. Maybe someday we will be able to find a solution for protecting old buildings.” He suggests legislation may be one way to achieve this.

For now, Houri will continue to post his images daily, reminding his viewers of a Beirut that is quickly disappearing as new developments take the place of historic neighborhoods. Wadi Abu Jamil, which inspired Old Beirut, no longer exists in spoken language – it’s now often referred to as “Downtown” or “Solidere,” after the company that redeveloped the city center.

“People everywhere else are fighting so hard to preserve their precious history,” Houri says, “and what are we doing? Deleting it, one building after another.”

Visit Old Beirut at oldbeirut.tumblr.com/