Much is made of Maimi and its Art Deco District, and rightly so, with its restoration and preservation of some of the best of 1930s and 40s architecture (although sadly a bit too much kitsch than correct in some cases), but it came as a bit of a surprise when I was told that in its heyday Casablanca had ten times the number of Art Deco buildings that Miami had, the city a clean pre-war palette to be played with by many of France’s top architects of the day.
 |
| credit photo : Pixabay |
Unfortunately you’ll have to have your wits about you to spot what’s left, at least with the exteriors, which have been remodelled almost to extinction. There are plenty of interiors that still retain the fripperies of fancy wrought-iron balconies, swooping stairways, brass adornments, luscious marble and lacquered wood that takes you back to the time of elegant ladies in sinuous frocks escorted by lounge lizards in smartly cut suits.
Mers Sultan is just an ordinary sort of neighbourhood near the centre of the city and not somewhere you’ll find a flood with tourists, but behind the grime of decades there are still plenty of Deco gems to please the eagle-eyed. Step into the Cinema Lynx on Avenue Mers Sultan and you are cocooned in an oyster shell of blue and yellow wave-form ceiling radiating from the screen, itself covered in a deep red curtain suspended from the proscenium arch, as if you are about to watch a stage play. And if you want to finish the night in semiseedy Deco style, slip into nearby Bar Atomic where little has changed, other than the sawdust on the floor, since the 1940s, and bottles of beer are still chilled in the original wooden fridges.
For the full-frontal Art Deco style, Cinema Rialto is just as it was in the 1920s, albeit slightly more ‘rubbed around the edges’ than the day it opened, but the dear old dame, fast approaching her century, is still as popular as ever. Saucy Josephine Baker, temptress of the Parisian stage, once trod the Rialto’s boards, and while the nearby restaurant Petit Poucet may also be a bit less glamorous than when Edith Piaf and author of The Little Prince, (and aristocrat, poet, and pioneering aviator), Antoine de St Exupéry whiled away their time there, it still has an air of faded elegance reminiscent of its glory days.
The most splendid staircase in Casablanca is said to be the wrought-iron delight at the design store Thema Maison on Houssine Ben Ali. The shop that was once a mansion built in the 1940s is now a showcase for the owner’s fabric designs and the best of Moroccan artisans, but was the family home before the family fled the nest and it became the delight that you see now. After a decadent shop, the restaurant Rouget de l’Isle (just over the road down an alley of the same name) is a beautifully restored 1930s building, with the addition of being one of the top French restaurants in the city at an affordable price.
Hassan II Mosque, the largest in Morocco and seventh largest in the world, gets plenty of attention, but in its own way the Sacré-Coeur Cathedral is another fascinating work of architecture. Designed by the French architect Paul Tournon and built in 1930, it was an experiment in the decorative use of cast concrete. An enormous wedding cake of a building, it clearly shows its Deco provenance but with subtle twists to appeal to its Moroccan situation. Grandiose as it is on the outside, it’s relatively modest on the inside, and though it was deconsecrated and fell into disuse after Morocco's independence in 1956, it’s still a pretty piece of eye-candy if you like your Deco on a vast scale.
But really, Deco-vastness isn’t what you find much of in Casablanca these days. It’s more the subtle indications, the memory of loucheness in the sweep of a stairway or the curve of a door escutcheon. It’s there, sometimes hidden by decades of abandonment, but it’s still there.
