Squatters move in; their laundry flutters from the rooftops, from every one of which there is a view of the sea. There are buildings whose facades or backs have fallen out, exposing ruinous brick insides and distinctive, colonnaded courtyards.

Then, there are big piles of rubble where buildings once stood, and vacant lots where weeds have overgrown the rubble.

But it is also a neighborhood where children play at checkers in the intricately carved doorways, mothers in head scarves climb the steep alleys after fetching their daughters from school, and enough of the whitewashed urban fabric survives to give a tangible sense of the past.

“Here, your neighbors feel at home with you, and you feel at home with them,” said Jamila Hamouda, whose husband, Mohamed, 73, was born in the 18th-century Ottoman dar, or townhouse, where brilliant blue-white tiles run up the stairs.

He was a teenager when French paratroopers blew up the Algerian revolutionaries’ legendary bomb-maker, Ali la Pointe, during the Battle of Algiers in 1958.

“It shocked us, what we lived through,” he said.