Political Walks: Tehran: Rise and Fall of the City’s Premier Nightclub Strip

Political Walks 01

 

1/// Tehran is not a very old city. When Tehranis use words like “old” or “ancient” to describe a building, you can be almost certain that the building is between 40 and 60 years old. Most likely, the building is some kind of modernist apartment building, a two or three-story residential building with colorful, rounded windows and playful geometric tiles and staircases.

If you’re lucky the old building in question will be made of yellowish mud brick, the traditional architectural style of Tehran built to be warm in winter and cool in the scorching summers.

But it suffices to say that 200 years ago, Tehran was a tiny village surrounded by orchards, and the 15 million people who live there now almost all came afterwards. As a result, the city’s actual historical old city is in almost complete decay, and many of the families who still live there have built (or are trying to build) modern apartment buildings in between the ruins, which either fell prey to inheritance disputes or drug addicts (or some combination thereof).

2/// The national Cultural Heritage institution has managed to sweep up a large proportion of all of the grandiose historical architecture of the wealthy of the past: beautiful old caravans, palaces, banks, mosques, churches, and so on.

The simplified, modernist style of straight lines and minor ornate touches defined the majority of the city’s construction throughout the mid-20th century, when Tehran really began becoming the “Tehran” that we know today, the “Tehran” that is capital of a modern Iranian state and the beating heart of its hopes and dreams. Today, this vernacular architecture is quickly being swept away.

3/// But Tehran has always been a city of hopes and dreams, a refuge for liberal thinkers fleeing the beautiful, ancient Persian towns of the South, with names that evoke turquoise palaces filled with wine-drinking sages like Shiraz and Esfahan, but that in reality have become far too burdened down over the course of centuries with the banal concerns of ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage.’ Tehran was where Iran could be made anew, where hundreds of thousands fled to as they left behind provinces left stagnant by “development” and towns left in ruins by Iraqi tanks.

And nowhere was more Tehran than Lalehzar Avenue. For decades, this street connected the old historic center of Tehran directly into its modern uptown, along the way hosting the capital’s greatest concentration of cinemas, theaters, bars, cafes, cabarets, and handsome young men and women.

4/// The street was originally inspired by Nasser al-Din Shah’s trip to Paris in 1873, where he was given a tour of the Haussmanian urban transformations and systems of massive boulevards taking shape in the French capital. Impressed, he demanded a Champs-Élysées be built in Tehran as well. Lalehzar was one side of the avenue, while the other was nearby Saadi Avenue. In between, sat a large garden.

Alas, Tehran was not Paris, and Lalehzar would be no Champs-Élysées. In the 1890s, after decades in which Iranian rulers had been cajoled into offering the British and Russian governments economic concessions and thus control over the economy, the Shah offered a British tobacco company a complete monopoly over Iran’s tobacco industry. These concessions inspired the country’s first mass nationwide uprising, uniting the country in anger at the increasing colonial domination over the economy.

In light of the mass protests (which included a nationwide boycott of tobacco), the Shah backed off the deal, but was still forced to pay a large sum in compensation for the decision’s reversal, and he subsequently sold off the garden at the heart of Tehran’s Champs-Élysées to pay for it.

5/// In the decades to come, the street’s fortunes revived as it became the heart of the Iranian capital’s leisure industry. The country’s first horse-drawn carriage and telegraph lines appeared on Lalehzar, and the street managed to develop a chicness that was otherwise lacking in a city that was still halfway rustic.

The city streets became a mix of old-school Tehrani romantic brick and edgy geometric modern. While the former has been in a number of cases lovingly restored, the vast majority of the latter remains today buried under pollution and soot.

6/// The area greatly benefited from the massive wave of European refugees who flooded Tehran during World War II. The vast majority of the 500,000 who made their way to Iran through the Soviet Union and across the Caspian Sea on boats were Poles, Jews, Christians, and Atheists alike driven from their homes by the Nazi invasion.

Thousands of Polish newcomers made their home in Bandar Anzali, where the boats first stopped, but thousands more took the long, winding road through the forests and mountains to Tehran. Here, they assimilated into the city’s growing cosmopolitan culture. They filled the local Iranian Jewish and Christian (Armenian and Assyrian) communities with life, energy, and a host of new congregants, and they brought forms of entertainment to the capital that they had enjoyed back in Eastern Europe.

7/// Cabarets with names like “Moulin Rouge” opened up beside cafes with names like “Polska,” and even after World War II ended in 1945 tens of thousands stayed on in the Iranian capital to keep the new social scene alive.

The growth of the middle class in the decades that come — as well as the small, secular elite that profited immensely from the Shah’s rule — ensured a steady stream of Iranian clients to keep the dream of Tehran’s tomorrows alive.

8/// This was the classiest street in the city, the place to see and be seen. Grandiose architecture from the early 20th century combined with mid-century modern in cinema after cinema with names like “Crystal” and “Rex.” The city’s first European-style theater, Tehran Theater, was built with a big, white European-style half-naked Greco-Roman lady hanging off the facade in the front.

Lalehzar was synonymous with being young, rich, and beautiful; or with “bourgeois moral corruption,” depending on which side of the political and moral universe you fell on.

Hedayat Mosque, halfway down the street, became a center of political protest in the months and years leading up to the triumph of the 1979 Revolution. Revolutionary figure Mahmoud Taleqani chose the mosque as the site from which to deliver many of his sermons, and many of those who would ascend the Revolutionary government’s ranks listened to his speeches here. When they walked out of the sermons, the supposed moral corruption of the age was all too clear.
After the 1979 Revolution, most of Lalehzar’s venues closed, and the street’s previous incarnation was slowly forgotten. Lalehzar has become a victim of its own success.

9/// Bit by bit, merchants took over in the venues’ absence. The area’s glamour was lost, but in a historical irony, the street became the biggest center of light fixtures in the entire city, a flashy, glowing paradise of luster, as Iranians call such shops.

Chandeliers, neon lights, and big electric signs now cover most of the street, but if you look closely you can see the signage and architecture hidden behind it.

10/// Nearby the “light-sellers,” as they are called, cheap shopping has proliferated, attracting Tehranis from across the city unable to pass up a good bargain. Names like “Bride of Berlin” (i.e. Aroose Barlan) hint at the vaguely foreign allure that Lalehzar still manages to command.

But the bright lights and colorful coats and scarves on sale are overwhelmed by the greying modernist buildings towering above. The clutter is a distinctly Tehran clutter, loud, gaudy, and not very conventionally beautiful.

11/// At the end of Lalehzar is Imam Khomeini Square, built in 1867 to serve as the heart of modern Tehran. It was for years known as Toopkhaneh, meaning “the place of artillery,” and was presided over by a grand Municipality Palace and a Telegram building on either side of a large park.

Today, it is one of the city’s ugliest squares: a massive mess of traffic presided over by the hideous, brutalist Government Telecommunications building.

In the 1960s under the Shah, the area’s turn-of-the-century historical architecture was bulldozed to make way for new construction and a large parking lot that until recently served as a bus station.

For decades following the Revolution, a large chunk of the square was closed to the public. In 1981, when the leftist organization Mujahidin Khalq declared war on the state in response to a series of bloody crackdowns by the country’s new Islamist leaders, a huge bomb devastated the ruling party’s headquarters just around the corner.

Dozens of the party’s leaders — especially from its more progressive and open-minded factions — were killed in the bombing. Those who would take their place, and would come to lead the nation, were far less open-minded than their martyred colleagues, and emerged more determined than ever to squash dissent. Fearful of a repeat of the Hafte Tir bombing, as it came to be called, the square was declared off-limits.

12/// Directly south of Lalehzar, on the other side of the square, is Nasser Khosrow Boulevard, Tehran’s first modern street, and today one of the few in the city that have been fully rehabilitated according to their historic character. It was one of the city’s most stately avenues in its past life, the well-mannered, richer older brother to Lalehzar’s flashy youthfulness. Nasser Khosrow leads past the Golestan Palace directly into the Grand Bazaar of Tehran, the heart of the capital’s massive economy then and now.

Today, the heart of the city has moved elsewhere. The protests that shook this part of town in the Revolution are long gone, having moved toward the university district to the southwest and further uptown, along with many Tehranis. For the generations that have come of age since the Revolution, Lalehzar is a nostalgic and tacky shopping district. But beneath its facades, past glories shine through, even as the memories fade.