Archive for the History category
August 27th, 2010
In most cities of the developed world, mechanical street sweepers are a fact of life. Even New York’s carless commuters are fluent in strategies to use on “alternate-side parking days,” when the scheduled passing of a street sweeper forces all of a block’s parked cars to one side of the street. It’s easy to forget that, before these behemoth, motorized sponges began scrubbing the streets en masse, even the widest boulevards were cleaned by hand. This street sweeper in 1910 New York would have his work cut out for him after his beat — Fifth Avenue — was considerably widened that year. Although the mechanical sweeper had debuted in 1840s Manchester, it took nearly a century to catch on almost everywhere else.
Of course, street cleaners — some wielding handmade brooms — are a common sight in the poorer countries of the so-called Global South. But old photos of individual sweepers toiling to keep dry the rain-soaked streets of currently presently, hypermodern Tokyo come as a bit of a shock. The photo above, from the collection of the Dutch Naational Archief, is dated “circa 1930,” though some commenters think it might have been taken even later, perhaps in the immediate postwar era. Almost nothing here is recognizable as contemporary Tokyo — except maybe the electronics store in the background. Many of the street sweepers are wearing conical hats typical of agricultural field laborers, and some are even sporting a mino, a traditional form of raincoat made from straw.
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August 15th, 2010
This is a feature story that was originally published in the July 2010 edition of Muse magazine. The photos accompanying this article were taken around the Graham Street Market in Central.
Standing in the soggy heat of a late spring afternoon, Katty Law reflected on the irony that it took a movie a mere two months to do what she has been fighting to achieve for two years. “We’ve been talking about Wing Lee Street for so long,” she said, looking up at a rusted balcony on this sleepy street in Sheung Wan. “But we couldn’t convince the government to save the whole street.”
That was before the makers of Echoes of the Rainbow picked the street — with its single row of tong laus built just before and after World War II — as the perfect backdrop for their weepy drama about a shoemaker’s family in 1960s Hong Kong. After the movie won a prize at the Berlin Film Festival, dozens of photographers, schoolchildren and sightseers started visiting the narrow street, recording the details of an urban scene that has become nearly extinct in Hong Kong. As the crowd of pilgrims grew, heritage advocates raised their voices and a group of architects, engineers and urban planners joined in, urging the URA to preserve all of the buildings on Wing Lee Street.
Government officials were listening. In a surprise announcement, the Secretary for Development, Carrie Lam, announced that Wing Lee Street would be withdrawn from the urban renewal site. For Law, co-founder of the Central and Western District Concern Group, the announcement was only a temporary respite from the overall battle to persuade the government to rethink its entire approach to urban design. Her aim is to get the government to encourage development that is sensitive to the environment, that enhances the city’s streetlife and sense of community and that respects Hong Kong’s history and heritage. “Right now, developers can do whatever they want, and they’re facilitated by the government. We need planning controls,” she said.
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August 12th, 2010
In Cantonese, Tai Ping Shan — Peace Mountain — refers to Victoria Peak, Hong Kong’s most exclusive address. But it’s also the name of a much less illustrious street in Sheung Wan. At the end of the 19th century, new migrants kept pouring into Hong Kong from mainland China, but the colonial goverment’s policy of segregation forced Chinese residents into the city’s least salubrious quarters.
Tai Ping Shan Street was the most squalid and overcrowded of them all. In the spring of 1894, the bubonic plague spread through the street’s tenements, killing more than 2,500 people by the end of the year. After the outbreak, the colonial government razed the neighbourhood, replacing part of it with Blake Garden, one of Hong Kong’s first public parks.
Today, Tai Ping Shan Street is ringed by the traffic-thronged, high-rise streets of central Hong Kong, but it remains a mostly low-rise area. It’s one of the sleepier parts of the city, too, especially on a Sunday, when most of the small workshops in the area are closed for business. Stroll down the street and the small lanes leading off it and you’ll spot some fine details typical of postwar Hong Kong life and architecture: metal shutters with floral cut-outs, old tin mailboxes, outdoor work and storage areas.
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August 9th, 2010
Capital Café, part of a new generation of bing sutts in Hong Kong
It looks like any other Starbucks — until you gaze past the espresso machine and notice a scene straight out of a vintage Hong Kong movie. Handwritten menus are taped to the walls, birdcages hang from the ceiling and green-framed windows open onto a landscape of big-character signs.
In a nod to Hong Kong’s original cafe culture, the Duddell Street Starbucks in Central has recreated a vintage bing sutt, an informal kind of restaurant popular in the postwar years that serves eggs, sandwiches, pasta soups and iced drinks, although the Starbucks bing sutt limits itself to coffee-flavored pineapple buns, egg tarts and Swiss rolls.
“We wanted to come up with something unique that could represent Hong Kong’s past,” says Teresa Shum, Starbucks’ public relations manager. “Bing sutts in the past served the same purpose as Starbucks. It was a place for people to connect to each other, to family and friends.”
In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, bing sutts were found throughout Hong Kong, but they have since become a rarity, with no more than a few dozen left in the entire city. Now they seem poised for a comeback. Over the past year, several new bing sutts have opened on Hong Kong Island, drawing interest from a young generation smitten by the romance of nostalgia and fascinated by Hong Kong’s heritage.
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August 4th, 2010
Dive off the main street near Wenshu Temple in Chengdu and you’ll find yourself in a backstreet that’s bustling with a very different kind of character.
One side of XiZhuShi lane is devoted to small mahjong rooms, their crowded tables spilling out onto the street through open fronts. Here many are engrossed in clamorous games of mahjong. Others spread out big newspapers or lean back to sleep.
Opposite these shops an even older building stretches crookedly along the street, its low roof overhanging worn plaster walls. It has been broken up into different rooms and small doorways offer glimpses of gloomy secrets inside.
Peer in through one of these doors and you’ll see people being manicured beneath the halo of an angle poise. Through the door of another there’s rows of men sat on church-like benches, staring forwards at a television which flickers brightly from the back wall.
“This building is about 90 years old,” says the old man with amputated arm who is sprawled on a wicker chair outside. “It hasn’t changed much in that time.”
Streets with this kind of traditional atmosphere are becoming harder to find in a China that has indiscriminately redeveloped large parts of many cities. Even in Chengdu, where the population are known to value a more traditional and laid back lifestyle, much of the central city has been rebuilt.
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July 21st, 2010
When Cynthia Lee Hong-yee found out that her family planned to sell her grandfather’s private garden to developers, she returned from the United States to take photos of the lush greenery and eclectic Western-influenced Chinese architecture.
“I was capturing some of the details and I realized I just couldn’t capture Dragon Garden’s greatness,” she said. “It has to be experienced.”
She realized the garden needed to be saved — and it was up to her to do it. After a contentious battle with the relatives who owned the garden, Lee managed to persuade her uncle, Lee Shiu, to save it from redevelopment by purchasing it from his brothers and nephews for HK$100 million. The plan, after that, was to donate the garden to the government, which would then open it to the public.
That was in 2006. Since then, the garden, which is located on the shores of the Rambler Channel just west of Sham Tseng, has sat in limbo, free from the threat of demolition but with no concrete plans to restore it and open it to the public. The Lees’ original offer to donate the garden was rebuffed by the government. It later changed tack and said it could take over the site, but would not guarantee how it would be used in the future.
As Hong Kong debates how best to preserve its heritage, the case of Dragon Garden poses a question that has proved surprisingly hard to answer: once you’ve saved an historic site, what do you do with it?
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July 15th, 2010
When Montreal’s Turcot Interchange opened in 1966, no one had seen anything quite like it. Floating one hundred pillared feet above the ground, its concrete spans swirled and swooped through the air, finally coming together in a knot of jaw-dropping proportions. It comprised over seven kilometres of road and spanned an area of seventeen acres. Underneath its four levels of overpasses and elevated ramps, boats floated on the Lachine Canal and trains chugged with freight. In an especially futuristic touch, two continuous bands of fluorescent lights glowed from the highway’s walls. Driving on it, the city unfolded before you: a skyline studded with smokestacks and steeples and the slow blink of the Farine Five Roses sign. More than a mega-project, the Turcot was a Modernist victory cry.
The Turcot still inspires, but, like any relic of a bygone era, its sheen has worn away. The railyards that once spread out from the interchange—and from which the Turcot took its name—were closed by Canadian National in 2002. Ordinary highway lights replaced the space-age illuminations when the aluminum wiring decayed. Winter road salt has soaked the structure in a corrosive brine, inflating steel reinforcement bars into rusted balloons ten times their original size, causing concrete to fall off in chunks.
In 2007, the Ministère des transports du Québec (MTQ) proposed tearing the whole thing down and building a new ground-level interchange in its place. According to the renderings, vehicular capacity would be increased by 20 percent, but the new interchange—projected to cost $1.5 billion over seven years—would require the demolition of two hundred homes, including an entire street of walkup apartments and a large loft building that housed more than four hundred people. Its embankments would cut off links between St. Henri, Côte St. Paul and the other working-class areas adjacent to the interchange.
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July 9th, 2010
The Rialto Theatre is located on the corner of rue Bernard and avenue du Parc, in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood. It was built in 1924 and was one of thousands of ornate movie theatres built in North America at the turn of the century, at a time when films were first entering the mainstream.
These theatres were called movie palaces — a fitting title as they were defined by an over-the-top ornamental aesthetic that evoked old world grandeur. Think limestone balustrades, wrought iron railings, gold molding and red velvet curtains. Most of the movie palaces in the 1920s were built to pay homage to architectural monuments in Europe. The Rialto itself was styled after the Paris Opera House by Montreal architect Joseph Raoul Gariepy. It has been designated as a heritage site by all three levels of government and is considered by its residents to be as much a part of the fabric of Mile End as its bagel shops, cafes and madcap personalities.
The Rialto has stood mostly vacant for the past few years, while its owner, Elias Kalogeras, looked for buyers. Kalogeras had owned the theatre since 1983. During this time it underwent a number of transformations. He purchased the Rialto with hopes of turning it into a mini-Eaton Centre, but the Ministry of Culture intervened and his plans never materialized. Since then it has been a nightclub, a concert venue, a repertory theatre, and a steakhouse. Kalogeras was confronted with many of the problems owners of defunct movie palaces faced: the difficulty of successfully filling such a cavernous space while maintaining the charm of a historic building and keeping it updated to the needs of contemporary society.
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June 19th, 2010
2000
2009
Change is a constant in most cities, and it’s no surprise that a decade can yield dramatic alterations to a specific street or even storefront. Take this slice of San Francisco’s Mission Street, photographed by Eric Fischer, creator of the locals v. tourists photography maps, which he captured in 2000 and again just last year.
In 2000, the block was showing evidence of prosperity. The millennium bug hadn’t shut down “Y2K Furnishings”, despite its ominous name. And the space next door is decorated in retro-50s futurism, reflecting a latent desire to resurrect that decade’s optimistic streak. But what Y2K didn’t do to San Francisco, the dot-com bubble’s burst ultimately did. In 2000, Y2K Furnishings was already having a going out of business sale. Today, save for one floor of the building it formerly occupied, the entire block looks mothballed.
The story of Y2K’s block is fairly rare, but it’s not wholly unique. It demonstrates one way in which cities have defied the narrative arc of unremitting, sometimes totalizing gentrification that U.S. cities have been said to confront throughout much of the 2000s. At worst, the last ten years of gentrification have been more mild, and less sweeping, than many critics have assumed.
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June 13th, 2010
Kate McDonnell pointed the way to some Flickr photos recently uploaded by Michel Gravel, a photojournalist for La Presse whose career has spanned more than 40 years. Many of the photos are street scenes from Montreal in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. What amazes me is how Montreal’s essential character has remained intact despite the fact that it has changed in so many ways — physically, demographically, linguistically, politically — in the past few decades.
The above photo of people lining up to board a bus in a winter snowstorm is a perfect example. When I noticed that the bus was the 80 — the same bus I took up and down Park Avenue every day for years — I started looking for clues as to where on Park Avenue the photo was taken. None of the signs were familiar, nor were the two buildings on the left. After a few seconds, though, I recognized the building in the middle distance as the block at the corner of Park and Bernard, home to Cheskie’s and the dépanneur where I bought newspapers, beer and monthly transit passes. The buildings on the left have been radically made over, but the three businesses visible in the photo — a hardware store, a restaurant and the corner dep — remain, just with different names and owners.
Gravel captured other scenes that are instantly recognizable today: orthodox Jews walking around Mile End, laundry hanging heavily over a laneway, L. Berson and Son’s tombstone workshop, riots, fires, people sweating it out during a heatwave, the dépanneur tricycle.
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May 13th, 2010
In Shanghai’s French Concession…or la France profonde?
Since the first World’s Fair opened in London in 1851, the event has remade cities, bestowing lasting landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower and Space Needle, and introducing the styles, modes, and technologies that would come to dominate urban life: City Beautiful neoclassicism made its debut at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and the 1939 New York World’s Fair was a celebration of the car as the transportation of the future.
It’s still unclear what the 2010 Shanghai Expo will do for the future of cities — even Shanghai itself. The fair’s theme, “Better City, Better Life,” points toward a focus on urbanization, but no single great idea has of yet emerged from the event. And while Shanghai has spruced itself up, it’s done so at a cost — including mass evictions — that hardly justifies the result: mostly stylistic hyperbole, including LED light strips attached to highway bridges.
Even the architecture of the fair’s pavilions is as hit-or-miss as it is temporary; most is slated to be swept away for another round of redevelopment soon after the fair closes in October. But Shanghai’s cityscape evinced cosmopolitan flair well before the world assembled Expo’s theme park of architectural amusements.
Of course, the city’s history may not have encompassed as many cultural traditions as there are token national pavilions at the fair. But because of its colonial past — it rose as a trading port divided into concessions ruled by the British, Americans, and French — Shanghai is filled with streetscapes that sometimes conjure the precise look and feel of London, Paris, or New York.
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April 27th, 2010
There are many easy things in life, but selling flowers, apparently, isn’t one of them. For more than 30 years, Cheung Yuk-hing and his family have run a flower stall in a laneway near Mong Kok’s Flower Market Road, selling peonies, orange trees and other plants they grow in a New Territories orchard. The hours are long, profit margins low and the family faces a constant battle with hawker control officers who regularly fine them for putting their plants on the sidewalk.
“We were the first to put our plants out in the streets, before there were so many other flower shops. Now everyone does it,” said Cheung, who was fined several thousand dollars during the run-up to the Lunar New Year.
Business in the Flower Market has been tough for years as competition between vendors has increased and rents have soared. Now its merchants have something else to worry about: an Urban Renewal Authority plan to renovate Flower Market Road and a row of prewar apartment buildings on Prince Edward Road West. Some merchants worry that, once the renovations are complete, rents will increase even more and the market’s small businesses will be pushed out.
“It won’t help us,” said Wing Chiu, whose family has done business on Flower Market Road for 10 years. “The people who come buy flowers are locals, but this plan is just for the tourists. Business is already lower than before and this won’t do anything to bring in new customers.”
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April 23rd, 2010
Forty years might not even be close to a lifetime for most people, but in Hong Kong, it’s enough to witness the birth and death of a neighbourhood.
In the mid-1960s, when Cheung Cheuk-kuen and his wife, Cheung Tsui-lin, moved into a flat on the top floor of a building in Kwun Tong, it was a typically bright, spacious place, newly built to accommodate Hong Kong’s postwar surge of population. Their life was comfortable; Mr. Cheung owned a restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui. In the 1970s, though, the restaurant began to attract gang members and Cheung decided it had become unsafe. He sold it and decided to earn a living by renting out his flat to tenants. He built cage homes in the living room and wood houses on the roof.
Now the whole neighbourhood is condemned, waiting to be demolished for a HK$30-billion redevelopment of Kwun Tong’s town centre. The Cheungs, who are in their late 80s, are some of the only remaining residents in their building. Mrs. Cheung suffered a stroke and can longer walk, so she spends her days in a wheelchair on the roof. “It’s better to stay up here where there’s more room and fresh air,” says Mr. Cheung. The roof is surprisingly quiet; only the occasional horn and the rattle of passing MTR trains serve as reminders of the busy streets below.
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April 22nd, 2010
The following essay appears in the April 2010 issue of Muse, a Hong Kong arts and culture magazine. The same issue also contains my feature-length profile on Hong Kong’s “tree professor,” Jim Chi-yung. The magazine can be found at major bookstores throughout the city.
In my neighbourhood, I know exactly what language to speak. At Jean-Coutu (the drugstore), Nouveau Palais (the corner diner) and Première Moisson (the upscale bakery), it’s French. At Zoubris (the copy shop), Cheskie (the Jewish bakery) and Club Social (the Italian café), it’s English.
But in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, on the other side of town, I’m lost. I know the neighbourhood is mostly English-speaking, but I don’t want to offend anyone. So before walking into the clothing store, I decide to take the safe route and speak French. Turns out it was the right decision. The owner was francophone.
Nothing is simple when it comes to language in Montreal. The city’s history has made it one of the most linguistically contested places in the world, but far from being a hindrance, it gives it the kind of powerful creative charge that can only come from cultural friction.
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