Ciro’s Great Nightclub Remembered in the Basement of Ciro’s Crappy Plaza

The famous Ciro’s nightclub – “The Most Fashionable in Town” – which was at 444 Bubbling Well Road (Nanjing West Road) was a very classy creation from the very classy Victor Sassoon. For much of its life the manager was the legendary Freddy Kaufmann (immortalized by Auden and Isherwood in their 1939 Journey to a War). Interestingly Ciro’s call itself the ‘coolest place in town’ which may confuse some younger readers. They were of course referring to their state of the art air-conditioning – the general use of the term ‘cool’ meaning good didn’t really enter the general lexicon in America until after WW2 and everywhere else much later (though ‘cool’ was used in black slang in the nineteenth century).

Sadly the wonderfully modernist Ciro’s was bulldozed a long time back in the spurious name of redevelopment. After a couple of shabby structures on the same site we eventually got the stunningly bland Ciro’s Plaza which defies any attempt to be remotely uninteresting with great strength. Though in the basement I noticed that there is a small display including some old photos of Ciro’s noting that the current dreary shopping mall is plonked on top of the original nightclub. History does pop up in the most unlikely places sometimes…