Part of the brilliance of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window was the way it acknowledged voyeurism as part of urban life. In the city, we’re always being watched and we’re always watching others, be it on the street, from across a café or on the web, through street photography.
I’d be lying if I said that the thrill of spying on others wasn’t part of the reason why I like rooftops. The exchange of glances on the street is replaced by a position that gives you a privileged view of everything around. I’ve never seen anything particularly exciting from a roof — it’s not like I bring a pair of binoculars — but I do enjoy catching the occasional glimpse into the normally sheltered world of somebody’s private life. Not too long ago, while hanging out on a friend’s rooftop, I was able to catch part of a World Cup game being watched on a large high-definition TV in the building next door.
Obviously I’m not alone. Peepers, a new film by Montreal’s Automatic Vaudeville Studios, takes the idea of rooftop voyeurism and builds a movie around it. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m happy to see some of the rooftops I know and love featured in the trailer. At least one of the scenes looks like was filmed on the rooftop where writer/actor Mark Slutsky lives — a rooftop my friends and I have snuck up to many times.
Above, 1980s. Below, 2010. Compilation by Lee Chi-man
The fact that a row of prewar shophouses still stands on Johnston Road suggests we’ve entered a new chapter in Hong Kong’s history of urban development. Originally housing the century-old Woo Cheong Pawn Shop and other neighbourhood businesses, the shophouses were bought by the Urban Renewal Authority and incorporated into a property development that included the construction of a luxury apartment tower.
Now the buildings contain a high-end restaurant and café known as The Pawn, which takes its name from the Woo Cheong Pawn Shop, one of the building’s former tenants. Designed by Stanley Wong, its interior is a British colonial mash-up, with a menu to match (think English ale and fried pig’s ears).
Over the past year, I’ve interviewed dozens of people about things related to heritage, and The Pawn keeps cropping up as an example of how buildings shouldn’t be preserved. It’s historic preservation for the highest bidder — the shell of an old building maintained and converted into something with the veneer of history. The ultimate irony is that the Woo Cheong Pawn Shop is still around; it was forced to move down the street to make way for The Pawn.
Wandering down narrow lanes, past rows of makeshift houses, I could be standing in a squatter’s village in the New Territories. Potted plants sigh in the heavy heat of summer. Door gods peel from wooden entranceways. It is quiet. But I’m not in a village — I’m ten stories above a narrow street in Tai Kok Tsui, on the roof of a large block of flats built in the 1970s.
About thirty families live on the roof. Most are immigrants from the mainland or South Asia; others are longtime roof-dwellers who’ve decided they’d rather live here than in a faraway public housing estate. People have been living on Hong Kong’s roofs for decades; rooftop villages like this are a remnant of the massive tide of mainland refugees that swept over Hong Kong in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Rooftop shacks have been bought, rented and sold ever since, in an illegal black market that is tacitly accepted by the government. There are no statistics on how many people live on rooftops, but one community worker told me the number could be in the tens of thousands.
One of the Tai Kok Tsui roof’s residents is a 23-year-old university student named Sam Fong. I was first introduced to him by a social worker who is helping relocate families off of the roof, which will be demolished for a new housing development in the near future. He moved here with his family from Guangzhou a few years ago. Unlike many roof-dwellers, he’s quite philosophical about his surroundings. The rooftop is a village in more ways than its appearance: everyone knows each other and people keep their doors open. Every fall, Fong’s family hosts a Mid-Autumn feast in a small open space in front of their house.
There’s nothing particularly special about this building. Built in the 1970s, it’s a highrise like any other, with a handful of small flats on each floor. None of the apartments have balconies; there is no club house or swimming pool; the only bit of shared space, beyond the dimly-lit concrete corridors, is the rooftop, which is divided into two narrow platforms on either side of the elevator’s machine room. Laundry lines crisscross the roof, but on a drizzly night, there are no clothes to be seen.
The view from here is attractive because of its ordinariness. Below is a brightly-lit football pitch, the sound of whistles and shouts echoing off the walls of surrounding buildings. To the south, apartment buildings jostle for space on the Mid-Levels, each trying to climb higher than the next in a quest for sea views. Exhausted, they pause for respite halfway up the dark, looming mass of Victoria Peak. To the east, IFC makes an appearance in the narrow gap between towers.
The glow of apartment windows stirs voyeuristic curiosity. In one, cool flourescents illuminate a dingy kitchen. Another window reveals a posh living room filled with art. Each is a portal into another Hong Kong, another set of lives, another set of stories.
Here on Peng Chau, thirty-five minutes by ferry from Central, the city is but a distant memory, a row of skyscrapers on the horizon. I make my way through sleepy streets to the tallest building on the island, a seven-storey apartment block. It has no guards and no doors to prevent entry to its upper floors. I walk up past the sounds of children playing and dinners being cooked behind closed doors.
When I emerge onto the roof, stepping out into brilliant sunshine, I’m greeted by a sweeping view of the entire island. Village houses sweep up the surrounding hills like waves on a beach. I can see the ferry pier where I arrived, the French café near the main square, the beach lined by wooden fishing boats.
There are signs that something is amiss as I make my way up the narrow stairs of this nondescript building, passing by boxes of empty beer bottles towards the smell of charcoal and the sound of laughter.
What’s going on becomes clear when I emerge onto the roof, a verdant oasis filled with smoke and lively conversation. It’s a barbecue. To be precise, it’s a cook-it-yourself barbecue restaurant, no different from those in the countryside of Hong Kong except that this one in the middle of Mongkok, high above a busy shopping street.
The location actually makes sense. Rooftops are the most obvious point of escape from a crowded city, a place to get away without leaving anything behind. Up here, among the plants and sizzling chicken wings, the noise of traffic recedes and a kind of tranquillity sets in. It’s not the same kind of quietude you experience in the country, but something else entirely: an urban retreat, a cocoon amidst the highrises.
Wah Luen is the cheapest building in Fotan, an out-of-the-way industrial district near Shatin. Since the early 2000s, it has become the epicentre of an artists’ colony populated largely by graduates of the nearby Chinese University. About 100 artists live and work in the area, most of them in high-ceilinged studios in the Wah Luen Centre, a brooding hulk of a building whose floors are always slippery from sausage factories.
On the building’s large, bleak rooftop, which is crisscrossed by rusty pipes and pockmarked by mysterious caged enclosures, it becomes clear just how odd the Wah Luen’s setting really is — an outpost of industry surrounded, rather improbably, by verdant hills. Standing towards the hills, your field of vision is occupied by greenery and small village houses, but your ears ring with the sound of distant machinery and the beep-beep-beep of delivery trucks backing out of loading bays.
Occasionally, there are reminders of the building’s newfound artistic vocation. The last time I visited, on a sullen grey afternoon, a pile of cement bricks had been cryptically arranged like a miniature Stonehenge. I’m not sure if it was the work of one of Wah Luen’s resident artists or a wistful elevator mechanic. Who knows.
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.
Eddie Lui looks out from atop the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, leaning on a cane, contemplating the scene before him. He waves his hand out towards the old housing estates of Shek Kip Mei, their pale yellow paint dulled by the grey skies and damp air.
“This is a space where you can really communicate with the vicinity,” he says. “You can see the evolution of public housing and the surrounding area. It shows you how we came into being.”
It has been a year and a half since the abandoned factory building on Pak Tin Street was converted into the JCCAC, a collection of artists’ studios, art galleries, cafés and performance spaces. Lui, the centre’s executive director, led the transformation. Though its location has been criticized as out-of-the-way by some members of the Central-focused art crowd, the JCCAC is beginning to forge a relationship with its neighbours in Shek Kip Mei. In the afternoon, old men read newspapers in the centre’s atrium and teenagers head up to the roof after school.
The roof is central to Lui’s plans for the JCCAC. He has covered part of it in a layer of hardy plants that help insulate the building. Two stages have been built on the roof, used for theatrical performances and rehersals. The centre’s artists have held a barbecue party on the roof. There are even plans to use it for film screenings. “We could show experimental movies or something like that,” says Lui, pointing to an open space that he says could fit about 70 people.
The tong lau on Russell Street, across from Times Square, is not in the best shape. Walking upstairs from the street, I pass a bookstore and a hair salon; after the third floor, the shops give way to apartments and the stairwell becomes filled with rubbish, its tiles stained by years of grime. By the time I reach the top, I have to step over piles of construction debris just to get outside.
But I’m here precisely because this building has been overlooked: its roof is now covered in graffiti. Compared to many other cities around the world, graffiti and street art are still fairly uncommon in Hong Kong, and rooftops like this give artists a kind of sketch pad on which to practice away from the eyes of the public. There are lots of tags, but also some work by the city’s best-known street artists, Graphic Airlines — whose chubby-faced characters are now as common in galleries as they are on the street — and Start from Zero, whose preferred media include stickers and wheatpaste.
There’s more up here than just graffiti. From here, I can peer behind the giant billboards that face Times Square; I’m surprised to see they are propped up by bamboo scaffolding. I would have expected something more elaborate and permanent, but perhaps bamboo allows the billboard to be easily dismantled in case the market for luxury watches and designer handbags collapses. It seems a fitting irony: the city’s corporate advertising is supported by traditional craftsmanship, its presence as fleeting and ephemeral as graffiti that is painted over or worn away by the sun.
Last October I moved to a new apartment — and with a new apartment comes to a new roof to explore. Unfortunately, my new building’s rooftop is far from spacious, with just two narrow platforms accessible through the fire stairs. Ladders lead up to two higher platforms, one atop the elevator shaft and another on top of what I assume is the water tank. The only things up there are satellite dishes, antennae and mobile phone receptors, which makes for a kind of depressing space. There isn’t even room to dry laundry.
There are, however, some pretty good views. To the east, there’s Langham Place and the highrise jungle of central Mongkok. To the east, there’s a view down Argyle Street towards Ma On Shan, one of Hong Kong’s tallest peaks, and to the west, a view over the Diocesan Boys’ School towards Kowloon Tong and the Lion Rock.
Before I moved from the Flower Market to Homantin last year, I went up to my building’s rooftop for a few last photos of the view, which gave out onto the towers of Mongkok on one side and the mountains north of Kowloon on the other.
By the end of this year, Hong Kong’s Buildings Department plans to finish clearing illegal rooftop structures from single-staircase buildings, marking the end of a clearance programme that began in 2001. But illegal rooftop communities continue to thrive, fed by a shortage of centrally located public housing and perennially high rents in the private sector.
Nine floors above Li Tak Street, in Tai Kok Tsui, more than 100 people live in haphazard shacks on the roof of a large block of flats.
Sam Fong, 23, who studies English at Polytechnic University and is an amateur photographer, moved to the rooftop two years ago, when he left Guangzhou to join his father, mother and sister in Hong Kong. They share a sheet-metal shack with small kitchen, living room and bedroom.
“Hong Kong is just like a jungle. You have to fight for your survival here,” said Fong, who recently started working part-time in a nearby supermarket. His father is a building concierge, his mother is a waitress and his sister works in a clothing store.
Because Fong, his mother and sister have not lived in Hong Kong for seven years, the family cannot apply for public housing, a common problem faced by poor immigrants.
