Old Hong Kong Lives Online

Pottinger Street, Central, 1955

Then: a row of ornate stone houses graced by balconies and verandas. Now: a parking garage. It’s a sharp contrast typical of the then-and-now images posted by Lee Chi-man on Flickr, a photo-sharing website. For two years, under the alias HK Man, he has taken old photos of Hong Kong street scenes and paired them with new photos shot at the same locations and angles.

Lee’s simple juxtapositions highlight the city’s drastic pace of change over the last century. They reveal enormous differences between Hong Kong’s past and present, including the near-total disappearance of the shantytowns, colonial villas and low-rise shophouses that once dominated the city’s landscape. Plenty of interesting minor changes are also evident. Over the past few decades, sidewalks have been hemmed in by grey metal railings; open, cluttered shopfronts have been glassed-in and tidied up; and flyovers and pedestrian footbridges, once rare, have become ubiquitous.

“Old Hong Kong had such a special feel,” says Lee, a computer animator born in the 1970s. “I can’t understand how change has come so quickly. It actually makes me upset. The old Hong Kong you see in photos has been destroyed.”

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The Fog Rolls In

Thanks to Quebec’s robust film industry, Montreal makes regular appearances as itself on the big screen, unlike other Canadian cities, which usually suffer the indignity of standing in for American metropolises. But it’s rare to see a feature film which Montreal is treated as a central character and not just a backdrop.

When you have scenes like this, courtesy of Flickr user beezart, you have to wonder why more filmmakers aren’t rushing to make more movies about la métropole.

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