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Lisbon

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Close Company

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Only the Trams Remain

Lee Chi-man, Hong Kong’s answer to Guillaume St-Jean, finds old photos of Hong Kong streetscapes and heads to the spot where they were taken to replicate them. So far, he has compiled around 400 scenes, showing just how drastically Hong Kong has changed over the course of the twentieth century.

The photos above illustrate how many of those changes have been for the worse. In the top photo, you see Central in the 1950s, looking down Des Voeux Road towards the bank headquarters. Today, the banks are still there, but their headquarters have morphed into postmodern skyscrapers. The old shophouses that once lined Des Voeux are gone; their graceful arcades and simple signboards have given way to a mess of overbearing corporate storefronts, bland façades and gaudy plastic advertisements.

The worst thing about this is the loss of human scale: whereas Des Voeux was once well-proportioned, with nicely-textured buildings and an understated elegance, it is now an unpleasant concrete canyon. As the street has become more unbearable over the years, footbridges have been built so that people may avoid it altogether, which only adds to the hostile atmosphere. If the effects of that aren’t evident in the photos above, they certain are in Lee’s other Des Voeux scenes.

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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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The Multinational Ding-Ding

The ding-ding, Hong Kong’s 105-year-old tramway is now a multinational asset. Yesterday, local conglomerate Whalf Holdings sold 50 percent of its shares in Hongkong Tramways to the French transportation company Veolia, which retains the option to buy the remaining half. “Operating the light rail system in Hong Kong will give us the knowledge and expertise in mainland China. That’s strategically why we chose to start in Hong Kong,” said the head of Veolia’s new Chinese division. While I’m not sure that’s a very good strategy (what does running a century-old British-style tramway in Hong Kong teach you about operating modern light rail in, say, Chongqing?), it does raise some questions about the future of a beloved piece of Hong Kong transport.

So far, Veolia has promised not to make any changes to the tramway’s current operations. Although they are much slower than the MTR, trams remain extremely popular, largely because they cost just $2 (about 30 Canadian cents) to ride. I’m willing to bet that the experience of rattling through the canyons of Wan Chai or North Point, wind rushing through open windows, has something to do with it too. After all, the tram is the very opposite of the sleek, air-conditioned MTR, and it can often be more enjoyable to ride than the loud, dingy buses that serve local routes on the Hong Kong side of the harbour. Hongkong Tramways makes about $150 million from fares, which hasn’t changed for several years, but the revenue from advertising on trams and tram stations has increased from $20 million to $50 million since 2004. Even considering the poor state of the economy, it seems almost inevitable that advertising will play an ever more prominent part in the tramway’s operation.

While there may not be any changes to the current tram line, Veolia will spearhead a proposal to run a spur line along the newly-reclaimed Central waterfront, from the Star Ferry pier to the convention centre in Wan Chai. It’s a great idea, one that could help offset the decline in Star Ferry ridership and give the public better access to waterfront open space. The only problem is that the guiding principle behind the new line would be nostalgia: the rolling stock would consist of custom-made replicas of the various types of trams that have served Hong Kong through the decades. In other words, instead of a proper, serious tram line along the waterfront, we’d have a tram better-suited to running a loop around the perimeter of Hong Kong Disneyland. I can easily envision a Peak Tram-style line that caters to tourists and charges far more than any normal transit user would be willing to pay. Hong Kong’s tramway is nostalgic enough; any new investment should be focused on making it more efficient and useful to the public.

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Tram Line to the Past

One of my favourite Hong Kong experiences is the tram ride along the north shore of Hong Kong Island. Although I’ve only done the full trip once — it’s a long way from Kennedy Town to Shau Kei Wan — I often take the tram for shorter journeys. There’s something about the wind in my face, the rattling of the old wooden interior and the slow parade through crowded streets that makes it much more rewarding than the bus or MTR.

It’s also a good way to get in touch with one of the few things about Hong Kong that has remained mostly unchanged in 100 years. These photos, taken in the 1950s and collected by the guys at Batgung, show a Hong Kong that is virtually unrecognizable: ornate and low-rise, with elegantly arcaded sidewalks. What links this vanished city to the present are the slow, rumbling trams, most of which are still in service today (albeit covered with advertisements instead of the classic green paint).

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Hong Kong New Year

Last year’s New Year’s Eve celebrations. Photo by sunday driver

New Year’s Eve has always been a bit underwhelming for me, never quite living up to the big-screen romance of fireworks exploding above jubilant crowds. Maybe that’s because, until now, the warmest place I’ve spent New Year was Vancouver, where it was a relatively balmy 5 degrees — virtually tropical compared to the -15 I was used to in Montreal and Calgary. Being in Hong Kong finally gave me a chance to get out, watch some fireworks and celebrate in public like I felt I should do.

So last night, some friends and I headed to what I thought would be a little-known spot on the North Point waterfront, a small cul-de-sac near the water surrounded by graffiti-covered walls. There’s a perfect view of Victoria Harbour and the Central skyline. Unfortunately, nothing in Hong Kong is ever as obscure as it seems, and at ten minutes to midnight this out-of-the-way spot was thronged with people from the surrounding neighbourhood, each of whom, I’m guessing, had gone there thinking that nobody else would know about it.

Luckily, there was a poorly-secured construction site nearby, and the construction office had an outdoor platform that gave us a completely unobstructed view of the harbour. We were sandwiched between a photographer with a serious camera mounted on a big tripod and a bunch of flash-happy families. Thirty seconds before midnight, a giant digital countdown appeared on the front of 2IFC and languid streams of fireworks began streaming out of the tops of Hong Kong’s tallest buildings. At midnight, the streams became geysers. It was strangely and amusingly phallic.

The show lasted only five minutes—nothing compared to the 20-minute Chinese New Year extravaganza that will take place later this month—but people cheered so excitedly we could hear them from across the harbour. Later, I sat at the back of a double-decker tram as we rode away from North Point, through the crowds streaming home from the countdown at Times Square. We stopped at a red light and the tram behind us pulled up close, only a couple of feet from me. A man sitting at the front rolled down his window and looked at me.

“Happy new year,” he said, smiling.

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Paul Tomkowicz, Switchman

I always wonder about the street cleaners I see around Hong Kong, small and weathered by sun and age, who sweep the pavement with coarse straw brooms. Their wide-rimmed hats, like the kind traditionally seen on Tanka “boat people,” seem oddly anachronistic next to their reflective safety vests and surgical masks. Who are they? Where do they live? How did they find themselves on a path that led to days and nights spent brushing the gutters free of debris?

I wonder if anyone thought the same when they saw Paul Tomkowicz, a Polish immigrant who worked as a street railway switchman fifty-five years ago. In the bitter air of midwinter Winnipeg, his job was to clear and defrost the city’s frozen streetcar tracks. In a beautifully-shot 1952 National Film Board documentary, we observe him as he works, silently, to clear the tracks, his ghostly frozen breath illuminated by the kerosene lamp he keeps at his feet.

It seems a lonely, anonymous life, but Tomkowicz doesn’t seem to mind it too much. He seems resigned to it more than anything, if only because the alternative, for him at least, would have been far worse. “Winnipeg’s alright,” he says. “In Winnipeg, you can go in the street, daytime, nighttime, nobody bothers you. My sister wrote me from my village in Poland. The soldiers came in the night. Murdered 29 people. My brother. My brother’s wife. Why’d they do that?”

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