How Motijheel is losing the bustle that once defined it

There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over old commercial buildings once the tenants leave — not silence, exactly, but a held breath. Walk through Motijheel today and you will hear it: a lift that once carried 300 people a day now carrying three, the flutter of a To-Let sign that has hung so long it has become part of the architecture, a shutter half-drawn over a shop that used to open before the sun. 

Once, this stretch of concrete between Shapla Chattar and Dilkusha was the beating financial heart of a nation. Now it waits, patiently, almost politely, for tenants who are not coming back.

When the foundations of Motijheel Commercial Area were poured in the 1950s, this was Dhaka's answer to a city that needed a centre — a place to put its ambitions, before it had fully decided what those ambitions were. 

The Pakistan government had acquired the land to resettle Mohajir businessmen arriving from India, and the plots handed out that year would go on to define the skyline of a nation not yet born. 

A handful of Bangali businessmen — Sirajuddin, Fakir Chand of Chand Textile Mills, Zillur Rahman of Ashek Lane, the landlord Labiuddin Ahmed Siddiqui of Baliadi — received their share alongside heavyweight non-Bangali houses like the Ispahani and Bawany Groups, Amin Brothers, Omar Sons, and the owner of Moon Cinema. 

The buildings they raised, Amin Court and Adamjee Court among them, still stand today. They are less landmarks now than headstones — monuments to an ambition the city has since outgrown, but monuments all the same, and there is something almost tender in the way they refuse to fall down.

For decades, the formula simply worked. Banks, insurers, stockbrokers, government offices and private firms packed themselves into Motijheel's narrow footprint, and commerce spilled outward from it — past Ittefaq Mor to Tikatuli, out to Dainik Bangla Mor, further still to Arambagh and Fakirapool, as if the whole city were arranged in rings around this one small centre. 

Anyone who worked here in those years will tell you the same thing, in more or less the same words: everyone passed through Motijheel eventually. 

It was where the country did its business with itself. "If you wanted to find someone in business, you came to Motijheel," recalled Shamsul Islam Tarafdar, a veteran banker who spent more than three decades in the area. "Everyone had an office here, or had to come here sooner or later." 

But Motijheel's economy was never only the 20-storey kind. It also lived at knee height, on the pavement, in the queue for lunch — and it is this second Motijheel, the one that had no annual report and no marble lobby, that the story of decline so often leaves out. 

For every bank that filled a floor, there was a tea stall that filled the gap between meetings. A photocopy shop that lived off filing deadlines. A footpath vendor selling shirts and umbrellas to office-goers rushing between appointments, timing his whole day around the rhythm of somebody else's schedule. 

Ghoroa Hotel, tucked into the area's grid of lanes, built its name over the decades on a pot of khichuri rich enough to make a busy executive skip a proper lunch — the kind of dish workers queued for regardless of rank, peons and branch managers standing in the same line, elbow to elbow, for the same plate. That queue, more than any balance sheet, was proof that Motijheel was alive. It had a pulse you could actually stand in. 

"Back then, we barely had time to wash the plates," said a long-time employee at Ghoroa Hotel, on condition of anonymity. "By noon there would be a line stretching outside. Now there are days when the rush never really comes."

Why businesses moved on

By the time parliamentary democracy returned in the early 1990s and the country began chasing a market economy in earnest, Motijheel was already running out of road — quite literally. There simply wasn't enough land left to build on, and what land existed came wrapped in traffic jams, patchy transport, and buildings too old to hold the ambitions of the businesses trying to occupy them. 

So business did what business always does when a space stops serving it: it left. First to Dhanmondi. Then, decisively, to Gulshan and Banani, and later still further out again, to Tejgaon, where cranes now rise where factory floors once ran. 

The Motijheel Commercial Area was built in the 1950s.

There were other forces at work too, quieter than rent and traffic but no less persistent. Bangabhaban's presence in the neighbourhood has long placed a kind of ceiling — bureaucratic as much as literal — over what could rise around it: any building near a government Key Point Installation, and Bangabhaban sits at the top of that list, needs a no-objection certificate from law enforcement and clearance from the Key Point Installation Defence Committee before RAJUK will even look at the plan — a layer of review most developers elsewhere in the city never have to clear. 

Then there was a pull simpler than any regulation. Many of the men who owned Motijheel's offices had, over the decades, come to live in Gulshan and Banani themselves, and some of them, tired of the commute, eventually brought the business home rather than continue making the trip. 

Running alongside the offices, on a smaller screen, was Motijheel's other quiet export: its cinema halls. There was a time an evening in the area meant a film as much as a meeting, but by 2025 even Modhumita — the hall on Toynbee Road that had been open since 1967 and had outlasted almost everything around it — announced it was closing for good after its Eid screenings. 

Motijheel lost not just its tenants but its reasons for anyone to stay past five o'clock.

When the crowd disappeared

What belongs here, in Motijheel, is what the exodus left behind. It is a queue that has thinned considerably. As offices emptied and floors went dark, one by one, the footfall that sustained the footpath economy went with them, quietly, the way water leaves a low place last. Hawkers who once counted on a predictable tide of office-goers now stretch a single day's earnings much further than they used to, standing longer beside carts that used to sell out by noon. 

"The buildings haven't disappeared — the demand has. Companies want newer offices, larger floor plates and easier access. Motijheel simply isn't the first choice anymore."

Joynul Abedin, commercial property owner

Small eateries built around the rhythms of a nine-to-five crowd — the breakfast rush, the lunch rush, the five o'clock stampede for a rickshaw — have had to make do with a rhythm that barely exists anymore, like musicians still keeping time to a song that has stopped playing. 

Even a name as established as Ghoroa Hotel cannot fully escape the arithmetic of a neighbourhood with fewer people in it. Fewer office-goers means fewer plates of khichuri sold, however loyal the old regulars remain, however many of them still make the trip out of habit, or memory, or something more like loyalty than either. 

"Earlier, I knew I'd sell most of my stock before lunch," said Masum Mia, a footpath vendor who has worked in Motijheel for years. "Now I stay until evening just to earn what I used to make by midday."

"The buildings haven't disappeared — the demand has," said Joynul Abedin, a commercial property owner in the area. "Companies want newer offices, larger floor plates and easier access. Motijheel simply isn't the first choice anymore."

The institutions that stayed

However, Motijheel is not quite empty today. It was never going to be abandoned outright, not with the country's central bank still headquartered there. Bangladesh Bank's Motijheel office remains its largest, and the state-owned commercial banks — Janata, Sonali, Agrani, Rupali — have kept their head offices exactly where they always were, as has the Dhaka Stock Exchange nearby. 

RAJUK, too, has stayed put, along with a scattering of insurance corporations and government agencies that never quite found a reason to leave. 

What remains now feels more like an inventory than a directory — mostly large government institutions and businesses too tied to Motijheel to leave. As private companies moved out, these institutions stayed behind, leaving the old commercial centre largely dependent on those that had nowhere else to go.

And yet Motijheel has not been abandoned so much as outgrown, the way a person outgrows a childhood home without ever quite managing to sell it. Amin Court and Adamjee Court are not ruins. They are still standing, still occupied here and there, still catching the evening light the way they always did — it is simply that fewer people look up to notice. 

Somewhere north, Gulshan's glass towers and Tejgaon's rising cranes carry the city's newest ambitions, chasing land and skyline the way Motijheel itself once chased them from Islampur and Nawabpur, from Paltan and Jinnah Avenue. 

Cities, it turns out, don't really lose their commercial hearts. They just keep handing the crown along, generation to generation, address to address.