Five years ago, if you were on Street 90, chances are you were lost on your way to a family gathering at a newly built house in the middle of nowhere. Street 90, Shara'a Tis'een, was just a wide strip in the desert marked by random buildings and some oil and gas companies; a barren road leading into all other parts of New Cairo.
Now — just like the rest of New Cairo — it is being built up at a dizzying speed and Street 90 is quickly becoming the commercial and leisure epicenter of the entire area.
At times, it feels more like you’re in a whole other country; one that is low-density, sprawling, and rich. Coming onto the street from the Ring Road, you are greeted by the glittery promise of Festival City, yet another conglomerate of malls and residential areas, being built by the Emirati company, Al-Futtaim. In a more high-tech world, every time you read 'Festival City', fireworks would go off and an explosion of color would appear behind a man in a top hat inviting you in — wallet in mouth — to the wonders of “Festival City!”
Just beyond the soon-to-be Festival City is another Street 90 mall: 'Downtown', which offers a whole host of banking, telecom, shopping, dining, and reclining needs. 'Downtown' may appear to be another capricious English name to attract Cairo’s ritzy crowd but it's possible that this will be the downtown of the district.
“Two years ago, when people came out here, it would be like they were traveling. Now I feel it is a part of their everyday lives,” says Ramadan, a groundskeeper at Downtown.
Street 90 is even plagued by the ills of Cairo's rush hour. “For the past year, between 3:30pm and 5pm on weekdays, the street is packed," Ramadan complains, “it is what began to give me the feeling that I am still in Cairo out here.”
Besides being at the heart of one of New Cairo’s burgeoning suburban bourgeois residential zones, Street 90 has one added dimension greatly affecting its demographics and its commercial prospects: universities and schools.
In the summer of 2008, AUC (the American University in Cairo) relocated its main campus and the majority of its activities from the university's historical downtown location to its new 20 million dollar facilities in New Cairo, just off Street 90 on what has been named AUC Avenue.
Reactions to the move have been mixed as different students come to AUC with different experiences in mind. “We have a much nicer campus that actually feels like a university and we don’t need to deal with traffic," explains Hadeel Elasmar, "it is nice to be close to all these spots where I can hang out and shop."
“Part of why I came to AUC was to be in Cairo and experience the city correctly," says Philip Taussand, a student at AUC on a semester abroad. "Now I am in the middle of a high-tech desert almost completely surrounded by western consumer outlets," Taussand complains, "just to get a cab downtown costs LE50 at the very least."
Nonetheless, many AUC students are embracing the area and the new campus. Businesses have caught on to that and are capitalizing. Only a minute or two before the AUC campus is another fixture of Cairo’s increasingly omnipresent Amer Group, Meeting Point. Along with all of Amer’s staple restaurants, Chili’s, Studio Masr etc., the building is a mall, complete with designer fashion, and the lot. “University students are our most constant daily customers,” notes Ahmed Saad, a manager at one of Café’s in the building said. Meeting point is also next door to Futures University.
If Meeting Point, Downtown and Festival City are not enough to satisfy your shopping needs, you can find solace in a new mall under construction directly across the street from Meeting Point as well!
At the current rate, Street 90 will soon be a natural extension of metropolitan Cairo. For now, it is a destination for 'old' Cairo’s inhabitants and a city center for those in New Cairo. Businesses, banks, hotels, and malls are going up, with business owners and managers unconcerned by a possible saturation of services in the area.
Mahmoud Atif, a manager of a restaurant in Downtown, explains that between Street 90 and the Suez Road much construction continues. "You have many schools and residential zones still being built and others completely inhabited," Atif points out. On the other side towards Katameyya it is the same. "Now you have people from inside Cairo — like Nasr City and Heliopolis — coming out here specifically to go out and do their shopping," says Atif.
Watch this place grow for the next 5 years, it will be one the “cleanest” (andaf – an Arabic word meaning, literally, clean but also "upscale") places in Cairo.
