Daily life in Beirut during the 1960s

A grounded look at routines in a Mediterranean port city shaped by apartments, commerce, education, multilingual exchange, and visible class difference.

Beirut in the 1960s was a major commercial, financial, publishing, and educational center on the eastern Mediterranean. Its port, airport, banks, offices, shops, schools, universities, and cafes tied the city to the wider Arab world, Europe, and the Lebanese interior.[1][4] Daily life was marked by movement between neighborhoods, workplaces, and family networks rather than by a single urban model. A clerk in Hamra, a dockworker near the port, a schoolteacher in Ras Beirut, a domestic servant in an affluent household, and a street vendor in a market district could live in the same city under very different material conditions. Beirut's reputation for sophistication rested on real urban amenities, yet ordinary routine still depended on household budgeting, kin support, and unequal access to housing and services.

The decade also had a chronology. It opened just after the 1958 insurrection and U.S. military intervention. Reform and state-building under President Fuad Chehab (1958–64), and then Charles Helou (1964–70), coexisted with a liberal, service-led economy and persistent social and confessional inequalities.[1][10] The October 1966 failure of Intra Bank exposed the fragility beneath the banking boom: a contemporary World Bank mission recorded a run by large and small depositors, while later historical work stresses the losses faced by thousands of small account holders.[4][10] After the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967, political print and Palestinian organizing became more prominent in Beirut.[1] The familiar label “golden age” therefore describes one visible culture of consumption and leisure, not the whole decade or population.

Housing and Living Spaces

Housing in 1960s Beirut ranged from spacious apartments and detached villas in wealthier districts to older subdivided buildings, modest flats, and dense mixed-use streets where shops and homes stood close together. Apartment living was increasingly characteristic of expanding districts. The detailed land-use and household survey that Samir Khalaf and Per Kongstad conducted in Hamra between 1964 and 1967 records rapid replacement of gardens and detached houses by multistory residential and commercial buildings, but Hamra's relatively prosperous and unusually mixed population makes it a poor model for the city as a whole.[2] Room number, privacy, building condition, income, and tenancy mattered as much as the broad label “apartment.”

Balconies, shutters, tiled roofs, and cross-ventilation mattered in a coastal climate with hot summers and damp winters. Households organized interior life around family routine and hospitality; where space permitted, a sitting room or salon allowed visitors to be received without opening the rest of the dwelling. Electricity and piped water were established urban services, and refrigerators, washing machines, and air conditioning were marketed and used in the capital, but appliance ownership should not be treated as universal. Research on electrification finds that electricity-intensive comfort in 1950s and 1960s Beirut was also a conspicuous sign of new wealth.[9] Paid domestic help could reduce an affluent household's laundry, cleaning, and childcare burden, while in many homes this work remained unpaid and was distributed unevenly among women, girls, and other relatives.

The apartment-centered picture omits residents of informal districts. In Karantina, beside the port and slaughterhouse, refugees, migrant laborers, factory workers, and informal workers lived in both concrete buildings and wooden shacks clad with flattened tin. Diala Lteif's study, drawing on Lebanese newspapers, Red Cross records, land records, and later oral histories, identifies at least ten fires there between 1960 and the major fire of February 28, 1965. That fire destroyed hundreds of shacks and left thousands without homes; metal cladding impeded firefighting, and residents salvaged possessions or rebuilt while landowners sought to prevent some returns.[3] The evidence supports the material contrast between concrete and tanaké housing, while responsibility for individual fires is less certain than residents' repeated suspicions of eviction by arson.

Location shaped daily experience directly. Residents close to shops, schools, offices, and seafront roads could make more journeys on foot, while those farther from commercial corridors depended more heavily on buses, shared “service” taxis, or longer walks. Cars were increasingly prominent, but contemporary newspaper discussion of traffic rules, pedestrians, parking, and congestion shows that automobility was already contested rather than effortless.[5] Housing was therefore tied to social standing, access to schooling, commuting cost, neighborhood identity, and the time required to cross the city.

Food and Daily Meals

Daily meals in 1960s Beirut reflected Lebanese urban food culture and the city's strong market connections. Bread and other cereal foods, rice, bulgur, chickpeas, lentils, yogurt, olives, vegetables, fruit, and oils were important categories, but the evidence does not support one city-wide menu. National food-balance data for 1961–63 indicate that cereals, including bread, supplied about half the available dietary energy. Such figures measure commodities available in Lebanon after production, imports, and exports—not what a particular Beiruti ate—and conceal differences between refugee and non-refugee households, incomes, and neighborhoods.[6] Bakeries, neighborhood grocers, produce sellers, butchers, market stalls, cafes, and restaurants joined household cooking to the public food economy.

Food shopping could be frequent where storage space, cash, or refrigeration was limited. A refrigerator could reduce shopping frequency, but bread and other perishable foods still encouraged local purchasing. Women's labor was central to planning, shopping, cooking, serving, and cleaning in many households, though paid workers, daughters, sons, and older relatives could share particular tasks. Work and school hours changed who was present for a midday meal; coffee, sweets, fruit, and shared dishes also served the practical demands of receiving visitors. These were flexible arrangements, not a fixed breakfast-lunch-dinner timetable that can be assigned to all families.

Income affected diet, storage, and the ability to absorb changing prices. Wealthier households had broader access to imported foods and restaurant dining, while households with less cash had to make greater use of filling staples, seasonal produce, and careful purchasing. This is a safer distinction than assuming regular meat consumption or a precise meal pattern from national supply data. Daily meals linked household labor to a street-level economy of ovens, cafes, grocers, and vendors, as well as to the port and import trade on which Lebanon depended for many foodstuffs.

Work and Labor

Beirut in the 1960s supported office work, port labor, retail trade, banking, publishing, education, construction, transport, tourism, and a wide range of skilled and informal occupations. A 1967 World Bank mission estimated that services produced 56 percent of Lebanon's gross domestic product in 1964 and described Beirut as the country's principal port, handling well over two million tons of freight in 1966; it also recorded almost 1.4 million arriving, departing, and transit passengers at the airport that year.[4] These national and transport statistics cannot count every urban job, but they explain demand for clerks, warehouse hands, customs and travel staff, drivers, hotel workers, repair trades, and shopkeepers. Small family businesses also relied on kin labor that did not always appear in formal employment records.

Working life depended heavily on movement through the city. Buses, service taxis, private cars, and walking connected neighborhoods to office streets, schools, markets, the port, and entertainment districts. Travel time varied by address and means, while traffic, parking, pedestrian movement, and route access were already public concerns as car ownership expanded.[5] Work schedules varied by sector: office hours differed from the longer, customer-led days of many shops and from evening work in hospitality and transport.

Women's wage labor was visible in schools, offices, shops, health care, factories, domestic service, sewing, and family enterprises, though marriage, family respectability, and unpaid domestic responsibility shaped who could work and under what conditions. Evidence from Lebanon's tobacco industry shows women workers negotiating family obligations and organizing around workplace grievances in 1960–65; it corrects any impression that working women belonged only to Beirut's professional middle class, though it is not a measure of the capital's female workforce.[7] Manual laborers, domestic servants, and informal workers generally had less security than salaried professionals and established merchants. Education, language skills, citizenship, and social connection affected access to the more secure positions.

Social Structure

Beirut's social structure in the 1960s was highly stratified, yet schools, shops, transport, workplaces, and streets brought different groups into daily contact. Wealthier families had more access to large homes, private schooling, domestic help, and leisure spaces, while lower-income households had fewer buffers against illness, eviction, or unstable wages. The city contained long-established urban families, migrants from the countryside, regional visitors, students, foreign professionals, and refugees. Palestinian camps on Beirut's outskirts were part of this urban world without enjoying equal legal or material conditions. A 1967 UNRWA photograph of Burj al-Barajneh, analyzed by Ilana Feldman, records dwellings patched from flattened oil drums, corrugated iron, wood, and sacking only minutes from luxury apartment blocks.[8] One image cannot define every camp home, but it makes the city's unequal building materials unusually concrete.

Family and kin networks were important sources of housing leads, jobs, marriage introductions, school opportunities, and credit in times of strain. Social life also formed around neighbors, religious observance, school communities, and professional circles. Cafes and seafront spaces gave the city a visible public social world, but access varied with gender, age, occupation, and spending money; visiting in homes remained important. Arabic, French, and English carried different practical value according to the school, office, publication, or customer involved.

The city's cosmopolitan reputation should not obscure the importance of class, education, neighborhood, citizenship, and family reputation. Access to schools, jobs, housing, and leisure was distributed unevenly. Urban mixing and persistent hierarchy therefore coexisted, and the ability to move between different social settings depended partly on schooling and household resources.

Tools and Technology

Technology in 1960s Beirut combined established urban utilities with expanding consumer goods. Telephones, radios, record players, electric lighting, refrigerators, sewing machines, gas cookers, washing machines, and air conditioners were advertised or used, but surviving evidence does not establish their ownership across the whole city. Offices used typewriters, files, telephones, calculators, and duplicating equipment, while port work depended on trucks, cranes, scales, warehouses, and paperwork. Cars and service taxis were increasingly visible even though buses and walking remained essential. Electricity, piped water, and a usable road or telephone connection often mattered more to routine than possession of a fashionable appliance.[4][9]

Public modernity was especially noticeable in media and commerce. Newspapers, magazines, books, posters, cinemas, and advertising circulated through homes, streets, shops, and workplaces. Zeina Maasri's study of printed matter shows that Beirut was both a commercial publishing center and, especially after 1967, a platform for anticolonial and Palestinian political graphics.[1] At household level, a refrigerator could alter food storage, a telephone could speed business or family contact, and a private car could change mobility and advertise status. Access, maintenance, fuel or electricity costs, and the labor saved are more revealing than a simple list of inventions.

Clothing and Materials

Clothing in 1960s Beirut varied with climate, occupation, class, age, and setting. Tailored jackets, skirts, shirts, dresses, trousers, and polished shoes appear in contemporary urban photographs alongside work clothes and less formal daywear. Some residents followed European fashion closely; others combined imported styles, locally tailored garments, and dress shaped by family or religious expectations. Tailoring and ready-made clothing coexisted, and an outfit for work, school, worship, a family visit, or an evening out could carry different expectations.

Material quality could signal status. Better-off residents had greater access to imported fabrics, finer shoes, jewelry, handbags, and a larger choice of garments; households with less money had stronger reasons to mend, alter, hand down, and reserve particular clothes for school, work, worship, or visits. Laundry and ironing tied public presentation to water, electricity, equipment, and often women's labor. Marilyn Stafford's photographs made in Beirut in 1960 include market sellers, a beauty pageant, a central cinema, and a seaside club; together they show how occupation and setting changed dress, but the original publicity commission and the photographer's choices prevent the series from establishing how common any style was.[11]

Evidence and its limits

No source used here describes an average Beiruti household. Khalaf and Kongstad's 1964–67 survey is unusually close to the decade, but it concentrates on Hamra; the surviving notebooks, maps, and photographs in the American University of Beirut archive preserve a particular research encounter rather than the whole city.[2] The 1967 World Bank mission explicitly warned that Lebanese statistics carried a considerable margin of error and noted that the latest population census was from 1932.[4] Food-balance sheets measure national availability rather than household consumption, photographs show what entered a camera frame rather than prevalence, and later oral histories are shaped by memory. The account therefore avoids a precise population total, appliance-ownership rate, “typical day,” or universal division of household labor.

Daily life in 1960s Beirut was shaped by apartments and tin-clad shacks, family networks, retail streets, schools, offices, port and airport work, and a public culture of cafes, print, and seaside movement. The city offered genuine urban comfort and connectivity to some residents, but access depended on income, housing, education, gender, citizenship, and neighborhood. Its everyday history lies in these different routines, not in a single nostalgic image of cosmopolitan ease.

References

Maasri, Zeina. Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut's Global Sixties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767736
Khalaf, Samir G., and Per Kongstad. Hamra of Beirut: A Case of Rapid Urbanization. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973. The field survey was conducted in 1964–67. AUB Archives description of the survey and collection.
Lteif, Diala. “The Conditions of the Working Class in 1960s Beirut: Fire and Everyday Struggles in Karantina.” Antipode 57 (2025): 1041–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.13136
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Current Economic Position and Prospects of Lebanon. Middle East and North Africa Department, December 28, 1967. The report itself cautions that statistical reporting was incomplete. Digitized report.
Monroe, Kristin V. “Circulation, Modernity, and Urban Space in 1960s Beirut.” History and Anthropology 28, no. 2 (2017): 188–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2017.1279613
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. See table 7 for the authors' historical series based on FAO food-balance sheets, and their warning that availability is not individual intake. https://doi.org/10.1079/PHN2005855
Abisaab, Malek. Militant Women of a Fragile Nation. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2010, especially chaps. 4–6. Publisher record and contents.
Feldman, Ilana. “Conflicted Presence: The Many Arrivals of Palestinians in Lebanon.” Migration Studies 10, no. 2 (2022): 190–213, especially the discussion of UNRWA's 1967 Burj al-Barajneh photograph. https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnab048
Kraichati, Cyntia. Watershed Lives: An Ethnography of River Infrastructure and Ruination in Lebanon. PhD diss., McGill University, 2024, 102–05. McGill University full text.
Traboulsi, Fawwaz. A History of Modern Lebanon. 2nd ed. London: Pluto Press, 2012, especially chaps. 9–10. Digitized edition, Library of Congress.
Stafford, Marilyn. “Peacetime Lebanon 1960s.” Photograph portfolio; images made in 1960. The accompanying note explains the original publicity commission and later publication history. Photographer's portfolio.