Sprucing things up

My old neighborhood in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is getting a facelift! Even the apartment building I lived in for a couple years has a new coat of paint.

Located in the old Piazza section of town, that three-story building was probably twenty years old when I moved into it in 1968, but even at that it was the newest and most modern structure on the block. I lived on the ground floor, which is now a beer store.

Back then it was surrounded by a sea of one-story, tin-roofed, mud-walled shanties. Today, that building, and a similar one near it, are the only things standing.

The Piazza district has always been the liveliest, if not the most modern, area in Addis Ababa. Fifty years ago the city was basically an overgrown village and the Piazza was the social and commercial heart of it. Modernization, of course, has come to many areas of Addis and it has grown considerably, but the Piazza hadn’t changed much—until now.

What’s happening around my old apartment building is part of a billion-dollar project to clean up the several rivers flowing through Addis Ababa. This includes the Bantiketu River watershed, which cuts through the Piazza district on its way south from Entoto Mountain to the Akaki River south of town. Just a few steps from my apartment it flows under the Ras Makonnen Bridge.

Just cleaning waterways that have been used as public laundry, restroom, bath, and industrial waste and sewer outflow since the town began is a massive project. Add to that the envisioned public space and walkway systems in the plan and I think the job will take way longer than the planned three years.

Nice to know that if I ever moved back into that building I’d have a waterfront view!

Below are two Google Earth views of my neighborhood. The first shows what the area looked like when I lived there and the second shows the area today. My apartment building is circled in red and the river appears as a green line.

Here’s another aerial view (south is up), with my building circled in red.

And below are two shots of the building. The first I took at the end of 2018 when my daughter and I visited Ethiopia. Land clearing had already begun. The second was taken by a friend, Bruk Ezra, just a couple weeks ago, showing the new paint job.