Qasr el-Nil Street
Qasr El Nil Street is a street in Downtown Cairo, Egypt. Qasr El Nil Street is one of the biggest streets in the downtown Cairo area with many businesses, restaurants, and an active nightlife.
The vintage urban planning and architecture here are reminiscent of the illustrious period of late 19th and early 20th century European Beaux-Arts and Egyptian—Islamic—Moorish Revival styles. The street and its new building designs were part of creating a new international downtown district, to link to Egypt’s rich Islamic heritage and institutions with the many new foreign enterprises, at the turn of the 20th century in Cairo.
Qasr El Nil Street extends (east to west): from the Abdeen Palace at Abdeen Square, passes a vibrant business district, Bab El-Lauq Market, and the American University in Cairo—Downtown Campus, is joined by Talaat Harb Street and passes through Tahrir Square with The Mogamma building and Egyptian Antiquities Museum, and then crosses the Nile River on the Qasr El Nil Bridge, to end on Gezira Island.
Isma'il Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, decided to strategically reclaim the East Bank of the Nile opposite Gezira Island, and create a 'Paris on the Nile.' The lower area was part of the Nile's natural pond, marsh, wetland, and riparian zone habitats for millennia, making this an ambitious civil engineering project. The existing 1880s Khairy Pasha palace was higher in the eastern Tahrir Square area, and later was absorbed into the American University in Cairo downtown campus. This urban project’s starting point was building the Egyptian Army Barracks, which became an important Egyptian and later British government institution. This area was eventually part of the urban district called 'Ismailiya' and 617 acres (2.50 km2) were allocated for this new neighborhood in which Qasr el Nil Street was centered. After adequate civic infrastructure was completed in 1874, Ismail Pasha decided that buildings had to cost a minimum 2000 L.E. amount of money to build and furnish. The large sum for the time was intended to ensure that the buildings in the Ismailiya district would be significant, large and built with expensive materials, and therefore excluding small shops and houses. Throughout its early years the street attracted many of the Egyptian elites, socialites, celebrities, and businesspeople, who caused a commercialization and development movement from the street beyond into the district that was rising to become classic downtown Cairo.
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