December 14th, 2009
Queen’s Road, near Noho, in 1930 and today. Photo by HK Man
Noho is Hong Kong’s newest neighbourhood. It’s also one of the oldest. This is, of course, an old part of town that has just recently gentrified and been given a New York-inspired moniker, which stands for North of Hollywood Road and is a counterpoint to the already-trendy enclave of Soho, which as you might guess sits on the other side of Hollywood Road.
Though it might now be known for dining, drinking and shopping, Noho was once associated with a few other things: revolution, prostitution and printing. First developed in the 1850s, shortly after the arrival of the British in Hong Kong, the area around Gough Street was a borderland between the city’s European and Chinese quarters. To the east were the banks, clubs and colonial institutions that served Hong Kong’s elite; to the west was a parallel Chinese city, crowded with migrant workers and merchants from across the harbour.
Living conditions were dire. With the villas and apartments of Central reserved only for whites, space was at a premium, and Chinese families were forced to live seven or eight to a room in squalid tenements.
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December 13th, 2009
The tensions had to bubble to the surface at some point. That’s the consensus that has emerged since underground cylcing activists literally took their fight to the streets, reclaiming a fourteen block stretch of bike lane that had been removed in Brooklyn earlier this year — at the possible behest of the area’s ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community.
The removal occurred on a stretch of Bedford Avenue, the main artery of Williamsburg. For the uninitiated, the neighborhood is roughly split between a gentrifying playground for youngish hipsters to the north and a tradition-bound, family-oriented Hasidic district to the south. The contrast between the two Williamsburgs can be stark, especially on Saturdays: whereas the northside is often packed with revelers, the storefronts of the southside are shut, and, save for families walking to and from synogogues, its sidewalks deserted.
Neither part of Williamsburg could remain contained within its own sphere for very long, and a culture clash was probably inevitable. The city cited safety concerns — including a prevalence of double parking and an increasing number of pedestrians being hit by bikes — as its reason for removing the lanes, but cycling advocates blamed Hasidic complaints that bikers’ skimpy attire was an affront to their moral sensibilities.
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December 6th, 2007
Quai d’Orsay: From Commuters to Connoisseurs
French culture is dead, Time magazine’s Don Morrison recently proclaimed. Complacently subsisting off plentiful government subsidies, it has failed to keep up and compete with any of the noise issuing forth from the anglophone world. If France’s capital city is any reflection of the country’s cultural decline, one might be inclined to agree with him — superficially, at least.
The museum-like quality of Paris, which remains a sort of improbable continuation of its late 19th century self, has long been lamented. The City of Light is bathing, perhaps, in too much of a stage-set’s glow, and one could be forgiven for feeling like one was traipsing through a theme park when strolling through the Tuileries in the evening – especially since half the park literally serves as a sort of fairground. It’s telling that the two most controversial building projects in central Paris – the reconstruction of Les Halles, a former marketplace turned mall and train station, and the potential rebuilding of the Tuileries palace, are, respectively, an attempt to snuff out one of the few 20th century intrusions into central Paris, and the attempt to restore a building lost to fire in 1871. The recent installation of a bike-rental system has only added further to Paris’ 19th century flair: never since then have there been so many pedal warriors on the city’s boulevards. All in all, Paris is not only ossifying, but taking active steps to turn back the clock.
Place Vendôme: Sepulchral City
Morrison claims that that hope for French culture lies in the twin engine of neoliberalism and the immigrant ghettoes of French cities’ banlieues: the latter providing new twists on what “French” means, the former allowing France to competitively export itself to the rest of the world. It’s true that these two forces have brought considerable change to Paris, though not, perhaps, in the positive ways Morrison expects. The offices of American law firms have quintupled along the Avenue Georges V, and St-Germain has steeply declined from Bohemian Rhapsody to Banana Republic. This sort of sterility, more than the mere preservation of belle époque facades, has paralyzed Paris.
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May 23rd, 2007
The Hua Qiang Bei skyline at dusk from the 20th floor of the Sichuan hotel, looking west. The tall building to the left is the 2nd highest in Shenzhen (for now) and was the site of the first electronics factory to be converted into a market, and subsequently an office tower. Its main tenant, SEG, is one of the biggest players in the neighbourhood.
When North Americans think of deindustrialization and China, we’re usually pretty quick to conclude that, since our cities have so little industry left, and so much of what we buy comes with a “made in China” sticker on it, then the new industrial zones, like Shenzhen, in the Pearl River Delta, must be chock full of factories working around the clock. But deindustrialization’s running strong in China, too, in cities that were first industrialized just a few decades ago. Like a time warp, Shenzhen and other places have sped through an industrial cycle that took more than a century to complete in Europe and North America.
The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone was China’s first experiment of the type, decreed by Deng Xiaoping in 1980. The former collection of sleepy fishing and farming villages, just north of Hong Kong’s New Territories hit a population of 1 million in 1991, and now counts 14 million. The role played by the city of Shenzhen, which was in the mid 1980s the focus of enormous investments in manufacturing (most of which were made by Hong Kong entrepreneurs, as that city shed its secondary industry), has shifted towards services and distribution. Shenzhen’s now a sprawling complex of offices, shopping, and apartments, punctuated by a series of “high-high-high-end” (to quote some planners) shopping malls and increasingly gigantic central business districts, with nary a factory in sight. So what happened to the industrial areas?
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January 1st, 2007
Mile End feels like Sesame Street. It has the right combination of rusty cornices, a welcoming atmosphere and multiethnic groups of children playing in the street, although big yellow birds and blue cookie monsters are lamentably absent.
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November 18th, 2006
Park Avenue; photo by flickr user Ansual
The Upper East Side is dying, at least according to New York magazine, in the latest issue of which Jay McInerney tries to convince us that the bastion of the New York elite is heading towards extinction. If such a proclamation is meant to be anything but hubris, however, it ought at least to come with a few caveats.
The first is that the existence of New York itself is partially driven by the very blonde-wigged, fur-wearing gossip mavens of whom McInerney flags the imminent decline; the article’s appearance is akin to those on the covers of political-science tomes asking if the United States’ power will soon be eclipsed. In other words, it has the effect of precipitating panic, demanding defences, and, above all, marketing magazines which contain within the secret signs of this dangerous denouement.
That said, it is hardly surprising that this purported “death” is really the product a soporifically-composed pseudo-sociology. Its greatest fault is this: its author inhabits a small world, one which is a stronghold of the superficial. In its characteristic enchantment with surface baudles and clubby clans it deludes itself–and McInerney–into envsioning an elusively myopic, narrowminded portrait of the city’s social strata. Wherever the diaspora (or whatever the death rate) of its bold-named mainstays, not only the social characteristics of the Upper East Side but, especially, the idea of the neighborhood are stronger than ever- whether or not either are synonymous with the neighborhood’s physical constraints.
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November 2nd, 2006
This is the first in a series of posts on city-related pop songs.
Photo by Chiron Bramberger on Flickr
Owen Pallett doesn’t like condos. This is abundantly clear in “This Lamb Sells Condos,” a song on his most recent Final Fantasy record, He Poos Clouds, winner of this year’s Polaris Music Prize for best new Canadian album. The Lamb in question is Brad Lamb, a Toronto condo broker whose billboards, including one with Lamb’s face photoshopped onto the body of a sheep, are found throughout the city. “The lyrics of Pallett’s song are a scathing psychoanalysis of Lamb and his colleagues in the loft and condominium development business, as well as a critical look at the costs — emotional and communal — of urban growth,” Torontoist informs us. Pallet himself elaborates, explaining that “these condos make me wickedly mad. It is turning Toronto into the architectural equivalent of a Glade Plug-In.”
But don’t expect a polemic in “This Lamb Sells Condos.” Instead, its lyrics are decidedly off-kilter and tongue-in-cheek, set to a gorgeous piano composition. The song isn’t so much a personal attack on Lamb as a poke at condo promoters in general, big-ego characters who have gleefully reduced urban life to a kitschy brand. “There’s a merchant in our midst and with a barrel fist / He’s coloured every surface, he’s slapped up a portrait / And yes, it is his own! He’s gonna take your home!” sings Pallett. “Look! Over the treetops! / Newly conjured erections are making him a killing / And Richmond St. is illing, so the graduates are willing / To buy in to the pillage, now there is no hope for the village.”
Click here to download “This Lamb Sells Condos.” The lyrics are after the jump.
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Montreal Apartments