The Bund from the Ninth Floor of Broadway Mansions – A Shanghai Correspondent Tradition Revived
Posted: July 22nd, 2011 | 1 Comment »As mentioned the other day the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club got a tour of Broadway Mansions this week courtesy of the management there. Why is Broadway Mansions interesting to the members of the FCC – well, the ninth floor of the building was home to the FCC between 1945 and 1949 – that’s to say after the club moved from Chungking and before it moved once again down to Hong Kong (for all the details see my book Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium War to Mao – it’s a bargain on Kindle). Broadway Mansions, an apartment building mostly though now a hotel, was also home to about 50 correspondents who had flats cum bureau offices in the building. That’s why you see so many shots of the Bund from up above across the northern side of the Garden Bridge and Suzhou (Soochow) Creek. They were just pointing the camera out of the bar window!! Yes, journalists don’t really get more hardworking as the years pass.
So here are two typical pictures showing the view across the Bund across the Garden Bridge shot from 1947 and Life magazine – there are literally hundreds more – those journos and cameramen spent a lot of time on the ninth floor FCC bar. Today we went up to the ninth floor, now hotel rooms, so I thought I’d snap a shot out of the window too, just for old times sake and to keep the tradition going!!
Admittedly my camera phone effort is a bit sub-standard but you get the point of being on the ninth floor of Broadway Mansions – sadly the rather shabby architectural effort that is the Peninsula Hotel that has nothing in common with the other buildings on the Bund and is by far the ugliest structure on the sweeping boulevard rather buggers the view. As Betjeman said of Slough so say I (with amendments) of the Peninsula – ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on the Peninsula. It isn’t fit for humans now,…’:
Thank you for posting these 1940’s photos of the view from the Broadway Mansions Hotel! I stayed there in ’81, when China was just beginning to open, and had panoramic, jaw-dropping views from our balcony. Most of the traffic then — buses, work trucks, and cargo bicycles — stopped by sundown. At night the giant city was silent and black — the only lights being from boats along the Huangpu and its Suzhou tributary. Across the river, where now stands a forest of soaring modern towers, there was — absolutely nothing! The deco ‘sky-scrapers’ of the Bund were still the tallest buildings in Shanghai, giving the downtown riverfront a beautiful, dreamy look evocative of the 1930’s. The hotel then had that familiar thread-bare communist look, though you could see the deco beauty in its bones. And of course, the hotel bar only took ‘foreigner money’, that was verboten for the average Chinese citizen. Different world now (and I’m glad of it!)