One of Haiti’s most renowned landmarks, the Oloffson Hotel, noted for its ornate wooden facade and celebrity guests, including the novelist Graham Greene, has become the latest victim of the country’s destructive spiral.
The hotel was “burned to the ground” in an apparent arson attack on Saturday night, Richard Morse, the hotel’s Haitian American owner and manager, said in a telephone interview on Monday from his home in Maine.
The destruction, he added, was confirmed by friends in Haiti and by drone footage showing the smoldering shell of the building, which had stood for more than a century, just a short walk from the center of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
While details about who was behind the fire remained unclear, the neighborhood has been convulsed by violence from gangs that now control most of Port-au-Prince.
The hotel’s wooden latticework, turrets and spires made it a classic example of the gingerbread Caribbean architectural style of homes that adorned some older residential parts of Haiti’s capital.
“I can’t describe the sadness and rage about the destruction of our patrimony,” Frederick Mangonès, a Haitian architect, said about the loss of the Oloffson. “There’s no respect for human life or history.’’
The gingerbread school emerged in the 19th century from a movement of architects studying in France who were inspired to design tropical-style mansions.
“Haitian gingerbread is very vertical and whimsical with high ceilings and wooden verandas,” Mr. Mangonès said.
Over the years, the hotel survived many political upheavals and natural disasters, including a cataclysmic earthquake in 2010 that flattened much of the capital and is believed to have killed more than 200,000 people.
While the Oloffson stood as a welcoming beacon to foreigners and Haiti’s cultural and intellectual elite, it was also a symbol of Haiti’s yawning social divide, surrounded by streets crowded with poor street merchants and beggars.
The elegant mansion was built at the end of the 19th century as the private residence of the family of a former Haitian president who was killed by a mob, prompting the United States to occupy Haiti for 19 years. The United States Marines converted it into a hospital during the occupation, which lasted from 1915 to 1934.
When U.S. troops left, a Norwegian-Haitian family, the Oloffsons, leased it and turned it into a hotel.
The Oloffson gained fame by hosting international stars, including Mick Jagger and Elizabeth Taylor, whose names adorned some of the rooms. Mr. Greene gave the hotel widespread exposure when he visited Haiti and made the Oloffson a setting in his novel, “The Comedians,’’ which depicted the dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his dreaded paramilitary force, known as the Tonton Macoute.
“With its towers and balconies and wooden fretwork decorations it had the air at night of a Charles Addams house in a number of The New Yorker,” Mr. Greene wrote. “You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him.”
When Mr. Morse took over running the hotel in the late 1980s, he restored a long mahogany bar that had been crafted from a pool table left behind by the Marines, and from where staff served the hotel’s famous rum punch.
Mr. Morse’s father was Richard M. Morse, a well-known scholar on Latin America and the Caribbean who taught at Yale, and his mother was Emerante de Pradines, an acclaimed Haitian dancer and singer who also taught at Yale.
Mr. Morse, an anthropologist by training, ran the hotel with a nonchalant attitude, brushing off the frequent power outages, lack of telephone service and occasional sounds of gunfire, simply telling his guests, “This is Haiti.”
Mr. Morse also formed a successful Haitian roots music band, RAM, entertaining guests on Thursday nights to a packed house, which often included foreign ambassadors.
Despite the hotel’s precarious existence, guests could always count on cheerful staff serving local Creole dishes of conch and goat with a traditional pumpkin soup, on the dozen tables laid out along the palm-shaded terrace overlooking a lush garden and swimming pool.
Before his death in 2005, guests might also catch a glimpse of Aubelin Jolicoeur, a local palace gadfly, art dealer and newspaper columnist who often reported on the comings and goings at the Oloffson.
Mr. Jolicoeur was easy to spot, immaculately turned out in a white linen suit and paisley ascot, assisted by a gold-tipped cane. Mr. Greene portrayed him in “The Comedians” as a character named Petit Pierre.
Mr. Morse also sometimes found himself at the center of political events. He recalled a post-presidency visit by Bill Clinton who greeted him by asking how long Mr. Morse had been in Haiti. “About 17 governments,” Mr. Morse recalled answering. “He really got a kick out of that.”
After serving as the hotel’s manager for years, Mr. Morse and his family bought out the owners about a decade ago, he said.
The hotel had not been accepting guests for more than a year because of the violence. Mr. Morse said a skeleton staff of three was forced to flee this year “when the shooting got so bad.”
He was last able to visit the hotel in January. ignoring warnings that the area had become too dangerous.
Though he feels bereft over the hotel’s demise, Mr. Morse said that the loss pales in comparison to the widespread suffering of ordinary Haitians. “People are getting killed, people are getting raped,” he said, “losing everything.”
“I can’t be crying about a building,’’ he added. “As far as the legacy and all that, that’s been established.”
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