But after a decade and a half it still only holds a few hundred thousand – an irony lost on Egypt's investment minister, Ashraf Salman, when he quipped that Cairo's yet-to-be-named replacement would be "the new New Cairo".
Sweaty, musical, melodramatic and political, Cairo Station stars ballsy writer-director Youssef Chahine as a homicidal newspaper seller in Cairo's vast railway station.
That was the year when Fatimid invaders began to build a grand enclosure to house their new mosques and palaces – a private city known to its residents as al-Qahera, and eventually to the world as Cairo.
Khaled al-Attiya, who has been trying to mediate an end to the political turmoil in Egypt, returned on Wednesday after several days in Cairo and complained he had not been able to meet all the parties he had been promised to see.
Speaking in Cairo, he said: "As I move to Syria, we will do whatever we can to urge and press for a cessation of hostilities and end to the killing and violence.
That President Obama is sympathetic is evident from his recent reiteration to the UN general assembly of his commitment to the two-state principle; a reminder of what he said in his speech in Cairo in 2009 during his first term: "....it is undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslim and Christian – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.
Ragia Omran, a lawyer for the Cairo-based Arab Human Rights Institute who visited Fahmy in prison on Wednesday, said his shoulder, already dislocated from a previous fall, had been fractured when the detainees were transported to Cairo's Qasr en-Nil police station for interrogation.
"At the end of the day, these were just journalists doing their job," said Bernard Smith, an al-Jazeera journalist who regularly works in Cairo.
The other emails between Clinton and her advisers provided by the State Department contained a summary of a 2011 meeting between John McCain and senior Egyptian officials in Cairo.
And it has to be done far away from Cairo – in the [rural areas] where the practice is very widespread".
I've covered the Egypt beat many times for Al-Jazeera but I flew into Cairo last September last year on a story about Syria.
