Stone-gate houses became city's soul

Delicate patterns on columns and window frames at the Blackstone Apartments on Fuxing Road are reminiscent of the golden old Shanhai.

Chen Zhaodi, 90 years old, still remembers the old days when she yelled at and chased after her two younger brothers, trying to get them off the rooftops of the old shikumen (stone-gate 石库门) houses in the different longtangs (lanes 弄堂) where they roamed.

"My brothers loved climbing and jumping across the rooftop tiles to play hide-and-seek with other kids in the longtang," Chen recalls. "My parents were always working, so I had to act like a mom."

Chen's parents ran a small shop in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, before they moved to look for more opportunities in Shanghai, invited by a wealthy relative who established a business here. They first settled in Hongkou District, where the relative's company was located.

In 1937, shortly after Japanese troops bombed and took over the area, they moved in and stayed for nearly three years in Si Wen Li (Gentle Lane) on today's Datian Road in Jing'an District.

There were more than 700 houses built around a dozen of connected lanes and many refugees found a roof there that year.

It was built around 1914 by a British businesswoman, later renamed after the firm that purchased it, and is now being demolished and rebuilt into modern houses and department stores.

At first, Chen's family of five took two rooms on the first floor, but as refugees arrived to join them, they ended up sharing one room with another family of four. A curtain divided the families, but "we could see and hear everything," Chen says softly.

"The idea of privacy didn't exist. Since we juggled so many people in one house, it was important to keep a good relationship, and my parents often warned us to stay quiet and to be polite to all our neighbors. It was the same for other families. We all helped each other in the difficult years," she recalls.

Shikumen houses, named for the stone-gate entryway frames carved with simple patterns and the wooden door often painted black with bronze door knockers, stand as proof of the early cultural fusion between the East and the West in Shanghai.

Shortly after Shanghai opened as a treaty port in 1843, the national Taiping Rebellion and the regional Small Swords Rebellion brought floods of refugees from nearby Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces into the city and later into the foreign concessions.

Real estate firms, mostly foreign ones at the time, built hundreds of housing complexes connected by urban alleyways, the longtang, across different districts starting in the 1870s.

Designers adopted the architectural features of both Chinese courtyard houses and Anglo-American terrace houses. The idea was to keep the basic structure of traditional Chinese houses with many separate rooms, since Chinese were used to living with their big families with three or four generations.

To save space, though, the gardens were turned into front courtyards (and sometimes also an additional back courtyard) and the houses were aligned close to each other like Anglo-American townhouses. The lanes were often interconnected with multiple entrances to the nearby avenues.

The city's population continued to grow, while its residents started adopting Western ideas and family sizes started to get smaller as young people lived by themselves. A new type of stone-gate house, with fewer rooms, appeared.

In the early 1900s, old and new stone-gate houses took up more than 60 percent of the housing in the city and around 80 percent of the people lived there.

As the population expanded further, the houses became even more compact, while the enclosed courtyard became open gardens. Soon, early apartments, often owned, built and designed by foreign firms, started to appear, many bearing features of European architectural styles.

The Embankment Building

400 North Suzhou Rd

The Embankment Building, finished in 1933, is one of the early apartments in Shanghai, financed by real estate tycoon Victor Sassoon. In the 1920s and 1930s, the city's population continued to grow and real estate firms soon introduced apartment buildings to replace urban alleys.

Sassoon demolished the alley community that was also financed by ED Sassoon & Co less than 30 years earlier, in 1887, to turn it into an eight-floor apartment building, the largest in the city at the time.

The land where the alley stood had an irregular shape, so the designers made it into a horizontal "S" to accommodate the shape and also to signify the Sassoon "S." It was also one of the few fancy buildings that offered a view of the Suzhou Creek.

It was equipped with eight entrances, seven staircases, nine elevators, a heating system and a swimming pool, with more than 700 rooms, mainly rented to expatriates.

The geometric patterns in the lobby and detailed carvings on some staircases are symbolic of the Art Deco style that was popular at the time.

In 1938, many Jewish people took refuge in Shanghai and Sassoon used the building to house them until they moved out to a shelter in Hongkou District a year later. After 1949, the apartments were re-assigned, mostly to teachers, researchers and those who worked in government offices.

"The apartment was assigned to my grandfather, who worked for a state-owned company," says Jerry Li, who grew up in the building shortly after it was expanded with three additional floors in 1978.

"Some of my classmates also live here and I used to hide our bad exam papers in the staircase at one of the corners, because my parents often took the other staircase," he recalls.