Gangs Burn Down Famous Haitian Hotel

Haiti's once-illustrious Grand Hotel Oloffson, a beloved Gothic gingerbread home that inspired books, hosted parties until dawn, and attracted visitors from Mick Jagger to Haitian presidents, was burned down by gangs over the weekend. Hundreds of Haitians and foreigners mourned the news as it spread across social media, with the hotel manager on Monday confirming the fire in a post 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 was burned during a confrontation between members of the Viv Ansanm gang coalition and police officers, the Miami Herald reports.

• Longtime hotel manager Richard Morse, who had been overseeing the property remotely from the US since the hotel's closure in 2022, told the AP on Monday that for several months, there were persistent rumors that the hotel had burned. "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 Oloffson served as a presidential summer palace in the early 1900s. After President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was lynched in 1915, triggering a 19-year US occupation, it 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 Francois Duvalier, best known as "Papa Doc."

• In the late 1980s, Morse became the hotel's manager. His band, RAM, played Haitian roots music on Thursday nights in a gig that became legendary, as were the Day of the Dead celebrations known as Fèt Gede that drew in Vodou practitioners. "It was a vessel for so many people to gather and freely express themselves," says Riva Précil, a Haitian American singer who lived in the hotel from age 5 to 15.
• "Losing the Oloffson reflects the incompetence of Haiti's oligarchs, the Haitian government, the United Nations as well as the French and American governments," Morse tells the Herald. "I'll do everything I can to get it back on its feet in spite of the powers that be," he says. "I feel free to finally speak out again. They can only burn it once."