April 27th, 2010
Twenty years ago, when film producer Amy Chin was looking for a new office, she came across a 1,500-square-foot flat in an old shophouse in the Mong Kok Flower Market. She fell in love as soon as she saw the 12-foot ceilings, balcony and huge, enclosed verandah. “This place is very good for creative people because of the ambiance,” she said. “We work late, until three or four in the morning, when the flower hawkers come out. The air is so fresh.”
Over the years, some of the biggest names in Hong Kong film joined Chin: John Woo Yu-sen shared an office with her until he moved to Los Angeles, film director Fruit Chan Gor leased the flat upstairs, Chow Yun-fat’s agency moved in and Ann Hui On-wah used one of the building’s flats to film a movie. Chin credits her landlord, a retired civil engineer, for keeping the building in good shape while keeping rents low. “He’s done a better job of taking care of this property than the government ever could,” she said. “The reason I can keep on making movies is because of this place.”
Now her building is one of 10 shophouses that will be renovated by the Urban Renewal Authority. The buildings, which were built in the 1930s by the Belgian construction company Crédit Foncier d’Extrème Orient, were originally targeted at middle-class homeowners, with amenities like private bathrooms that were unusual in other shophouses. Today, the buildings contain a mix of flower shops on the ground level and businesses and residential flats on the upper floors.
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March 18th, 2010
Froideur intellectuelle
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December 13th, 2009
There is not much to indicate that the rundown shophouse on Shanghai Street in Mongkok houses anything but a pawn shop.
On the third floor, however, is Tong Saam, an unmarked space that has positioned itself on Hong Kong’s creative vanguard. Since it was opened earlier this year by three friends interested in music and art, it has hosted film screenings and performances by underground folk singers such a Beijing’s Zhao Yiran.
“Normally, you’d only be able to find this kind of space in an industrial area,” says one of Tong Saam’s founders, Charlie Wong Liang-yih, a freelance designer. “It’s the perfect size and even has a balcony. Being in Mong Kok makes it even more special because it’s so central and we’re part of a real neighbourhood. Places like the Cattle Depot [Artists' Village in To Kwa Wan] are like warehouses for artists. This is more like a community space.”
For all its ambitions, though, Tong Saam might soon be redeveloped. Shortly after they moved in, Wong and his partners heard rumours that the Urban Renewal Authority was planning a new project on the street. Even if that did not turn out to be the case, it was likely that other URA projects in the area would drive up prices and encourage owners to sell their properties to developers, he said. “We’re surrounded by redevelopment projects,” Wong said.
Tong Saam is not the only new venture to open in a neighbourhood targeted for redevelopment.
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June 28th, 2009
Whenever you come across a particularly charming and surprising corner of Hong Kong, you can almost be sure that the Urban Renewal Authority has plans to do away with it. Although its official vision is “to create quality and vibrant urban living in Hong Kong,” most of its developments obliterate tight-knit communities and organic urban growth in favour of shopping malls, office developments and housing estates. Cynical Hong Kongers see the URA as a proxy for the big land developers that control this town; its projects are usually little more than land grabs for Hong Kong’s economic elite. Aside from displacing well-established neighbourhood social networks, they replace small-scale, independent businesses with corporate chain stores, which degrades the entrepreneurial spirit on which this city was built.
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June 28th, 2009
I photographed this old (and perhaps abandoned) industrial building in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood just a few years ago. At the time, it was a captivating relic — almost entirely ensconced in graffiti, it was sprouting weeds that had either spilled onto the sidewalk, or had climbed up from the sidewalk onto it. The old orange car parked nearby added to the mystique; this was like a slice of 1970s New York.
That’s not entirely coincidental. Gowanus sometimes seems stuck in a time warp, a largely defunct swathe of industrial buildings dividing the homey brownstones of Carroll Gardens from the tony ones of Park Slope — neighborhoods that have been experiencing rapid change. Part of the reason the area is so moribund is its namesake Gowanus Canal, a brackish channel that has become the site of a raging local debate over whether it ought to be designated a Superfund site, allowing it to receive federal money for industrial cleanup.
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June 22nd, 2009
Opening weekend for the High Line, Manhattan’s latest, most expensive new playground, is a mob scene: a line of cabs and SUVs blocks long throng the streets of the Meatpacking District, which, full for once, seem almost grateful to be receiving as much attention as they did when trucks filled with carcasses from somewhere west of the Hudson trundled down them without reproach from sleeping neighbors. Even still, these days, every Jersey plate throws looks of shock, scorn, and derision, even if it belongs to a Montclair family with 2.5 kids rather than a butcher shop in Paterson.
When the blood of slaughtered pigs still stained the streets of the Meatpacking District, the High Line park-in-the-sky was once just a dream of some urban eccentrics who liked nothing more than risking tetanus while strolling in the mangy weeds that had sprung up atop the abandoned railroad trestle that everyone thought was — it was the fashion to describe such places — a blight, a pox, a black cancer preventing the realization of the neighborhood’s bright, less bovine future.
Today, a line one hundred people deep winds its way under the railways southernmost supports, which carry the new park above to its blunt slice-off point, teetering slightly over Gansevoort Street. The whole affair — the carnival atmosphere, the families, the concessionaires (albeit servers of hangover huevos rather than cotton candy), even the fact that the High Line’s hip landscape designers have opted to retain (well, replicate) the old railway tracks atop the trestle (and the weeds, too, although they’ve acquired, like hipster hair, an air of carefully-planned carelessness) — all of this feels like the entrance to some spectacular theme park ride, and I half expect to see a sign forbidding anyone who isn’t this tall to ride (the extensive list of rules and regulations turns out to be much less interesting).
New Jersey looms ominously in the background
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June 14th, 2009
“There’s no way they can move us,” the shopkeeper said. “After three years, they’re still not done with Phase 1. How will they ever get to Phase 2?” He chuckled, pointing at the neighborhood-sized shopping center being erected one block away.
Such is the precarious state of Kunming’s old city. Of the ancient walled city, once four kilometers across, only a single cross-shaped area formed by Confucian Temple Street and Guanghua Street has escaped demolition to date. Yet this tiny area is a treasure trove of pre-1949 Chinese architecture, from wooden shop fronts and stone courtyards to a pair of prewar tenements called the “Sister Buildings” that bend gracefully to the curving streets. Amazingly, most of the shopkeeper’s neighbors have lived here for their entire lives; tea shops and little restaurants continue to do business even as squads of shovel-toting laborers dig up the streets to lay new gas lines.
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October 13th, 2007
St. John’s unique architectural vernacular is something that must be seen in person to be truly appreciated. No other large Canadian city has the degree or extent of revitalized heritage buildings that central St. John’s has, and the fact that the City of St. John’s fostered huge improvements to its built heritage beginning in a time when the province was at its economic nadir is a testament to the city’s innovative methods of heritage planning.
St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, home to just under 200,000 people, was one of the first Canadian cities to enact heritage planning legislation. In the 1970s, the city’s downtown core was in a highly deteriorated condition. Buildings were underused, clad in makeshift materials, and seen as a liability for people who wished to develop anew.
Despite the poor economics of the time, the city was not immune to large-scale commercial development: in the late 1960s, the twelve-storey Royal Trust Building took down a stand of traditional buildings on Water Street, and in the early 70s, the similarly-styled Atlantic Place cleared three blocks of St. John’s downtown building stock.
Following the changing values of the era — heritage issues were beginning to appear on the national radar, and Heritage Canada was founded in 1973 — the city issued a study into the creation of a heritage by-law. This by-law was approved in 1977, creating the first major heritage district in the nation and enabling the Heritage Advisory Committee, who still today act as intermediaries to council.
The city also lifted disincentives to homeowners who wished to renovate their older downtown properties and worked with new local heritage foundations to establish design guidelines that would restore the unique architectural character that the city accumulated in the years following the devastating fire of 1892.
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