Haiti's renowned Hotel Oloffson is burned down by gangs
Hundreds of Haitians and foreigners mourned as the news spread across social media, with the hotel manager confirming the fire on X. Even though gang violence had forced the hotel in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, to close in recent years, many had hoped it would reopen.
'It birthed so much culture and expression,' said Riva Précil, a Haitian-American singer who lived in the hotel from age five to 15. In a tearful phone interview, Précil recalled how she learned to swim, dance and sing at the Oloffson.
Longtime hotel manager Richard Morse, who had been overseeing the property remotely from the US since the hotel's closure in 2022, told the Associated Press on Monday that for several months, rumours had circulated that the hotel had been damaged by fire.
'So when I heard Sunday morning that it burned, I did what I usually do, which is call someone who has drones and have them go take a look,' he said. 'This time, when they called back, they said something like, 'take a seat'. I knew then that this wasn't like the other times.'
The attack on the area began late on Saturday, according to James Jean-Louis, who lives in the hills above the Oloffson. He said he watched the flames as he and other residents were chased out while police and gangs exchanged heavy gunfire.
Journalists are unable to visit the hotel and verify the damage because gangs control the area, making it inaccessible. Patrick Durandis, the director of the Institute for Safeguarding National Heritage, also confirmed the fire in a message to AP.
In its heyday the hotel attracted artists, intellectuals and politicians from Haiti and beyond, including Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Tennessee Williams. It also survived coups, dictatorships and the devastating 2010 earthquake.
Morse said he was reluctant to talk about what happened to the hotel given that in Haiti 'so many people are dying and being raped and losing everything that I don't want the focus to be on the hotel'.
Morse spent nearly 30 years at the Oloffson. It's where he met his wife, had his children and started his band, RAM.
'There's no life without hope, so we have to consider bringing Haiti back and bringing the hotel back and bringing the art and the culture back,' he said.
The Oloffson served as a presidential summer palace in the early 1900s and then became a US Marine Corps hospital before a Swedish sea captain converted it into a hotel in the 1930s.
It also served as inspiration for the fictional Hotel Trianon in Graham Greene's 1966 novel The Comedians, set in Haiti under the brutal dictatorship of François Duvalier, best known as Papa Doc.
In real life, tourism dwindled under the Duvaliers, and the hotel became a respite for aid workers and foreign correspondents.
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