T
ucked away in a hillside garden a short walk from the restive heart of Port-au-Prince, the Hotel Oloffson was a strange kind of refuge. Through good years and a lot of bad ones, it stayed open to all comers, welcoming despite its dark undertones and somehow immune to Haiti’s political strife. A favorite haunt of artists, celebrities, and local intelligentsia, along with aid workers and journalists needing a stiff rum punch to ease the day’s stress, the Gothic gingerbread mansion weathered brutal bouts of violence and natural disasters to become the most storied hotel in the Caribbean. Mick Jagger and Jackie Kennedy Onassis were guests, and it was a centerpiece in Graham Greene’s classic novel The Comedians about the terrors of dictatorship. Later, it was reborn as a bohemian jam-hall where diverse crowds pulsed to Vodou-rock rhythms deep into the night. After the 2010 earthquake leveled much of the capital, the Oloffson was one of the few hotels left standing. The music went on. And the faithful kept coming back, even as the country descended into lawlessness.

Last weekend, the armed gangs that have a stranglehold on Port-au-Prince burned the hotel to the ground. In recent months the gangs have attacked schools, hospitals, libraries, a historic radio station, and the offices of the country’s oldest newspaper, part of a “very clear and obvious effort to erase all these institutions,” says Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, who grew up poor in the capital’s Bel Air neighborhood. “[The Oloffson] was a bridge — a space for connection where different worlds could meet.” While the hotel may be just one more building, “it’s a symbol of something that once might have been left alone,” she adds. “If this place that is so well-known — an international treasure — could not be protected, how much protection is there for ordinary people in Port-au-Prince right now?”

Owner Richard Morse told Rolling Stone the Oloffson had been closed since March, when members of the Viv Ansanm (Live Together) gang alliance raided the property after gun battles with police that had forced area residents and hotel staff to flee. Morse still hoped to reopen one day. But after watching a social-media video of the hotel aflame in the night, he asked a friend to do a drone flyover to check it out. “When he called me back, he said: ‘I think you better have a seat,’” says Morse. Aerial footage revealed a smoldering ruin.

The sudden, total loss was a gut punch to the Morse family and generations of hotel patrons who enjoyed camaraderie and music at the Oloffson, no matter the troubles beyond its walls. “We’re heartbroken,” says Isabelle Morse, Richard’s daughter. “It touched so many people: artists, journalists, writers, rich, poor, Black, white, local, international, gay, straight; it was home to all. Everyone has a piece of memory attached to it, and they have no place to go anymore. It feels like somebody died.” Filmmaker Richard Sénécal put it bluntly in a post on X: “What nature couldn’t destroy in nearly a century, barbarism and savagery by our fellow Haitians burned it down in one night.”

The United Nations estimates the gangs now control 90 percent of the capital, which edges closer to collapse in a vacuum of international apathy and government infighting. Kenyan forces deployed to assist national police have had little impact, undermanned and outgunned by high-powered weapons smuggled in from the U.S. and the Dominican Republic. Nearly 5,000 people have been killed in the last nine months. And with the gangs expanding into new parts of the country, more than 1.3 million are uprooted from their homes, the highest total on record. Soaring costs and drastic aid cuts have left a million children to suffer critical levels of food insecurity.

“So much devastation in the country, so many people getting killed, so many people getting raped — and so many people focusing on a hotel,” Morse says by phone from his home in Maine. “A lot of things are making me really angry. But I guess the bottom line is: If the hotel is going to attract attention to the people that need it, then I guess that’s a positive thing.”

Few establishments are as steeped in history and political intrigue. Built in the late 19th century, it was initially a private residence for the Sams, a powerful family that produced two Haitian presidents, one of whose killing at the hands of a mob spurred the U.S. military to intervene. During the 19-year occupation, it was used as a hospital by Marines until forces withdrew and Werner Gustav Oloffson, a Swedish sea captain, converted the grounds into a hotel in 1935. The Grand Hotel Oloffson, as it was then known, became jet-set famous after the 1950s, when a French photographer bought the hotel and attracted the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, and Graham Greene, some whose names adorned the guest rooms. 

Greene immortalized the hotel in The Comedians, a haunting novel about life under dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his dreaded paramilitary goons, the Tonton Macoute. “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,” Greene wrote. “You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him.” The book was adapted into a 1967 film starring Taylor and Richard Burton, but Hollywood glamor was no match for the Duvalier nightmare. When tourism to Haiti dried up, the hotel was left to resident aid workers and journalists; and Aubelin Jolicoeur, the dapper Haitian newspaper columnist who inspired the Greene character “Petit Pierre.” Impossible to miss in a white linen suit and paisley ascot, Jolicoeur was a fixture at the hotel for four decades — an in-house attraction who trafficked in gossip and signaled his arrival each day by tapping the floor with his gold-tipped cane.

Morse took over the lease in 1987 after the fall of the Duvalier regime. The son of a Caribbean scholar and a beloved Haitian entertainer, Morse says he’d learned how to mix art and business while working in New York for Steve Rubell, the co-founder of Studio 54, and set about transforming the Oloffson into a vibrant cultural space. Dropping the “Grand” from the hotel’s name to make it more democratic, he renovated the mahogany bar, added more rooms, and installed a Haitian roots-music band that he named RAM, after his initials. As songwriter-cum-conductor, Morse helmed a rotating cast of musicians and dancers. His future wife, Lunise, became lead female vocalist. (His son William later joined as lead guitarist.) 

By the early 1990s, RAM’s Thursday night concerts were wildly popular, marathon affairs charged with increasingly brazen protests against the military junta that ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. “The band thought, ‘Man, we are invincible,’ you know? ‘We can say whatever we want because no one’s messing with us,’” recalls Morse. “And then at some point in ‘94 they started threatening us. People started following us around thinking that the [U.S.] invasion would be triggered by me getting killed.” In September of that year, 25,000 U.S. troops surged into Haiti to restore democracy and the hotel enjoyed its most profitable run, though trouble was never far. A 1998 assassination attempt during Kanaval claimed the lives of eight supporters.

On Jan. 12, 2010, Haiti was hit with a magnitude 7.0 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and destroyed vast swaths of the capital. Damaged but unbroken, the Oloffson emerged as a hub for relief workers and journalists who poured in from around the world. Morse served as an essential source of information on RAM’s Twitter feed, and held a free concert three months after the quake on the hotel lawn; thousands showed up. The band would continue to perform regularly to a packed house, a steady drumbeat for Haiti’s recovery. The Oloffson stage also hosted big-name performers, from Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Jackson Browne to Jimmy Buffett and Arcade Fire. “Hotel Oloffson was a hotel on the surface, but it was really a temple, a refuge at the crossroads of culture, music, and social justice,” says Arcade Fire’s Régine Chassagne. “It was an inn for the NGO workers and writers, people passing through, who all had Haiti at heart.”

As reconstruction staggered along, armed gangs thrived during the 2011 to 2016 presidency of Michel Martelly. A cousin of Morse’s, Martelly armed and financed gangs to extend his power and traffic drugs, laying some of the groundwork for the plague that now grips the country. (Morse served for a time in Martelly’s administration but quit in 2013, citing corruption and mismanagement.) Morse says the Oloffson was deemed to be in a high-risk “red zone,” and foreign staff were either forbidden or discouraged from patronizing the hotel. The July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse plunged the country into greater chaos. And the Covid-19 pandemic brought business to a standstill.

During a May 2023 trip to report on the gang war, I stopped by the hotel one afternoon for lunch. Its iron gates remained open and unguarded, the courtyard overgrown and prowled by dogs. The familiar statue of Baron Samedi, Vodou’s top hat-wearing master of the dead, greeted me at the base of the staircase, but the bar was empty save for Madame Jeudy, its stalwart manager. I ordered a plate of poulet créole and wandered around the dining room taking in the art and curios. Out on the balcony a painter was at work touching up the facade, a small hedge against the decay. It didn’t matter that the food took an hour to arrive. A faint sea breeze cut the heat, and I was glad to be off the streets.

“The Oloffson was always a safe haven,” says Neil Brandvold, an American filmmaker who had to run from trouble in Port-au-Prince on more than one occasion over the years. “As long as you got through the front gates of the Oloffson, everyone left you alone. Just the respect for Richard and the hotel as an institution … It was sort of protected from the gangs and their violence.” On Brandvold’s last visit, in late 2023, however, some attempted kidnappings in the municipal cemetery forced him to cut filming short. He holed up in the hotel for several days with a photographer watching gunfights flare through the night. “I think we were the last people to stay there.”

In February, I ran into Morse at a heavily guarded hotel in Pétionville, a suburb of the capital. Commercial flights had been shut down for months and travel around Port-au-Prince was a roll of the dice. Morse told me he’d nevertheless walked down to the Oloffson out of habit, stopping to take selfies with fans along the way, until friends insisted it was too dangerous to go back again. Most members of RAM have since relocated to the northern city of Cap Haitien to keep making music. For his part, Morse released a new song the day before the Oloffson burned down, titled, “We Want Justice.” A cry for Haiti, and all that’s wrong in the world.  

“He’s devastated — probably the most devastated of us all,” says Isabelle Morse. “That was our living room. The music, the characters, the people who kept coming back, all that he did to keep it alive and make it this place of resistance and freedom in a place that’s so hard to do that. He spent his whole life doing it. And now it’s gone.”