The Ohio State University

www.osu.edu

  1. Help
  2. Campus map
  3. Find people
  4. Webmail




Situated in a shallow bowl, the city is surrounded by hills to the South and East, with exits to a narrow coastal plain to the West and North.  Originally, well-to-do families built their houses near the harbor where government offices and business activities are located.  As in other Latin American cities, the poorer people increasingly populated the hillsides.  The wealthier then began moving up higher into the hills as roads were constructed, first to Pétionville and then, by 1930, to Kenscoff.  The city and its surroundings clearly reflected the deep divisions of the society as a whole.

In 1947–8 only one tourist hotel had been constructed at a somewhat higher altitude.  Truman Capote (1948:120), who visited Haiti for some weeks in 1948, described the view, with some artistic license, from the American-owned Olaffson hotel:

“From the terrace where in the mornings I sit…I can see the mountains sliding blue and bluer into the harbor bay; below there is the whole of Port-au-Prince, a town whose colors are paled into peeling historical pastels by centuries of sun:  sky-gray cathedral, hyacinth fountain, green-rust fence.  To the left, and like a city within this other, there is a great chalk garden of baroque stone:  here is the cemetery.”

Bourguignon, in his novel The Greener Grass, writes of the city as seen from a loftier altitude, as the narrator’s plane takes off:

“In the last flash, I saw the city again.  All the streets, the markets, the houses.  The Champ-de-Mars and the presidential palace, all white, like a newly painted toy.  And now the bay, as blue and deep as a Norwegian fjord, and all around the mountains covered with an extravagant vegetation of the most sumptuous green.  The entire island seemed of the most delicate emerald green, with a few yellow stripes for the roads and some white dots for the buildings” (p. 18).  [Fifty some years later, with the country’s disastrous state of erosion, it is difficult to remember what now seems unimaginable splendor.]

 

 

Continued

Table of Contents, Collection B | Table of Contents, Collection C

Page last revised: July 31, 2007

BACK TO TOP



Rare Books & Manuscripts Home      |      Questions, comments to Rare Books & Manuscripts webmaster.