Daily Life History

Daily life in Beirut during the 1970s

A grounded look at apartment households, seafront routines, offices, universities, cafes, markets, service taxis, family networks, and unequal access to comfort in Lebanon's capital.

Beirut in the 1970s carried forward much of the commercial and cultural energy visible in Beirut during the 1960s. The city was a Mediterranean port, a banking and publishing center, a university town, and the center of an economy strongly weighted toward services. Arabic was widely used in everyday life, while French, English, and Armenian had importance in particular schools, publications, firms, and neighborhoods. Hamra and Ras Beirut, Achrafieh, Basta and Mazraa, the port district, the southern suburbs, and Bourj Hammoud in Greater Beirut offered very different daily experiences. A 1974 economic mission found prosperity and rapid private investment, but also rising prices, deficient public transport, overcrowded housing, and sharp inequalities obscured by national averages.[1]

The decade was not uniform. Offices, schools, universities, cinemas, cafés, beaches, restaurants, markets, and family visits remained part of early-1970s life, although access depended on income and location. The clashes at Ain al-Rummaneh on 13 April 1975 are conventionally treated as the start of a war that lasted until 1990; intense fighting in 1975–76 divided the capital along armed front lines, and the 1976 ceasefire did not restore a stable city. East Beirut was again heavily shelled during the 1978 “Hundred Days” fighting between Syrian forces and the Phalange.[3] Routines therefore differed not only before and after April 1975 but between districts, ceasefires, renewed battles, and households that stayed, moved within the city, or left Lebanon.

Housing and Living Spaces

Housing in 1970s Beirut ranged from sea-facing apartments and villas to older stone houses, subdivided rentals, workers' rooms, and dense low-rise construction on the metropolitan edge. The contrast was structural, not merely decorative. In 1974 the World Bank reported that 15 percent of the capital's dwellings were already classed as luxury units; investment continued to favor expensive buildings, while rent controls discouraged new non-luxury construction. Its mission judged that workers' pay could not meet the market price of even modest accommodation and that the public program comprised only 695 units, with studies for 2,325 more—very little beside population growth and the stock of overcrowded or substandard homes.[1]

Where space and income permitted, reinforced-concrete apartment blocks offered balconies, tiled floors, bathrooms, and a reception room or salon for visitors. These features should not be made into a city-wide norm. Some families shared flats or rooms, and lower-income housing was often close to workshops, factories, garages, markets, or transport routes. Refugees and recent rural migrants were prominent in precarious settlements at the metropolitan margins. Research on Karantina, for example, reconstructs a mixed community of Lebanese, Palestinian, Armenian, Kurdish, and Syrian residents, many living in tanaké—wooden shacks clad with flattened metal—and working in factories or informal trades. Most of its institutional archive was later destroyed, so this account depends in part on newspapers, land and Red Cross records, and retrospective oral histories.[6]

War turned unequal housing into repeated displacement. Karantina and the adjoining Maslakh settlement were attacked and destroyed in January 1976; other residents fled buildings near the emerging front line or moved in with kin.[3][6] A dwelling that remained standing could still lose the systems that made it usable. In spring 1977, a reconstruction mission found that electric pumps serving Beirut's water network suffered frequent outages, leakage may have consumed half the supply, and water was being rationed by shutting different sectors in rotation. The city's new solid-waste plant was inoperative; inadequate open trucks collected what they could, while refuse accumulated or was burned on beaches and other open ground.[4] Storing water and food, adjusting washing and cooking to supply hours, and relying on nearby relatives or neighbors were therefore consequences of damaged infrastructure, not timeless features of Beiruti domestic life.

Food and Daily Meals

Daily meals drew on household cooking, neighborhood bakeries and grocers, produce markets, cafés, and restaurants. Bread and other cereal foods remained especially important. National food-balance sheets for 1971–73 attribute 45.7 percent of available dietary energy to cereals, including bread; meat, fish, dairy products, and eggs together supplied 11.1 percent. These are supply estimates for Lebanon, not observations of what a Beiruti family ate, and they conceal differences of income, religion, age, and refugee status.[7] They support a broad picture of bread, rice or bulgur, pulses, vegetables, fruit, yogurt, and oil as important categories, but not a fixed menu or a claim that meat or mezze appeared at a particular interval.

Shopping was often local and frequent, particularly where cash, storage, or refrigeration was limited. Bread, vegetables, coffee, sugar, rice, oil, soap, and cigarettes could be bought from bakeries, grocers, market stalls, and street vendors; the port and wholesale trade linked those small transactions to imports and produce from elsewhere in Lebanon. Household equipment varied. Gas burners, aluminum or enamel cookware, coffee pots, and storage jars were available, but neither appliance advertising nor the existence of a domestic refrigerator industry establishes ownership in every class of home. Preparation, serving, preserving, and cleaning were substantial forms of labor, usually assigned unevenly within families and, in affluent homes, sometimes shifted to paid domestic workers.

Public food culture was more diverse than household budgets. A restaurant article prepared before the fighting and published in late 1975 named Al-Ajami in the old cloth souk, fish restaurants south of the city, hotel dining rooms, and Japanese, Armenian, French, and other establishments; it also observed office and street snacks such as manouche and shawarma.[8] This is useful contemporary evidence for what was sold and for Beirut's international visitor economy, but its prosperous businessmen, hotels, and celebrated restaurants do not represent most residents. After 1975, the destruction of port warehouses, broken transport links, inflation, power cuts, and unsafe routes could restrict both supply and access.[4] The effect varied by district and by each household's cash, storage, cooking fuel, and family network; the evidence does not justify one standard wartime shopping strategy.

Work and Labor

Beirut's working life in the early 1970s was built around services, trade, finance, education, media, construction, transport, tourism, printing, retail, port activity, and manufacturing. National figures should not be mistaken for a city census, but they show the capital's weight: a 1974 mission placed 68 percent of Lebanese industry in Greater Beirut, while services accounted for about 70 percent of national output. Port imports rose from 1.7 million tons in 1967 to 2.8 million in 1973, helping sustain work in shipping, warehousing, customs, driving, wholesaling, and repair as well as office employment.[1] The benefits were distributed unevenly, and occupational status depended on education, language, citizenship, gender, and social connections.

Factory work was neither marginal to the metropolis nor adequately captured by Beirut's banking-and-tourism image. Research using Arabic workers' publications, newspapers, union records, and later interviews describes young and recently urbanized workers in the industrial suburbs, with food processing, textiles, garments, furniture, wood, and metal among the main branches. Average weeks of 50–53 hours exceeded the legal maximum of 48, protective equipment and drinking water could be inadequate, and employers used daily hiring to evade leave, rest-day, and social-security obligations. In garments, where female and daily labor was especially important, average pay in 1974 was reported below the legal minimum.[2] The Gandour sweets-factory strike of November 1972, violently broken up by the Internal Security Forces, makes these conditions and organized resistance more concrete than a generic list of occupations.

Movement through the city was part of the job. Workers used buses, shared “service” taxis, private cars, motorcycles, and walking routes, but the 1974 economic mission already described public transport as inadequate and noted that poorer workers often had to live close to employment.[1] Fighting then changed both workplaces and routes. By 1977, the central commercial district, much of the low-income peripheral belt, and an estimated 60 percent of Beirut's industrial plants had been destroyed; port traffic had resumed with damaged warehouses and equipment, while telephone service required major repair.[4] Some institutions and firms reopened or relocated, but a safe commute, a functioning phone, and access to customers could no longer be assumed. Women's paid work in schools, offices, health care, factories, sewing, shops, and domestic service continued alongside unpaid household labor, but evidence from the garment sector cannot be used as a measure of all working women.

Social Structure

Beirut's social structure in the 1970s was layered by class, education, neighborhood, religion, family origin, language, gender, citizenship, and access to property or foreign connections. Wealthy families, professionals, merchants, senior officials, and university staff lived very differently from port laborers, domestic workers, taxi drivers, street vendors, junior clerks, workshop workers, refugees, and recent migrants. Yet schools, offices, buses, markets, apartment buildings, hospitals, cafés, cinemas, and seafront promenades brought many groups into daily contact. This proximity did not erase inequality: in the early 1970s, expensive construction and speculative land prices coexisted with overcrowded housing and low-paid industrial work.[1][2]

Family remained the main structure of support. Relatives helped people find apartments, jobs, school places, doctors, loans, marriage partners, and travel opportunities. Visits were frequent, and the obligations of weddings, funerals, baptisms, engagements, religious holidays, exam success, and illness could stretch household budgets. Reputation mattered in choosing tenants, employees, spouses, and business partners. Education was a major route to status, especially through universities, private schools, professional training, and language skills. Arabic was the everyday base, but French and English often carried value in banking, medicine, tourism, higher education, journalism, and social presentation.

Public sociability had many forms. Men were highly visible in cafés, shops, offices, workshops, and evening streets, while women moved through schools, markets, offices, clinics, religious institutions, family visits, and shopping districts in ways shaped by class and household expectations. Students used university campuses, bookshops, cinemas, cafés, and shared apartments to widen their social worlds; AUB's surviving records document a hundred-day student strike in 1971, protests over tuition, and student support for workers, evidence that campus life was political as well as social.[5] After 1975, checkpoints and armed front lines narrowed many people's range of movement. The “Green Line” separated armed zones, but neither side was socially or religiously uniform, and ceasefires could reopen routes temporarily.[3] Beirut was therefore neither simply cosmopolitan nor neatly divided: mixed workplaces and kin networks persisted amid coercive territorial separation.

Tools and Technology

Everyday technology combined consumer goods with repaired, shared, and improvised equipment. Some homes had refrigerators, gas cookers, electric fans, radios, cassette players, televisions, sewing machines, irons, washing machines, water heaters, rotary telephones, or record players; no source consulted provides a reliable city-wide ownership rate. Access therefore matters more than the catalog. A refrigerator depended on electricity, a tap on electric pumping and an intact distribution main, and a telephone on working exchanges and cables. The 1977 reconstruction report estimated 220,000 subscriber lines across pre-war Lebanon, more than 90 percent automated, but found war damage ranging from local networks and exchanges to vehicles and repair workshops.[4]

Offices used typewriters, carbon paper, filing cabinets, rubber stamps, adding machines, telephones, telex equipment, and ledgers. Newspapers and publishers depended on presses, typesetting equipment, delivery vehicles, and skilled print workers; shops and workshops used tools specific to food processing, garments, shoes, furniture, metalwork, and repair. Transport technology shaped time and opportunity: buses, service taxis, cars, motorcycles, trucks, port cranes, airport services, and coastal roads connected Beirut to its suburbs and the wider region. During fighting, however, a vehicle could not overcome a closed crossing, and broken power, telephone, port, or water systems multiplied household labor. Reliability, fuel, repair skill, and safe access mattered more than whether a device looked modern.

Clothing and Materials

Clothing reflected climate, class, occupation, age, religion, and setting. Suits, jackets, ties, dresses, skirts, blouses, polished shoes, jeans, and imported fashions are visible in photographs and commercial writing, alongside uniforms, aprons, overalls, and practical work clothes. These images are selective. AUB's holdings include press, university, political, and studio photographs, but cameras disproportionately preserved public events, prominent people, and well-known streets; they cannot establish how frequently most residents owned or wore a particular style.[9]

Cotton, wool, linen, denim, leather, and synthetic fabrics could be bought ready-made or made up by tailors and seamstresses. A 1970 industrial table counted 397 Lebanese shoe-and-clothing firms employing 5,641 people, while the labor evidence shows that garment production relied heavily on subcontracting and low-paid female and daily workers.[1][2] Clothing was therefore both personal presentation and other people's labor. Alteration, mending, hand-me-downs, laundering, and shoe repair extended use, especially when budgets tightened. After 1975, access to shops, workplaces, water, and electricity varied with the security and services of each district; it is safer to describe these constraints than to infer a uniform wartime fashion or a universal turn to garments sent from abroad.

Evidence and its limits

No surviving source defines an average Beiruti household for the whole decade. The 1974 economic report is contemporary and unusually detailed, but largely national and written for development planning; its authors warned about uneven statistics. The 1977 reconstruction mission is strong evidence for damaged systems at a particular post-ceasefire moment, not proof that every district experienced the same outage. Labor research recovers workers often missing from political histories, but concentrates on organized industrial districts before April 1975. AUB's Ras Beirut interviews were recorded in 2014 from older residents of varied backgrounds, so they preserve experience filtered through memory and remain specific to one part of the city.[5] Photographs and restaurant writing capture visible material culture but favor what photographers, editors, and visitors found noteworthy. These limits are why the article avoids a precise population, appliance-ownership rate, “typical day,” or universal account of food, dress, and family labor.

Daily life in Beirut during the 1970s joined seafront leisure, university streets, apartment hospitality, offices, print culture, markets, factories, workshops, service taxis, and family obligations. From 1975, armed geography and damaged infrastructure made the same city materially different from one district or week to the next. Households kept homes, meals, clothing, schooling, and livelihoods going through paid and unpaid labor, nearby shops, repair skills, and social networks, but the capacity to do so was never equal.

References

  1. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Current Economic Position and Prospects of Lebanon, report no. 670a-LE, 20 May 1975. Based on a mission to Lebanon in July 1974; includes contemporary evidence on prices, housing, transport, industry, and trade. Digitized report.
  2. Tufaro, Rossana. “Workers Do Not Liberate Themselves Other Than with Their Own Hands—The Political Experience of Workers' Committees in the Industrial District of Beirut (1970–1975).” International Labor and Working-Class History 104 (2023): 143–163. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547923000224.
  3. Traboulsi, Fawwaz. A History of Modern Lebanon. 2nd ed. London: Pluto Press, 2012, especially chaps. 11–12 and the chronology. Digitized edition, Library of Congress.
  4. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Report and Recommendation of the President on a Proposed Loan to the Republic of Lebanon for a Reconstruction Project, report no. P-2113-LE, 15 June 1977. Based on missions in February–April 1977; documents port, telephone, water, sanitation, housing, and industrial damage while cautioning that reliable post-1975 statistics were scarce. Digitized report.
  5. American University of Beirut, Neighborhood Initiative. “Ras Beirut Oral History Project.” Describes 60 interviews conducted in 2014 with men and women over 70 from different social and educational backgrounds. Project description. See also AUB Archives and Special Collections, finding-aids directory, for the AUB Students' Activism Collection, 1970–79.
  6. Lteif, Diala. “The Conditions of the Working Class in 1960s Beirut: Fire and Everyday Struggles in Karantina.” Antipode 57 (2025): 1041–1061. Its main period is the 1960s, but it supports the account of the settlement's material conditions. Open-access accepted manuscript, University of Cambridge. A conference brochure for Lteif's associated oral-history project documents the destruction of most archival sources in January 1976: American University of Beirut.
  7. Nasreddine, Lara, Nahla Hwalla, Abla Sibai, Mouïn Hamzé, and Dominique Parent-Massin. “Food Consumption Patterns in an Adult Urban Population in Beirut, Lebanon.” Public Health Nutrition 9, no. 2 (2006): 194–203. Table 7 reproduces historical national food-balance data for 1971–73; these measure availability, not individual intake. https://doi.org/10.1079/PHN2005855.
  8. Allan, Donald Aspinwall, with photographs by Tor Eigeland. “This Was Beirut.” Saudi Aramco World 26, no. 6 (November–December 1975): 8–12. Written before the fighting; useful as a contemporary account of restaurants and foods on sale, but oriented toward visitors and affluent diners. Magazine archive.
  9. American University of Beirut, Archives and Special Collections. “Photographs & Postcards.” Collection guide to approximately 100,000 images, including the Manoug collection, which mainly documents Lebanon from the 1940s to the 1970s. Collection description.

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