There is no monument to Sir Victor Sassoon, the Baghdadi Jew who changed the face of Shanghai in the 1930s. But he left his mark in several landmark buildings, including the Peace Hotel, whose Art Deco splendour has been revived. Fascinating article by Taras Grescoe in the New York Times (with thanks Dan and Lisa):
The Peace (Cathay) Hotel as it was in the 1930s, and as it is today (Photo: Hsinhua agency/Qilai Shen)
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
Harrow and Cambridge, Sassoon shifted the headquarters of a family
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
penthouse, 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 see him
counted among 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 serve as a guesthouse for visiting Soviet bloc
dignitaries.
Yet,
over the course 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 metropolises, 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
semicolonial past, vestiges of a once-reviled foreign occupation, have
lately become some of its most coveted addresses.
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