The area around the canal entrance contains Port Said's finest 19th-century architecture — the buildings put up in the boom years after 1869 when the city was cosmopolitan, prosperous, and full of European merchants, engineers, and Canal Company employees. The characteristic style is distinctive: tall facades with wooden balconies running the full width of the building, shuttered windows, and ground-floor arcades sheltering pedestrians from the sun.
Many of these buildings are in various states of disrepair — Port Said had a difficult second half of the 20th century economically — but the scale of the streets and the consistency of the architecture give the neighbourhood a genuine sense of its origins. Walk the streets north of the main commercial area in the early morning, when the light is good and the traffic is light, for the best impression of what the city once was.