The Slow Demise of Long Spring Lane

A little north of Shanghai’s Suzhou Creek, nestled behind the cacophony of Qipu Lu’s hectic wholesale clothing district, lies the entrance to Changchun “Long Spring” Lane (长春里). It is a crumbling longtang* (弄堂) marked by one of Shanghai’s ubiquitous brick archways, which lies under the lane’s name, chiseled in stone. And it has a very auspicious address: 858 Tanggu Lu. In Chinese, 858 is “ba wu ba” but sounds very close to “fa wo fa” as in “prosper I prosper”.

But for all its supposed good fortune, the lane has lately found itself less than prosperous. Residents of the front section of Long Spring Lane have moved out after agreeing to take government compensation for redevelopment plans, turning the main alleyway into a repository for rotting trash and festering vermin. Meanwhile, the once-lovely balcony overlooking the street was being slowly eaten away by termites and humidity.

The back portion of the longtang was still intact and home to a few families, but it was slowly emptying out, evidenced by the bricked-up shikumen**. 858 Tanggu Lu is increasingly surrounded by wide asphalt roads and warehouse-like offices. It’s unclear whether any future building will share the longtang’s encouraging address, but if it does, it will certainly promise prosperity of a different kind.

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Halloween in a City of Ghosts

There’s something undeniably creepy about Nam Koo Terrace, an abandoned red-brick mansion on Ship Street in Wan Chai. Nearly seventy years ago, the house was used as a military brothel during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, and the ghosts of so-called “comfort women” are said to haunt the house today.

In 2003, a group of teenagers made headlines when they snuck into the mansion and became so distraught they had to be hospitalized.

But when Wong Sau-ping takes ghost-seekers on a tour of Wan Chai, it’s not Nam Koo Terrace that scares them the most — it’s the hill behind it.

“There’s a place in the woods where people say a woman hanged herself,” she said. “When we went to investigate, we found a big urn, and nearby is a shrine where people perform rituals to chase ghosts away.”

Sometimes people become so scared they feel ill and leave the tour, she said. “Ghost stories let you imagine what happened — we can’t actually show you the ghost, so you have to fill in the blanks yourself.”

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Obsolete Modernism

You can see the Pekeliling Flats from the platform of the Titiwangsa monorail station, just north of Kuala Lumpur’s city centre. The grounds between each apartment block are unkempt; the flats themselves look ransacked, with doors knocked out of their frames. Though the flats haven’t been abandoned for very long, they are already being reclaimed by tropical vegetation creeping out of cracks and up from the ground. They’ll be demolished next year, according to the Sun, one of KL’s daily English newspapers.

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The Industrial City Deconstructed

Détroit: Ville Sauvage (Detroit Wild City), film de Florent Tillon (2010), présente de façon particulièrement poétique et imagée la réversibilité du processus d’urbanisation. Dans le cas très précis de Détroit, il s’agît d’un phénomène directement lié à la baisse de production dans l’industrie automobile américaine et des pertes d’emplois qui sont une conséquence directe des déboires dans cette industrie.

Les quartiers anciens de la ville – ainsi que certaines banlieues – sont laissés à l’abandon, vidés de leurs habitants. Plusieurs tours anciennes du centre-ville sont en attente d’un preneur et d’une nouvelle occupation. D’autres sont simplement détruites… Une attention particulière à été porté aux sonorités ambiantes, ce qui plonge le spectateur dans un environnement sonore particulièrement persistant, qui marque.

Quel est le destin des mégapoles en perte de vitesse? Quel est l’avenir du mode d’urbanisation nord-américain? Peut-on sauver ces témoins de notre passé industriel, lorsque les ressources financières se font rares? Quelle est la valeur – et le sens – de notre banlieue, si la ville centrale disparait?

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Empty L.A.

The density of urban slums once drove city planners and social workers mad — and, in some cases, still does today. But perhaps because of the vicious crime that followed mass abandonment of cities like Detroit, or the specter, for the first time, of an entire city’s virtual erasure in the wake of Hiroshima, the empty, depopulated city has inspired more horror in the last sixty years.

In the original (1953) film version of The War of the Worlds, Los Angeles is almost completely evacuated to await its doom. The philosophical 2001 film Vanilla Sky opens with a nightmare sequence in which the main character wakes up to an empty Manhattan. Alan Weisman’s recent book The World Without Us detailed precisely what would happen to the built environment over time if people really did disappear from cities.

Limited disappearance has even been used as a tool to stress the catastrophic consequences of a particular category of person vanishing, as in the 1922 Austrian novel and subsequent film The City Without Jews (a shocking anticipation of Nazi anti-Semitism), or the 2004 film A Day Without a Mexican.

These apocalyptic precedents are what first came to mind upon first encountering photographer Matthew Logue’s new collection, Empty L.A.

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Unbuilt Cities

The world is filled with mad dreams only partly come to life. In Eastern Europe, half-built skyscrapers that neither communist governments nor their free market-friendly successors could complete form ironic landmarks, totems of ideological overconfidence. In China’s Inner Mongolia province, authorities built a whole city to boost the country’s GDP — that no one could afford to live in. And vast, empty grids etch the surface of the United States: the hidden ruins of capitalism’s most spectacular failures.

Fly out of Fort Myers at dusk, catching the glint of the setting sun on the vast grid of streets stretching across the marshlands to its east and you may come to understand the level of ambition that led the airport you just left to be grandly styled “Southwest Florida International”. This is Lehigh Acres, quickly becoming America’s most notorious — if not its first — suburban ghost town.

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Vertically Challenged

The Midtown West intersection was windswept and deserted, save for two fighting children. To their right, a weed-strewn lot, some freshly-painted tags, a shopping cart filled with someone’s belongings from some far-off store called “Buy Buy Baby”, a long-unnecessary construction cone. To their left: an empty, suburban-style Mercedes dealership, out-of-place, surreal — just a little beyond was the Empire State Building. In the near background, a panorama of half-finished new condo towers, half-gleaming in once-trendy sheaths of glass.

New York has not reverted to the destitution claimed by some of the shriller portraits painted by the European press, which cover the economic downturn’s grip on the U.S. with the same sensationalism they once reported on the country’s urban crime. The recession is marked by subtler symbols — the increasing emptiness of storefronts, on the one hand, and the skeletal remains of stunted skyscrapers, on the other. New York’s condo tower boom is over, leaving behind a forest of halted cranes, a frozen Dubai.

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The Old Steel Foundry

My first experience of urban exploration came thanks to an abandoned steel foundry on St. Ambroise St. in St. Henri, on which there was still a piece of 1995 referendum-era graffiti urging us to vote “Oui.” My girlfriend and I walked around the building, exploring some of the more easily accessible areas on the ground floor.

Just as we were about to leave, two kids from the neighbourhood came up to us. “Do you want to see something cool?” they asked. We followed them to a steel garage door that had been pried open, squeezing ourselves underneath and into a dark building.

The boys ran up a staircase to the left. Upstairs was a large room, brightly lit by the setting sun, filled with huge piles of debris, toilets and empty bottles. “GOGGLE AREA,” read a sign hanging crookedly from the ceiling. “Wear your safety goggles. Portez vos lunettes de sûreté.” As I looked around, flipping through the pages of 1980s fashion magazines that were sitting in a pile on the floor, the two boys started picking up bottles and smashing them on the ground.

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End of the Line

At the southeastern corner of Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood — the cape that put the Hoek in the area’s original Dutch name, Roode Hoek — almost nothing is used according to its original purpose. A rail barge has been repurposed as a waterfront museum, a warehouse has become a massive Fairway supermarket, some streetcar tracks have become a waterfront promenade, and a solitary rowhouse has been refitted as a shrine to nauticalia that would not look out of place in a New England fishing village. Recently, one of its old docks was even restored to working condition — as Brooklyn’s first cruise terminal.

Creative reuse is almost the rule here — with one exception. A pair of mid-20th century streetcars sits, rusting and abandoned, between the repurposed warehouses and the reclaimed promenade, seeming like a fossilizing fragment of a network that once covered the entire borough.

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Suzanne Takes You Down…

John Allison’s 1983 photos of Montreal’s Old Port reveal a neighbourhood essentially unchanged since Leonard Cohen wrote his 1966 song “Suzanne.” Looking at the half-abandoned streets, flanked by greystone warehouses still bearing the imprint of their past occupants, sidewalks claimed by cracks and weeds, it’s hard not to recall the lyrics from that song.

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she’s half crazy
But that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you’ve always been her lover

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Scaling an Abandoned Silo

Next to the Redpath Lofts, on the Lachine Canal, is an abandoned sugar silo. Somehow, we ended up at the top.

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Illicit Rooftop Views

I took these photos from the roof of an abandoned grain silo on St. Patrick Street in Point St. Charles, right next to the Lachine Canal. I was there, in the company of two Montrealers who have snuck up to dozens of roofs over the past few years, for an article that will appear soon in the Gazette.

To access the roof, we climbed up a series of six metal ladders in a large concrete shaft filled with mysterious black sand. The effort was worth it: there is something serene about being alone on a roof with the city spread out before you. We shared a bottle of port and listened to tinny music on portable speakers.