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| Belfast, Northern Ireland • Royal Avenue • April 2013 |
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It's said that the Europa is the most bombed hotel in history. Belfast was once Ireland's money machine. Which is why the Brits held onto it and its neighboring counties when the Irish Republic seceded in 1946.
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Since the 1950s though– – like blooms in winter – shipbuilding, textiles, tobacco traders, and the region's heavy manufacturing shriveled. Even without The Troubles world economics would have sucked them away... Ahhh but The Troubles.
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From the early 1800s through the Good Friday Agreement of April 10, 1998, violence between the occupiers and the occupied gashed the Ulster counties leaving Royal Avenue blood-spocked and gnarled by bullets and bombs.
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The Irish and British fight over this Northern hunk of the island terrified investors who fed the economics that vacuumed at the region's industries.
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Peering up above Royal Avenue in center-city Belfast the sky was smokey with what? A memory of gun-smoke steeped smog... And squinting into the yellow haze I muttered, "_Gunsmog!_" the stuff stained the Northern Irish heavens.
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Then I panned down to the rebuilt Greek columns on the Hotel Europa, and coughed.
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