Dead Street | Shanghai's Urban Renewal (Part Five)

We've been following Shanghai's recent push to restore the historic character of its streets. The series runs to five articles, and tries to record as many of the people living through it as possible. This is the last one.

Just after midnight, Master Shi dialed 110.

He had been on edge since 10 p.m. By that hour the 20-odd bars along the eastern stretch of Yongkang Road were supposed to have cleared their tables and chairs off the sidewalk and shut their doors behind them. But the sound systems kept booming down the street, and Master Shi could feel the whole building shaking.

Master Shi has lived on the ground floor of Lane 65 on this street for 72 years. A little over six years ago there was still a street market outside his door. At four or five in the morning the vegetable sellers' shouting would sometimes wake him, and he would lie there looking up at a ceiling more than three and a half meters above him, feeling, as he put it, "not quite right." Looking back, though, those were decent years. After two ground-floor households on the street handed over their homes in 2012 and bars moved in, the wallets of the other ground-floor residents filled up fast. Every one of them except Master Shi now collects more than 10,000 yuan a month in rent, and the little street turned into what CNN called "perhaps one of the most crowded drinking spots in Asia".

But unlike Xintiandi or Tianzifang, this has always been a residential block. Which meant that for the people who actually live here, the good days were over.

For some young people, the good days had only just begun. They turned up right after work, on the dot. Jorge Reis, a chef who had been in China for a year and a half, was one of the regulars. A few days earlier, in an interview with Youth Daily, he said: "There are a lot of bar streets in the US and Europe, and this street is almost exactly like them — when you want a drink, you just walk into any bar and start drinking."

The people on the barstools along the street used to be mostly foreigners. Now perhaps half of them speak fluent Chinese. When something like the European Championship is on, the crowd is still there at four in the morning.

The night he called 110, Master Shi discovered that the police have no hold over alcohol and nightlife either. They shouted, they lectured, they pushed people back indoors for a while — but soon an energy nobody could contain drew the crowd out onto the street again, the young people shoved the doors open, and the music and the noise started up once more.

The tug-of-war among residents, officials and bargoers dragged on so long that the street became a case study in urban-planning research at Tongji University and other schools. Academic seminars and violent scuffles ran side by side, and the days went by, one after another.

"The bars on Yongkang Road have to go." At a call-in event with residents on July 11, Bao Bingzhang, the head of Xuhui District, addressed the bar street: Yongkang Road, he said, was a textbook case of "over-commercialization" that had outrun what the area could carry. Master Shi heard about it too: "It's blown up now, there's too much going on, and the district chief has spoken."

In the past, Master Shi said, the police had told residents to "take it up with the district." Almost all of them believed that "the district chief knew about it long ago; he just didn't want to deal with it then."

The suspicion has some basis. In several news reports from the summer of 2013, after all, the Yongkang Road bar street still appeared as a model of attentive neighborhood-committee oversight, a "Hengfu slow-living district" that had finally escaped the days of "shops leaving one after another" and "not enough foot traffic." After the district government moved Yongkang Road's street market out in 2010 and set out to fill this back street off Huaihai Road with "cultural and creative businesses," it had never managed to bring the place back to life.

The bars grew wild, and showed a vitality no plan had called for. Now the city's planners meant to start the cleanup with the ones that had no liquor license. Almost no bar on Yongkang Road met the standard.

In the days after word got out that "the bars have to go," Master Shi felt the evening crowds on Yongkang Road had "clearly thinned." Soon an official notice confirmed that Yongkang Road would be added, in the second half of 2016, to the cleanup plan for the "Xuhui Hengfu Historic District."

That plan was already 90 percent finished: nearly 400 businesses closed along 10 streets.

Three hundred meters away, South Shaanxi Road was being cleaned up too. The lots along the street may no longer be used commercially, and the place is now close to a dead street.

Walk past at night and you may wonder whether this can really be the center of Shanghai. South Shaanxi Road was always busy. The walls that have been bricked and plastered over are not finished yet, and the notices still stuck to them here and there hint at the crowds of a few months ago. The eviction was swift and hard: notices went out on March 1, and by April 15 more than 20 shops had moved out of this street of under 400 meters — Italian restaurants, Cantonese restaurants, cafés, a flower shop, and Flask, a bar with a modest following online. Flask has since opened a shop within a shop, tucked deep inside Green&Safe, an organic restaurant in Xintiandi, under a new name: The Bunker by Flask.

Another South Shaanxi Road bar, a jazz club called Lavida Club, held on into July. Its owner, Rogar, had found a new space, but the work on it was not done. On July 16, after a little over a year in business, Lavida served its last night. A week before that, the crowd was under a quarter of what it had been before the cleanup. "I accepted this a long time ago. What else can you do?" Rogar said that week. "Crying and carrying on wouldn't change anything. Better to use my head on what comes next."

On the last day Lavida drew nearly the crowd of its best nights — "on a Friday or Saturday around nine, the people inside would be backed up to the door" — and it ran until 3 a.m. The peanuts they had laid in for the final night were gone by a little after ten. For once Rogar didn't book a jazz singer; he got a DJ friend to warm the room up instead. The friends he called in were in high spirits, and he mixed the drinks himself. Almost no other shop on the street — most of them walls now — joined the party. Outside, it was eerily quiet.

The planners may soon face the problem Yongkang Road faced in 2010: driving one crowd out is easy, and working out who to bring in is hard.

Zheng Zhirui, a Macau native drawn to Shanghai years ago by the feel of the old "French Concession," is undecided. After Hua Hao Zhan, his Chinese-style izakaya on Middle Fuxing Road, was torn out, he might go looking for a storefront in Jing'an. It is a real headache: "I won't go to Xintiandi either. Danshui Road's been pulled down too. It's hard now to find a place with any flavor to it."

Mike, from Tianjin, had been in Shanghai a year and a half. Head office sent him to manage the Shanghai branch of WZK, a sneaker store. Mike likes the Bund, because it also sits on a river and he can see something of Tianjin in it. Young people back home are devoted to Nike's Foamposite basketball shoes, which is why Tianjin is sometimes called "the hometown of the Foamposite"; WZK's flagship store in Tianjin, COLOUR, on Chifeng Road, is one center of that culture. Mike's company signed a lease of more than 10 years with a sub-landlord, planning to reproduce the culture here.

The Shanghai branch, opened on South Shaanxi Road three years ago, was starting to find its feet. When the red-and-blue T-Mac shoes dropped in its first year, Mike says the line ran five or six hundred people deep. This February, WZK had an exclusive release of 12 pairs of the Yeezy 350 — the "coconut shoe" — with numbers handed out at 10 a.m. and the draw at 10:30. The line went from the shop door all the way to the intersection. "Number 2058! 2190! 2280! ... 2499!" Mike was the one calling numbers that day, and the count went past 2,000.

With WZK and Lavida both gone, the deadness of the little shopping strip on South Shaanxi Road may last a while. The property owner, the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, has other uses in mind. The school plans to turn the site into student dormitories and teaching and research space for its Sino-British College; the plan is still awaiting approval.

Yanqing Road was the first street to be finished. Bao Bingzhang, the Xuhui district chief, thinks the results here are "very good."

By one account, the first draft of the plan for Yanqing Road, drawn up by the design institute the government commissioned, went building by building: No. 2, a preserved historic structure in good condition, should be cleaned, though its security door looks abrupt and should be repainted. Inside the walls at Nos. 42 to 52, climbing roses or hedge bamboo should be planted, to change with the seasons. The doors and windows privately altered at Nos. 80 to 86 should be swapped for finer ones in keeping with the street's character ...

When Liu Lijun first came to Yanqing Road 11 years ago, it had just been through a round of cleanup. He found you "couldn't see a single person for half a day," and at the time he took that for a sign of class. Now Liu understands where vitality comes from. With some regret, he says this street of under 200 meters "was lively a few years ago, and this year it's gone quiet" — five shops closed at once. Liu's dumpling shop has a business license, so it came through this May's Yanqing Road cleanup untouched.

What is left along Yanqing Road: one vegetable shop, one dumpling restaurant, one milk shop, one real estate agency, two snack shops and three fruit stands. Cai Wei, who heads the historic preservation office of the Hunan Road subdistrict, says they will fill the gaps as soon as they can, balance the neighborhood's mix of shops, and bring in new businesses.

Any new business that wants in on this street has to hang a sign of a standard design out front. The Hunan Road subdistrict installs them free, but shops may not put their phone numbers on them, so the whole street looks uniform. Zhang Lei, who studies the design history of old Shanghai, thinks the old signs were ugly, and thinks they should have been left to go on being ugly. "It's an honest ugliness. Look at it long enough and it stops bothering you. It has a better chance of becoming a cultural symbol by staying ugly than by turning beautiful."

Seven shops on Yanqing Road have gone over to the new signs: brown cloth, white lettering, no phone numbers, not a style you see much. Old Shandong Fruit Store, which never had a logo, now takes a slice of lemon as its mark; Happy Dairy uses a milk carton; Liangzhixin Orchard an apple; and the Northeastern Handmade Dumpling House an elegant traditional-character rendering of the word for dumpling, sitting above the glass door where thick red letters advertise "dine in or take out, easy on the wallet." Most of the signs carry English as well — "Old Shandong Fruit Store," for one. The corner of Yanqing Road and Donghu Road is to be the information center for the future Hengfu historic and cultural district, so the shops here, besides serving the people around them, will probably have to serve as a shopfront for the district.

The Shanghai Liu Lijun thought he had come to was probably not one that moved this fast, flattening everything like wind through grass.

"Shanghai is better than Beijing. In Beijing everything comes in gusts; there's less of that here," Liu says. That is what drew him, he says: "Work hard enough and you can make money."

After opening Hua Hao Zhan on Middle Fuxing Road, Zheng Zhirui would sometimes get complaints from customers about the food and the service. His answer was usually the same: what the little place was going for was an attitude toward living, a room where you could eat and drink a bit with friends.

For a restaurant that means to make money, that answer will not satisfy everyone. But there really are customers who care only about the things attached to "living" in this sense. On Hua Hao Zhan's Dianping page, which has stopped updating, someone recently asked: where is it moving to? Somewhere with no trees?

For Zheng Zhirui, that may be how it goes. After leaving Hong Kong he spent 16 years in Shanghai's "French Concession," and felt there was "room to grow" here — not only the street trees, the cafés and the bars, but room to gather up "a few odd, interesting people." Only Beijing's Gulou, he reckons, compares. Zheng doesn't want to move somewhere interchangeable: "If it's that kind of place, you could be in any big city. You don't need to be here." He spent a stretch in Beijing too, in a courtyard house around Gulou. If not for the air there, he might have been glad to keep going back and forth.

Still, he likes to measure Shanghai against the "big cities" he knows. Those cities are usually thought of as expensive but orderly: "you pay that much and you get certain guarantees." And Shanghai? Zheng says, a little deflated: "It can match the rents of any international city. It just doesn't do any of it well."

On the 34th day after Hua Hao Zhan closed, the wall along Middle Fuxing Road was nearly bricked up, and a few frames for relief carvings had gone onto it. The trees were still there. They count as part of the historic character.

The residents of Jiashan Road are as bored as ever when they have time on their hands; some sit around a table playing cards, others sit out in the shade. At two in the afternoon, Master Li, who sells chicken, had just finished lunch at the roadside — the routine he has kept since he became a mobile vendor.

The landlords all refused to talk, afraid that if this blew up it would cut off the household's income. As one person in the trade, who asked not to be named, put it: "The truth is, every cent a sub-landlord makes is illegal." Once the storm passes, though, as long as the planners go back to "knowing about it but not stepping in," maybe they can do what one real estate agent suggested — turn the place into a studio, or find some way to rent it to foreigners again.

And the streets brought fully under control may soon be abandoned by their customers. Carlos, a Spaniard who lives on Middle Huaihai Road, isn't much worried about the Yongkang Road bar street being shut. He told reporters a few days ago that as long as his friends are around, it doesn't matter where he drinks.

But everyone the cleanup plan has touched says they have learned something about this city they had never learned before.

Even on the last day Rogar wouldn't give out the address of his new bar, though he offered a half-serious piece of advice: "Which is to say, in business you can't skip the incense and the praying — if someone wants to come make trouble for you, they will." Li Guokai sometimes walks past the spot where the makeshift vegetable stalls stood, now an empty lot again. Liu Lijun's dumpling shop is still doing brisk business; he used to plan for a grand future, and now he intends to "keep his eyes on what's in front of me ... can't look too far ahead."

Behind that wall on Middle Fuxing Road, Tang Yuanlong is still waiting for news. He has heard that at the end of August Tongji University, which designed the plan for this preservation zone, will deliver three proposals. He and his wife, Wang Wujing, can only look on the bright side: maybe the planners will think again and take the wall down, and let the music bookstore get its "historic character" back.

And then everything would "start over."