Hong Kong’s market booths are typically painted green
Why is Hong Kong so green?
The question came up a couple of months ago when I was having afternoon tea with my girlfriend, Laine, at Mido Café.
“If you had to pick a color to associate with Hong Kong, what would it be?” she asked, looking out the window at Temple Street hawkers setting up for the night.
“I dunno,” I said. “Red?”
“That’s what most people would say, right? But I think it’s green. Not just because of the hills or the trees, but because so many things in the city are painted green, like the street market stalls.”
It was an interesting observation. A few weeks later, I brought it up when I met Hulu Culture co-founder and old Hong Kong expert Simon Go for coffee — also, coincidentally, at Mido Café. He immediately perked up.
“I call this color ‘grassroots green,’” he said, gazing up at Mido’s 1950s-era metal window frames which were, of course, painted green. “The windows, the market stalls, the trams, the Star Ferry. It’s everywhere, in all of the most famous Hong Kong things.”
But why? Go didn’t know for sure. He speculated that the government required market stalls to be painted green as a measure of consistency. I got the same answer from the owner of a paint shop on Wellington Street, in the middle of Hong Kong’s oldest street market.
“The hawkers come here to buy their paint and they choose from a few different shades of green,” he said. “I think it has to do with government policy.”
The Montreal metro being built under de Maisonneuve, early 1960s
For a long time, the boulevard de Maisonneuve was one of my least favourite streets in Montreal. It was built in the 1960s by linking and widening four distinct streets: de Montigny, Burnside, St. Luc and Western. The final product was a Frankenstein’s monster of crudely-stitched appendages and half-healed wounds.
In the east end of downtown, near Place des Arts, the street curved through a landscape of parking lots and weedy terrains vagues. Further west, it sliced through blocks of greystones and apartment houses, creating a sad streetscape of crudely amputated buildings. Although the metro runs underneath, de Maisonneuve’s primary objective has always been to funnel cars through the city centre, and it was never very pleasant to walk along its narrow sidewalks. The push for automotive supremacy went so far that the road was tunnelled straight through the lobby of an apartment building whose owner refused to sell to the city.
Then, in the mid 2000s, things began to change. The real estate market awoke from a decade-long slumber and new apartment towers rose along the central stretch of de Maisonneuve. The city widened sidewalks and planted trees. Further east, in the Quartier des Spectacles, the 1960s-era curve was straightened, slowing traffic and creating space for some whimsical new public spaces. The renovation of Norman Bethune Square near Concordia University gave the western stretch of de Maisonneuve a prominent facelift. In 2008, a lane of traffic was taken from cars and given to bikes, which immediately gave the hodgepodge street the kind of singular identity it had always lacked.
Sam Wan was 10 years old when his father, an officer in the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, died in the line of duty. Reeling from his death, Wan’s family moved from their Tsim Sha Tsui apartment back to their ancestral village, Tai Po Tsai, where they owned a small tile-roofed house.
The year was 1966 and the village couldn’t have been more different from Kowloon. Situated on a small plateau beneath Razor Hill, about halfway between Clear Water Bay and Sai Kung Town, Tai Po Tsai was a centuries-old collection of ramshackle houses and farm fields. Almost everyone in the village was related to a common ancestor. Most of them made a modest living.
“The villagers were small-scale farmers — they grew rice and vegetables for sale in the market in Sai Kung,” recalls Wan. “Their income was not very good, so most of the male villagers went outside to work as sea crew members. Some went to England to work as labourers or in Chinese restaurants.”
But things were changing. Shaw Brothers had opened a film studio nearby in 1961 and many of the studio’s employees, including some future film stars, started renting houses in the village. Then, in 1972, a revolution: the government passed the Small House Policy, which gave each male villager and his descendants the right to build a 700 square foot house in the village, without having to pay a land premium or licence fee.
Later this year, when Hong Kong’s government moves its headquarters to a glassy new building next to Victoria Harbour, it will leave behind the leafy hill it has called home since the 1840s. Rather than conserve the hill for public use, however, the government wants to sell half of it to developers, who plan to tear it up for a new shopping mall and 32-storey office tower.
“This hill belongs to the public and it should stay public,” says heritage activist Katty Law, who is part of a spirited coalition of groups that oppose the plan.
Over the past few months, a litany of groups have come out against the government’s plan, including the pan-democratic political parties, designers, environmental activists, architects, historians and congregants from St. John’s Cathedral, which is located on the hill.
Even feng shui masters think it’s a bad idea. One master, who is also a registered architect, told the South China Morning Post that the new office tower would block the site’s chi, which comes from the balance between Government House, at the top of the hill, and the three 1950s-era office blocks immediately below.
The government’s rationale for the redevelopment plan is straightforward: there’s a shortage of Grade A office space in Central and the new office tower would provide 28,500 square meters of it. The project is essential “to maintain Hong Kong’s competitiveness,” a spokeswoman for the Development Bureau told me.
Every day for more than 60 years, the ovens of the Mido Café have churned out dozens of crispy pineapple buns for breakfast tea. Better known by their Chinese name, bolo bau, pineapple buns are the most emblematic of Hong Kong snacks: light, fluffy and filling, with sweet, crunchy crust on top.
But when Mido’s third-generation owner, 59-year-old Wong Sing-fan, is asked where the bolo bau comes from, she looks nonplussed. “It’s from the British,” she says hesitantly, before adding, “They have them in England, right?”
Hong Kong-style cuisine, known for its peculiar marriage of Western and Chinese tastes, is perhaps the city’s most beloved contribution to the world, Cantopop aside. Local staples like bolo bau, milk tea and macaroni soup have followed Hong Kong people wherever they go, from the suburbs of Vancouver to the streets of Shanghai. But for all their notoriety, the origins of these pastries, drinks and dishes are unclear.
“It’s a bit of a mystery,” says Lingnan University historian Lau Chi-pang while nibbling on an egg tart at Honolulu Café in Wan Chai. “Some of us scholars are very interested in knowing where they came from, but it’s quite tricky because their origins are not documented. Basically, we have no idea where to start.”
A large part of the problem is that few bakers or cooks in the past bothered to write down their original recipes. That is especially true in the case of popular cuisine meant for everyday dining. With no food-obsessed TV shows or websites like OpenRice to document their creation, the story of how most dishes came to be has been lost to the fog of time.
The original, ca. 1800 Mangin-Goerck Plan (top) and part of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, as engraved by William Bridges
Last month, New York celebrated the bicentennial of one of its most iconic works of engineering and urban design — Manhattan’s grid. The 1811 street layout was officially known as the Commissioners’ Plan, but its execution is really owed to John Randel, Jr., the plan’s chief surveyor and engineer, who endured — and persevered through — endless legal and physical challenges to imprinting his vision on what was, north of the burgeoning city, a wild, hilly, watery island.
Randel’s difficult (and often amusing) travails have been widely recounted elsewhere: he was, among other things, pelted with vegetables and even arrested for trespass in the course of carrying out the Commissioners’ scheme, which involved seizing property and, in the course of leveling hillsides, leaving some houses stranded on bluffs along his new avenues. The New York Times has a colorful story about him as part of a larger feature celebrating the grid — which, the paper proclaimed, had easily stood the test of time.
But what if Randel had encountered more propertyholders like Henry Brevoot? His obstinant refusal to part with his estate means that, to this day, you can’t walk the length of 11th Street uninterrupted — it doesn’t run between Broadway and Fourth Ave. Or what if the considerable engineering challenges his project faced — eight million cubic yards of dirt had to be moved from the future west side to fill in the valleys of the future east — simply couldn’t be overcome, either physically or financially?
There’s been plenty of aimless speculation over centuries as to what Manhattan would look like sans grid. Among the more tongue-in-cheek illustrations were Charles-Antoine Perrault and Alex Wallach’s views of what the island would look like if crisscrossed not by its grid, but by Paris’ medieval streets and strident boulevards. Cutting and pasting the Left Bank from one Google Earth grid to another didn’t exactly make for a perfect fit, but the idea that a gridless Manhattan may have developed in a similarly piecemeal, haphazard fashion — as it had, with farmers subdividing their land into individual, poorly meshing grids, until 1811 — makes sense.
But there was at least one serious master plan for Manhattan that predated the Commissioners’. Surviving in only a few rare maps (themselves mostly reproductions), it demonstrates that, had the Commissioners’ Plan not prevailed, New York could have been a considerably different place today.
Light from a new fashion boutique floods an alley
near Blake Garden, Hong Kong
Alan Lo Yeung-kit is an unlikely critic of urban renewal. Three of his successful restaurants — Classified, Press Room and The Pawn — are located in Urban Renewal Authority projects in Sheung Wan and Wan Chai.
Critics have accused his businesses of taking part in the kind of URA-style renewal that is destroying the character of Hong Kong’s old neighbourhoods. But Lo is no fan of bulldozer redevelopment. “Our whole approach to urban renewal needs to be rethought,” he said.
Lo said he has come up with an alternative model for urban renewal, one that is both profitable and preservation-based. Last year, he and partner Darrin Woo founded a new design and development firm, Blake’s, that was inspired by the old neighbourhood around Blake Garden in Sheung Wan. The firm’s first project took a mid-century tong lau at 226 Hollywood Road and converted it into four luxury apartments. The units sold out soon after they went on sale in November, fetching more than HK$25 million apiece.
“It’s about getting out of the box-standard big-developer approach and making something that fits the neighbourhood,” says Lo. “The vision is to rethink an old, slightly sleepy neighbourhood with respect for what has been in the district for a long time, and without having to knock things down.”
Sometime in the late tenth century, a Sung Dynasty bureaucrat named Tang Hon-fat left his hometown of Pak Sha Village in Jiangxi province atook a trip south, to the coast of Guangdong. When he passed through the lush valley now known as Kam Tin, he was so taken by its natural beauty and the friendliness of its peasant inhabitants, he decided to move his entire family there. They arrived, ancestral bones in tow, in 973.
If Tang were to pass through Kam Tin in 2011, he might be less impressed. The mountains are still as beautiful as always, but the banana trees and farm fields of the valley have mostly given way to a haphazard collecton of houses, shacks and junkyards, none built with particular care or concern for the surrounding landscape. And if the people of Kam Tin were once known for their generosity, they lost it at some point during the millenium of pirate raids, dynastic upheaval and British annexation that has passed since Tang Hon-fat’s arrival. Visitors to Kam Tin’s ancient walled villages are more likely to encounter a cranky old woman demanding an entry fee than they are to be greeted with smiles.
Still, Kam Tin is one of Hong Kong’s most intriguing places, both for its centuries of history (documented with flourish by Sung Hok-pang in a 1973 paper for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society) and its more recent development. In 1950, the Royal Air Force opened a base here, which housed a number of military families until the return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. (It was also used as a detention camp for Vietnamese refugees from the 1970s to 1992.) Today, the base is mostly disused, run by a single unit of the Peoples’ Liberation Army, whose soldiers are not allowed to leave the base. But the airfield still makes its presence felt through the large community of ex-Gurkhas — the Nepalese and Indian who formed their own regiments in the British Army — who have remained in the area.
You’ve probably heard the term “voodoo economics” before. Famously used by George H.W. Bush to denounce Ronald Reagan’s theory of trickle-down wealth when the two were vying head-to-head for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, they never again escaped the elder Bush’s lips after he became Reagan’s running mate in that year’s general election. The former’s subsequent silence and the latter’s historic victory ensured that voodoo economics would reign unchallenged throughout the 80s, fueling a period remembered for overall prosperity — but an alarmingly huge income gap.
It’s no coincidence that the 80s were also the period when the word “gentrification” began to play a major role in US public discourse. So did “yuppies”, who became the subject of routine social satire during the decade. Less well documented, though, are the earlier, murkier beginnings of postwar gentrification, well before the tipping point that brought the concept into mass consciousness. In the late 1960s and 1970s, as white flight continued hollowing out American city centers, the first gentrifiers were also taking their initial, cautious steps into what is now some of the most coveted real estate in the country.
Director Hal Ashby’s first film, a 1970 comedy called The Landlord, marks the period well. The protagonist is Elgar Enders, a dandy-suited suburban WASP who lives off his parents’ money — the original trust fund kid. His plan to buy a ghetto tenement, evict its tenants, and transform it into into his new mansion seems rebellious and eccentric, though it’s no less whimsical than the change of tastes that brought mass gentrification to similar Brooklyn neighborhoods (the movie was filmed in a now unrecognizably destitute Park Slope) in the 80s and 90s. In fact, Enders’ scheme might have been prophetic — in the last decade, the mansionization of New York apartment buildings has become a small trend.
Thirty years ago, Shenzhen was a collection of farming towns and fishing villages home to not much more than 300,000 people. It is now a sprawling metropolis of several million, with around 3.5 million in the city centre and another five or six million in the suburbs and industrial towns that stretch for miles beyond.
The story of Shenzhen’s growth has been told many times, in many places, but it is still hard to understand exactly how quickly the city has grown until you see it from above. 1,200 feet above ground, in the observation deck of Shun Hing Square, the city’s tallest building, the ad hoc nature of Shenzhen’s development becomes obvious.
It might only be thirty years old, but Shenzhen has been built and rebuilt so many times, it has the urban layers of a city four times its age. Country fields developed into worker-unit housing blocks in the 1980s were redeveloped into low-rise private housing in the 1990s and then into high-rises in the 2000s. None of these generations fully subsume the other — there are always traces left of the past — and the city is littered with discarded planning initiatives, like attempts to build tree-line boulevards that were abandoned after just a few blocks.
On a pleasantly warm evening last November, my thoughts wandered over to the nighttime activity at the Sai Wan pier and I wondered if the same sort of thing happened at the nearest bit of waterfront to my apartment, the New Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter. I grabbed my camera, stepped out of the door, and twenty-five minutes later — after walking through the crowded streets of Mongkok, over a series of footbridges and past the gigantic housing estates near Olympic MTR station — I reached the water.
A couple of dozen people milled about. There were teenagers sitting by the water’s edge, legs dangling off the concrete seawall. Middle-aged couples strolled hand-in-hand down the waterfront promenade. A few elderly people swung their arms, walking backwards, doing strange old-people exercises. Next to the water’s edge were a few small boats, their engines running, operators sitting onboard, killing time. Every so often, one of the boats would leave the typhoon shelter and return with a single passenger.
The New Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter seems a poor heir to the sensational legacy of its predecessor. First opened in 1916, the Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter was designed to protect Kowloon’s fishing boats from heavy summer waves, but it also sheltered a thriving community of Tanka people, who had made their livings in the coastal seas of South China for generations. They had their own language, their own food and their own wedding rituals, all of which, naturally enough, were centred around the sea. For centuries, they were considered non-Chinese barbarians by land-dwellers, and it wasn’t until 1731 that the Chinese emperor emancipated them from this status. But they still suffered discrimination whenever they set foot on land, so they continued to live most of their lives at sea.
Rongeurs attendant la fin: rue Charlotte, Montréal
Alors que j’arpente les rues étroites et organiques de la cité coloniale, au sud du quartier latin, je me surprend à escalader lentement la douce pente de la basse-ville jusqu’au tragique Boulevard René-Lévesque – horrible et bruyant – que je trouve en pleine transformation. Tout près, des dizaines de tours d’habitation, modernes. Au loin, ces hautes barres vitrées où s’empilent les bureaux, s’effaçant par ce mélange étrange de lumière jaunâtre et de fumée mécanique : le centre des affaires, que je devine, avec son mouvement et sa confusion.
Je décide d’accélérer le pas et de me retrouver dans un dédale de petites rues rectilignes, agglutinées comme elles le sont, entre les principales artères qui dessinent la carte de Montréal : Saint-Catherine, Sherbrooke, Maisonneuve et René-Lévesque. Puis coincées étrangement entre la cohue estudiantine du Quartier Latin et l’ex Red-Light District que forme la Main – le boulevard Saint-Laurent – et ses théâtres et autres cabarets plus ou moins douteux.
Je sais que bientôt nous ferons table rase de cette zone – comme déjà nous l’avons fait dans les années ’60 en construisant à peine à deux pas l’immense complexe des habitations Jeanne-Mance – pour en faire un lien moderne, propret et sécuritaire et reliant enfin ce nouveau grand ensemble urbain que doit devenir le Quartier des Spectacles.
J’emprunte l’étroite et unique rue Charlotte, microcosme de cette mutation.
What happened here ? This used to be the north end of Griffintown, right next to the business center of Montreal.
À Montréal, au cours des années 1950 et 1960, notamment suite au rapport Dozois, on identifie des dizaines de quartiers qualifiés d’insalubres, vus comme irrécupérables, et où les taudis menacent la santé publique. Puis ont les rase, un par un, pour faire place à des projets d’ensemble, comme les Habitations Jeanne-Mance ou encore la tour de Radio-Canada, dans l’Est.
urban blog of the day: favelissues, discussing favelas (and other types of informal settlements) worldwide http://t.co/5dQ9I6Xyabout 12 hours agofrom web
