Who would ever have doubted that the new, caring, sharing Hong Kong government would finally come to its senses over the heritage/total destruction debacle? In yesterday’s SCMP we were treated to an article about how the destroyers of vibrant street markets Peel and Graham have suddenly backtracked on the 90000 floor super turbo luxury tiled penthouse gaffs, and are now saying there will only be “some development,” where even “two or three buildings” will be allowed to survive. The paper went on to say it was uncertain how many hawkers would keep their stalls.
Looking at the artist’s image of the “improved” Graham street, you can see why.
The place will look more than anything like the plaza in Discovery Bay, only with a tree. Young and beautifully dressed people will waft around in the spacious … square? certainly not a street, and it will all be shiny, square, big, open, clean, fascistic and orderly. Oh, and sterile, that goes without saying. Presumably the hawkers’ stalls will have glass walls and marble floors, be air-conditioned and cost $70 000 a month per square foot; that’s probably why there is some uncertainty among the stingier of the hawkers whether they should stay on.
Still, not to worry, Hong Hong has no shortage of hawkers like Gucci and Armani to fill up the gaps.
But now that they’re changing the plans anyway, why not, (totally insane and whimsical, I know, heretical even) leave the place like it is? Sure, the houses can be renovated inside to make them more suitable for modern living and the outside will welcome a coat of paint. But the markets, according to everyone except the Urban Razing Arseholes and the people they grovel before, the property developers, are fine as they are. We love them! Tourists love them! People who live there use them!
Two little streets left unrazed. Only two. Not very long, not very wide. Two streets in the whole formerly charming, funky, throbbingly alive city left un-Shenzhenified. Is that too much to ask?
Ah sin, The government will get their own way, just like the HK Jockey Club got their way with the beutification of the old police station in Holywood Road. Yes they gave into teensy weesy little bit of public objection to show good will, by chooping the the top off some hpodermic syrynge looking tower they wanted to erect there because peopl claied the tower would exceed the height of several nearby blocks and even obstruct their view.
Next to come is all the lovely land that has now been reclaimed by filling in the harbour, that we were told was urgently required for a major road to help ease traffic congestion.
So why not bore a big tunnel under the harbout and shove all those motorised polluter under the ground instead of erecting pedestrian skyways and gassing them with car exhausts gases while they are on the way to catch a ferry to the outling islands.
Not to mention soon all the new additional offices and shopping plaza that will be erectd on the land beside the re-claimed land.
I’m getting lost with all this government one sidedness of knocking down the old and reclaiming or leasing off the old. There is no need to have markets now all the poultry sellers have been forced to give up their licences.
The next thing the government will be planing on doing is to get those ‘nasty’ butchers who hang all the pig and cow parts up for sail each day in the wet markets, to pack all their raw meat into a white plastic polystyrene dishes covered with cling film and store all the meat in refridgerators where those grey FEHD people who walk around the streets will be given the authority to issue the butchers with a fixed penalty ticket should their chilled meat refrigerators ever be found to be too hot.
Welcome to Hong Kong
I am duly welcomed. This time for once it seems you’re on my side. The side of the Good Guys.
Yes it is a terrible, terrible thing, this wanton destruction of everything that could possibly be connected with Hong Kong as we knew it - last week! Or certainly a couple of years ago. I sometimes walk across that travesty calling itself the walkway from what is supposed to be the Star Ferry Pier … no, it’s too painful to go on.
These fcukers are counting on the public memory being as short as their own, and that in a few years’ time everone will think of Hong kong as the place where everywhere you go, if you should be so insanely inclined as to walk, is the place where everything is nicely airconditioned and vacuum packed. After all, it’s for your own safety. But Jimsee, we don’t have to lie down and take it in spades. We can protest! Other than in blogs!
Like how, you mean write to the guy with a propeller on his neck. He probably already has two stacks of letters in his office, one stack is from people who write and complain in English, the other from people who write and complain to him in Chinese. Every so often he will call in the waste paper collector to shred all of them.
Suppose can send a postcard instead of a letter.
So tell me any other ideas?
I know and I understand your concern. But it’s always better to do something than to do nothing. A few years ago the government had the insane idea of building a “super prison” of 7000 inmates on an island in full view of Mui Wo.
A lot of people banded together and wrote, had meetings with officials and wrote again, and finally the plan was scrapped.
We need to lobby the only people propeller boy listens to: Tycoons. And the only way to get them to listen, is to make them see that they can make more money in the long run if they conserve rather than destroy. In the end this stuff is like sales; you always have to show the customer how he can benefit from your idea.