The Hotel Oloffson is apparently still standing.
After seeing pictures of the collapsed roof of the Presidential Palace, I had little hope. But googling last night, I came across reports stating that the gingerbread mansion was unhurt.
It was the one landmark I insisted on seeing when I went to Port-au-Prince in 1992. Graham Greene, in his novel The Comedians, wrote: "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. ... 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."
The hotel has such a presence in the novel that it becomes a kind of literary character. Now it has a new role: a base for relief workers and journalists.
