Astor House: The Bank Around The Corner

After the previous posts outlining the tumultuous changes and literal impacts of the war years on the area around the Astor House, let's take a short break while - maybe unadvisedly - standing in the middle of the intersection of Broadway and Seward Road.

On the sharp north-east corner of this intersection stands a branch of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank - a company that today is still one of the largest banking corporations in the world under the name HSBC.

This postcard from sometime in the early 1910s shows the back of the Astor House block on the right - also displaying an example of how little the captions on these postcards were proofread. On the left is the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank building, still relatively new as it was probably built in the early 1900s. The tram tracks along Broadway date this picture to the early 1910s, as the tracks were laid down around 1908.

This second photo is from 1935, probably in summer, as sun shades have been draped over windows everywhere. A policeman stands in the middle of the intersection and it seems a senior officer is there with him for a brief conversation. It's overall a peaceful scene during a brief break to the general excitement and upheaval of the mid-1930s in Shanghai.

The store on the right might have been an early example of the Jewish refugee wave, but the name is unfortunately cut off. I could not find a draper called "Oscar Land..." in the 1939 address book for Shanghai, but the years from 1935 to 1939 would bring many changes to this neighborhood and maybe the owner of this store moved on.

This is a part of a rare aerial shot of Shanghai. This photo is from the late 1940s, after Shanghai had been taken over by the Communists. The bank building has undergone some renovation, probably to repair damage from the war. It's unclear if it is still a bank at this point - or a HSBC branch at that.

For our next post we will stay in this intersection and turn around to take a look at the Japanese Post Office across the road.