According to Kamal Rebeiz, the late mukhtar of Ras Beirut, “even the sun in Ras Beirut is different!” Perhaps outrageous, Rebeiz’s claim to Ras Beirut’s distinction is a familiar one among its oldest inhabitants. To many this western-most extension of the city is synonymous with the American University of Beirut (AUB) founded by American missionaries in 1866. In turn, Ras Beirut’s association with unparalleled tolerance, diversity, and cosmopolitanism is credited to AUB’s long presence there. But the mainly Orthodox Christian and Sunni Muslim community of Ras Beirut insist that their ta‘ayush, or coexistence, is the bedrock of Ras Beirut’s exceptionalism setting it apart from other parts of Beirut, of Lebanon, and of the region. Indeed, they claim that their history of timeless coexistence is what persuaded missionaries to choose Ras Beirut as the College’s site in the first place. While no missionary records substantiate this claim and Ras Beiruti memories “resist correction by others,” it is the very fallibility of these recollections, as Alessandro Portelli suggests, that reveals deeper meanings and provides invaluable insights into “the interests of the tellers, and the dreams and desires beneath them.” Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of memory studies and oral history in the writings of Pierre Nora, Maurice Halbwachs, Susan Crane, Barbara Misztal, and Portelli, this paper examines the recurrence of local claims to Ras Beirut’s exceptionalism in stories which describe a mourned past. Based on published and unpublished memoirs and extensive oral histories conducted over the past four years with members of Ras Beirut’s oldest generation, this paper sheds light on an intangible heritage that “would otherwise be lost both mentally and materially” (Crane). Far from being dismissed as an older generation’s futile longing, these stories insist on local agency in the making of Ras Beirut and represent its primacy in challenging, however subtly, the missionary “discovery” of Ras Beirut, on the one hand, and any association with the sectarianism of the Lebanese Civil War on the other. By repetition and self-perpetuation, Ras Beirut stories of exceptionalism, or narratives of coexistence, affirm a past remembered in common to accord unity to an older generation’s sense of dislocation in the post-war present. Told individually, they represent a collective memory whereby “the individual calls recollections to mind by relying on the frameworks of social memory”(Halbwachs) and transform the intangibility of the Ras Beirut’s past into a tangible “repository of peoples’ memory” (Misztal).