A Lost Haven in Haiti
by Jonathan M. Katz
There was a place in Port-au-Prince called the Oloffson. It housed a nearly century-old hotel, but it was more than that. Earlier this year, amid the spiraling gang war that has seized almost all of Haiti’s capital, the hotel’s enigmatic last owners, Richard and Lunise Morse, reluctantly decided to close it down. The shuttering was supposed to be temporary. On July 6, unknown persons set fire to the wooden manse and burned it to the ground.
It is hard to explain what the Oloffson meant to so many of us. Régine Chassange, the Haitian-Canadian singer of Arcade Fire, called the Oloffson a “temple” and “refuge” in an interview with Rolling Stone. Edwidge Danticat called it a “bridge”—a “space for connection where different worlds could meet.” The Haitian journalist Macollvie Neel remembered the hotel as a place of whispered rumors during her childhood in the Haitian countryside—of “mind-bending spiritual experiences that sounded more like acid trips, spicy nights in the bougainvillea”—until she finally got up the courage to visit the grand hotel herself. (“But, enfin,” she recalled, “no one had warned me about the Oloffson rum punch.”)
Its history was long. The midcentury Marine turned historian Robert Heinl recalled it as a de rigueur watering place “for writers ranging from Noel Coward to Truman Capote,” on whose sweeping veranda “the beautiful people” congregated. In Haiti’s long-forgotten golden age of tourism, from the 1950s through the 1970s, an endless stream of notables made the Oloffson their Hispaniolan pied-à-terre, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Mick Jagger, and Elizabeth Taylor. Graham Greene immortalized the hotel (rechristened the Hotel Trianon) in his 1966 novel, The Comedians: “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,” he wrote. “You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him... but in the sunlight or when the lights went on among the palms, it seemed fragile and period and pretty and absurd, an illustration from a book of fairy-tales.”
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