Hassan Allam
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Hassan Mohammed Allam (1903-1976), was one of the pioneers of modern construction in Egypt.
Hassan Allam was born in 1903 in the city of Port Said and subsequently moved to the Upper Egyptian town of Al Minya with his family. His father owned a small shop that sold construction materials including tiles and ceramics imported from Great Britain. He attended primary school but did not continue his education and joined his father's business instead.
In 1923 at the age of 19, he immigrated to Cairo where he formed a small informal contracting outfit. His career did not really take off until in 1936 he founded Hassan Mohammed Allam & Co. for General Contracting - a limited partnership company. Despite having received no formal education in the field of construction, his managerial and technical expertise was substantial. He was also widely popular with construction labourers and engineers.
In 1938, King Farouk was on a hunting trip when he was injured in a car accident. With no hospitals nearby, the King had to be whisked back to Cairo. As a result of this incident, the King ordered that a hospital be built in the area. Hassan Allam thus landed his first major contract and El Kasaseen Hospital was built on the Cairo-Ismaïlia agricultural road. Other early contracts included the Mebara hospital in Port Said, a power station in Damanhur, and the first Egyptian oil refinery in Suez. His firm was beginning to seriously compete with El Abd Pasha, Ahmad Bakir (a road contractor) and Ali Ibrahim Pasha (whose work include the Television Building and the Tahrir Office Complex in Cairo). Eventually the company became one of the largest in the construction field in the country together with Osman Ahmad Osman's Arab Contractors Co..
Sometime during the 1940s, Anwar el-Sadat in an effort to evade political persecution, disguised himself as a truck driver and took a job in Hassan Allam's company. Sadat later became the third president of Egypt.
After the 1952 revolution, the company continued to thrive and executed a number of major roads such as the Ismalia-Al 'Arish, Suez-Marsa Alam, and Alexandria-Marsa Matruh highways. Many projects were also completed in Port Said that included a large cathedral and a mosque. Prior to the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the company was in charge of building a new community for the Nubian people whose villages lay in the area that was later to become Lake Nasser.
In 1961, the company was nationalized under President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s new socialist policies to become Nasr General Contracting - Hassan Mohammed Allam with Hassan Allam losing ownership and becoming its general manager.
In 1972, taking advantage of the Infitah or open-door policies recently adopted by President Anwar el-Sadat’s government, he established his second company - Hassan Allam Sons. Shortly after, the new company submitted a bid for building a large sewage network in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. However Hassan Allam did not live to see the result of the bid; he passed away in 1976 on the third of January.
The funeral was held at the Omar Makram Mosque in Tahrir Square and was attended by thousands of mourners. The crowd extended from the mosque almost up to the Rameses Hilton.
There are currently two streets named after Hassan Allam; one in the Heliopolis district and the other in Downtown Cairo.
