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TRAVEL PAST AND PRESENT
The Man Who Changed the Face of Shanghai
By TARAS GRESCOE OCT. 2, 2014
On the table before me, a martini glass of chilled gin, Cointreau and
vermouth, spiked with a shot of crème de menthe, emed to glow green
from within. Raising slender arms, a chanteu in a qipao — scarlet,
tightfitting and sleeveless — stilled a babble of Mandarin, German and
Japane voices as she trilled the first tones of "Ye Shang Hai,” an aching
anthem to the legendary night life of the China coast.
It’s been a long time coming, I thought on a visit to Shanghai this spring, but Sir Victor Sassoon would once again feel at home in the lobby
bar of his grand hotel, in the city he loved most.
Never mind that I’d had to slip the bartender the recipe for the Conte Verde (one of Sir Victor’s favorite cocktails) as I’d entered the bar. Never
mind that, back in the ’30s, the real parties had taken place nine floors
above, in the Tower Night Club, where Charlie Chaplin and Paulette
Goddard once twirled on the teak floorboards of a sprung dance floor. The night I visited, the crowd in the Jazz Bar was cosmopolitan, the playlist pre-revolutionary, the drinks divine. It would have been fitting, I thought, if a
tall man sporting a monocle and a top hat emerged from the shadows to
make the rounds of the tables with proprietorial ea, as Sassoon was wont to do in the heyday of the Peace Hotel.
Until recently, the name Sassoon — or, more exactly, Sir Ellice Victor Sassoon, the third baronet of Bombay — had been all but effaced from the
streets of Shanghai. The scion of a Baghdadi Jewish family, educated at男人常吃什么补肾
Harrow and Cambridge, Sassoon shifted the headquarters of a family心理辅导方法
empire built on opium and cotton from Bombay to Shanghai, initiating the
real estate boom that would make it into the Paris of the Far East.
The 1929 opening of the Cathay Hotel (its name was changed to the Peace in the mid-50s), heralded as the most luxurious hostelry east of the Suez Canal, proclaimed his commitment to China. (He even made the 11th-floor penthou, just below the hotel’s sharply pitched pyramidal roof, his downtown pied-à-terre.) Within a decade, Sassoon had utterly transformed the skyline of Shanghai, working with architects and developers to build the first true skyscrapers in the Eastern Hemisphere, in the process creating a real estate empire that would regularly e him counted amon
汤姆的午夜花园g the world’s half-dozen richest men. Within two decades, the red flag of the People’s Republic was hoisted over the Cathay, which would for many years rve as a guesthou for visiting Soviet bloc dignitaries.
物品英文Yet, over the cour of the years, Sassoon’s buildings, apparently too solid to demolish, continued to stand, so many mysterious Art Deco and Streamline Moderne megaliths in a cityscape growing ever grimier with coal dust. As Shanghai once again takes its place as one of Asia’s fastest-growing metropolis, and supertall, 100-plus-story towers define its new skyline, there are signs that the city is beginning to value, and even treasure, its prewar architectural heritage. Sir Victor would have appreciated the irony: The landmarks of Shanghai’s micolonial past, vestiges of a once-reviled foreign occupation, have lately become some of its most coveted address.
The last time I was in Shanghai, in 2007, the Peace Hotel was in a sorry state. In the Jazz Bar, who faux Tudor walls emed to be stained yellow with the nicotine of decades, I watched a xtet of ptuagenarian Chine jazzmen lurching their way through “Begin the Beguine.” (The musicians, who reheard clandestinely through the Cultural Revolution, are still sometimes joined by their oldest member, a 96-year-old drummer.)
I was given a tour of the property by Peter Hibbard, an author who books “Peace at the Cathay” and “The Bund” document Shanghai’s European architectural history. He showed me tantalizing glimps of marble and stained glass, partly hidden by poorly dropped ceilings, and explained that the lavish décor of the eighth-floor restaurant — inspired by
the Temple of Heaven in Beijing’s Forbidden City — had to be papered over during the Cultural Revolution to spare it the wrath of the Red Guards. Hidden away in storerooms, he assured me, were the original Arts and Crafts furniture and Deco glasswork that had been a feature of every guest room. Mr. Hibbard informed me the hotel was about to clo its doors for a complete makeover; he feared the worst.
After a three-year restoration overen by the lead architect Tang Yu En (and a makeover supervid by the Singapore-bad designer Ian Carr, completed in 2010), much of the cachet of the old Cathay has been restored to the Peace.洗脸的拼音
On the ceiling of the Dragon Phoenix Restaurant, gilded chinoirie bats once again soar; Lalique sconces have been returned to the corridor that leads to the eighth-floor ballroom. In nine themed suites, the décor has been recreated from old photos: The Indian Room is newly resplendent with fili
greed plasterwork and peacock-hued cupolas, while a micircular moon gate parates the sitting and dining rooms of the Chine Room. A spectacular rotunda has once again become the centerpiece of the ground floor, its soaring ceiling of leaded glass undergirded by marble reliefs of stylized greyhounds that remain the hotel’s insignia.
Some changes would surely have caud Sassoon to arch an eyebrow. To avoid spooking visitors from the south, elevators now skip directly from the third to the fifth floor. (The number 4 sounds like the Cantone word for “death.”) The revolving door on the riverfront Bund, once the privileged entrance for such celebrity visitors as Douglas Fairbanks and Cornelius Vanderbilt, is now chained shut with a rusty padlock. (It is bad feng shui for a building’s main door to face water.)
In spite of such adjustments, Mr. Hibbard is delighted to e Sassoon’s flagship property reclaiming pride of place on the Bund. “Sir Victor changed the face, and the manners, of Shanghai,” he said. "The Cathay exemplified this. Outside, it’s so simple, clean and streamlined. Inside, it’s fanciful and buoyant. It gave society a venue to play in. It still gives people from around the globe an opportunity to have a fantastic time in one of the world’s most
exciting cities.”
振动的近义词
The building has something el going for it: location. Sassoon built his headquarters where bustling Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s main commercial street, intercted with the banks, clubs and head offices of foreign firms that lined the Huangpu riverfront. The hotel, in other words, sits at the exact point where China meets the world — which means that, to this day (and well into most nights), it is buffeted by concentrated streams of humanity.
I was not surprid that Noël Coward found the renity to write the first draft of "Private Lives" during a four-day sojourn at the Cathay in 1929, or that Sassoon, a nomadic tycoon who could live anywhere in the world, cho it as the site for his aerie. The nsation of being swaddled in luxury at the calm center of a bewitching maelstrom is unique. After building the Cathay, all Sassoon had to do was sit and wait for the world to come to him.
Come it did, and Sassoon was there to receive it. Working with Palmer & Turner (a firm founded in 1862, and with offices in Hong Kong to this day), Sassoon went on a building binge. His favored collaborator was the British architect George Leopold (Tug) Wilson, who travels had expod him to Parisian Art Deco and the latest American skyscrapers. Shanghai’s swampy soil had long prevented structures from rising more than 10 stories. Wilson faced the challenge by building on concrete rafts t atop the mud, and Sassoon founded the Aerocrete Company, which produced a lig
hter,“aerated” concrete that further diminished the load. His clean designs, though not the first time modernism came to Shanghai, brought a touch of Gotham to a city who architectural face had hitherto had a stodgy, neo-Classical cast.
The impressive stepped tower of the 14-story Metropole Hotel, three blocks south of the Peace Hotel, is typical. Completed in 1932, and decorated with Persian rugs and Jacobean furniture, the Metropole catered to executives rather than wealthy tourists. (It remains a hotel primarily for business travelers, if a somewhat down-at-the-heels one). The sweep of its concave facade is continued, across Jiangxi Road, by the mirror-image Hamilton Hou. The twin Art Deco towers, on a curved interction
designed to be downtown Shanghai’s answer to Piccadilly Circus, create an impressive, amphitheater-like urban space.
Hamilton Hou, though its luxurious triplex apartments and doctors’offices were relentlessly subdivided in the 1950s, remains the most atmospheric of the old Sassoon properties. As I read a glasd-in directory in the lobby (you can still make out the name of Viola Smith, a former tenant who became American consul to Shanghai in 1939), a silver-haired man, an infant balanced on the s
eat behind him, drove his scooter directly into the elevator next to me. Riding up to the upper floors, I emerged into daylight. The Chine tenants have made what were once private rooftop gardens into a world of their own: miniature penjing trees and aquariums of tropical fish now share a stunning river view with a three-foot-tall statue of Chairman Mao.
In a city dominated by low-ri brick rowhous, Sassoon’s housing projects offered a fully rviced, air-conditioned alternative to rising damp, incts and mold. The 14-story Cathay Mansions, a luxurious residential hotel, had opened off the leafy streets of the French Concession in 1929. Six years later, it was joined by the even more opulent Grosvenor Hou. Separated by luxuriant gardens, the buildings gave long-term residents a choice of Old English or American Colonial-style suites, complete with claw-foot bathtubs and rvants’ quarters. Thanks to Sassoon’s connections, Grosvenor Hou’s automatic elevators were powered by electricity from the supply stations of the nearby French Tramway Company.
While the décor of the Cathay Mansions, now a business hotel, has been effaced by an innsitive renovation, Grosvenor Hou has retained its charm. From a central tower in classic Art Deco, ribs of brick spread outward, like stylized bat wings. I paid a visit to a spacious model suite, who high ceilings, parquet floors and curvaceous niches prerve the elegant simplicity of Jazz Age metropolit
an style.棉花胡同
leave过去式The Sassoon buildings were renamed the Jin Jiang Hotel in 1951, after a popular restaurant in Grosvenor Hou run by Dong Zhujun, the mistress of a Sichuan soldier. Taking over as director, she turned the complex into
