A Downtown Eulogy: Gentrification, Memory, and the Unraveling of My Cairo
Prologue
Writing about cities and memory at this moment feels difficult. As I write, cities across the Gulf are subject to attacks triggered by a war instigated by the United States and Israel. I find myself worried about friends, former students, and colleagues scattered across the region. It is a moment of reckoning. A moment that compels reflection, and perhaps the difficult task of learning lessons so that such destruction is not repeated. In times like these, it becomes necessary to return to questions of memory and place—not as sentimental exercises, but as forms of resistance to the forces of erasure and violence, regardless of where they originate. Such confrontations must be honest and unflinching. There is little value in pretending that “everything is fine.” It is not.
The fading glamour of downtown Cairo
On January 3, 2026, I left my home in Maadi and ordered an Uber to downtown Cairo. Destination: Felfela. The act itself felt ceremonial, as if I were returning to a site of pilgrimage. The car slid onto the Ring Road, skirting the ashwa’iyat—those dense informal settlements that have long framed Cairo’s uneasy modernity. I thought of my book Arab Modernism(s) and the persistent tension between vision and improvisation, between state ambition and everyday survival. From the elevated highway, the city looked like a palimpsest of failed promises and stubborn resilience.
We entered downtown through Qasr al-Aini Street, approaching Tahrir Square with a caution that felt less about traffic and more about memory. I was dropped off next to Hoda Sha’arawy Street, home to Felfela, the famous Ful and Falafel restaurant. Before eating, I needed to walk. I turned toward Tala’at Harb Square.
Groppi was closed. Covered in cloth. No sign of renovation, no announcement of an imminent reopening. Just a shroud. Once, Groppi was Cairo’s answer to Europe, a confectionary dream echoing a cosmopolitan age. Now it stood mute, like a stage set after the actors have fled. I lingered, recalling scenes from Youssef Chahine’s films—especially Cairo Station—where downtown throbbed with desire and despair. The Cairo of that age was messy, alive, unvarnished. This felt embalmed.
Madbuly bookstore was open, but diminished. Its storefront reduced, the outdoor displays of books and magazines gone. In the 1970s and 1980s, this was a sidewalk republic of ideas: newspapers flapping in the wind, glossy magazines, political pamphlets. Now it felt contained, cautious. A shadow of its former self. I thought of The Cairo Trilogy and how Mahfouz’s characters moved through a downtown that was porous, morally complex, open to chance encounters. That porosity is disappearing.
Madbuly Bookstore. A shadow of its former self
Tala’at Harb Square
Walking along Tala’at Harb Street, I noticed scaffolding and careful restoration. The Isma’iliya Development Company has been methodically refurbishing facades. The Belle Époque returns—at least visually. When I was a child, this street was packed with shoe stores. Vendors clogged the sidewalks selling belts, socks, cheap toys. The chaos was democratic. Now there are artisan coffee shops, curated restaurants, souvenir boutiques. And tourists. Many tourists. I do not remember it being like this before. Downtown was ours—crowded, yes, but not staged.
Radio Cinema still stands, though no longer a cinema. For a time, it was a television studio. Bassem Youssef filmed his program Al Bernameg there before exile turned him into a global comedian and occasional pundit. The building carries that residue of dissent. Now the passage leading to it houses a Diwan bookstore, a café, and a souvenir shop. I entered the shop out of curiosity. Objects were displayed with museum-like reverence—and priced accordingly. A young Japanese couple examined papyrus prints and brass trinkets. For a moment I felt I was in a heritage district curated for export, not in the unruly downtown of my adolescence. Further along, Cinema Miami retained something of its seedy aura. Once, as a teenager, I would pause to inspect the lobby displays: Egyptian film stills, actresses in miniskirts from the 1970s, a fleeting liberation framed in glass. That particular spectacle is gone, but a residue lingers. Across the street stands Cinema Metro, more refined, where I watched Jaws as a boy—terrified and exhilarated—and later The Water Carrier Is Dead, an adaptation of Youssef El-Seba’i’s morbid novel. The cafeteria Excelsior, once attached to the theater, was shuttered. Another institution erased without ceremony. Another setting relegated to the dustbins of history,
I then embarked on a futile quest to find Lehnert & Landrock, that legendary purveyor of orientalist postcards and rare books. I passed the heavily guarded synagogue—barriers, security, a reminder of layered histories and persistent anxieties. At the bookstore’s former address: nothing. In its place, a mobile phone shop. My GPS insisted it existed further along. It did not. I later learned it had moved upstairs, to a smaller space, still selling its reproductions and photographs. But on that afternoon, it felt like a metaphor: heritage displaced, miniaturized, hidden on the first floor. In contrast, Dar Al-Ma’aref and A’alam al-Kutub remained steadfast. Arabic publishing houses that look almost exactly as I remember them. Their continuity offered solace and comfort.
By then I was famished. Felfela did not disappoint. Ful and ta’amiya—stewed beans and fava patties—served in that same rustic interior unchanged by fashion. It is one of the fragments that survived the city’s relentless editing. Afterward, I walked to Café Riche. Once a haunt of revolutionaries, intellectuals, politicians. Naguib Mahfouz had sat here. So had actors like Youssef Wahbi, Anwar Wagdy and Leila Mourad. Photographs line the walls, a curated nostalgia. I ordered a local drink and sat in contemplation. But Riche is no longer a site of rebellion. It is frequented by Arab tourists, Europeans, Egyptians of a certain class. Outside the Cafe, young people took selfies. Performance replaces politics. A group of sha’abi teenagers loitered outside, curious. I sensed they would not be welcomed in. Inclusion has become aesthetic rather than social.
When I stepped back into Tala’at Harb Square, I noticed a security checkpoint occupying a large section of the sidewalk opposite Dar Al-Shorouk bookstore. Officers sat casually on chairs. Behind them, another building under renovation. Surveillance and restoration proceed hand in hand. As I waited for my Uber back to Maadi, I felt an ache that is difficult to articulate. The downtown of my youth is gone. What is emerging is a sanitized heritage spectacle catering to tourists and the affluent. The chaotic inclusiveness—imperfect but vital—is being replaced by curated order. Cinemas, Felfela, Café Riche: these are fragments of memory, stubborn relics.
I am reminded of the movie In the Last Days of the City. Its protagonist wanders through a Cairo on the brink, sensing that something irretrievable is slipping away. That film captured a city suspended between revolution and erasure. To extinguish the fire of a revolution, perhaps one must first erase its spatial traces. Erase memory itself.
And yet I will return. I always do. Downtown remains a chapter in My Cairo, even if rewritten by others. The façades may be restored, the sidewalks disciplined, the shops curated—but beneath the surface, the city’s older rhythms persist, faint but audible. Cairo resists finality. It mourns, it adapts, it remembers.
