Astor House: In The Streets

While there are many photos of old Shanghai that document the life of the common people out in the streets, only a few of them can be identified to be from the very specific neighborhood that I am discussing here.

That leads to a severe imbalance in these essays - many of the photos or postcards show long-established colonial businesses and foreign-owned buildings, but what is missing is the life of the Chinese majority that made up 98 percent of the population of greater Shanghai in the 1930s.

For actual numbers, in 1930 there were about 3.1 million Chinese living in greater Shanghai vs. 65,000 foreign residents.

One photographer that took many photos out in the streets of Shanghai and who tried to document what he saw is R. Bartz, who in 1935 published his book "Sketches of Present Day Shanghai".

Among his many photos are two that are identifiable as from North Soochow Road, just across of Broadway from the Astor House.

The photos are probably from early to mid-1934 as in this view we can see on the very left the tall shoulder of the brand new Broadway Mansions Hotel, still clad in construction scaffolding. The Broadway Mansions were open by early 1935.

The focus of this photo is a man eating a bowl of food from the baskets of a street vendor. One basket holds upturned clean bowls and a pot with rice, while the other basket holds several other pots with vegetables or soup. The whole setup can be transported with the bamboo pole connecting the two baskets.

Behind this contraption is a man furiously sweeping the floor. And further behind that we see a truck being loaded with goods from the boats along Soochow Creek, which is to our right. In front of the truck is a man that stands in the universal at-rest posture of police forces everywhere, giving the shoreline and the truck a rather intensive look.

In the distance we see the Garden Bridge with a lot of foot traffic and a car crossing. Behind the truck we have the Soviet Consulate that we just discussed in the previous post.

R. Bartz walked across the street from that first photo and came halfway down one of the stairs that connect the street level of North Soochow Road with the actual shoreline of Soochow Creek. He turned away from the Garden Bridge right behind him and took this second photo.

This is one of the very few photos I've ever seen of the actual shoreline of the creek here near the mouth of the creek, with beached boats unloading freight and a multitude of people out and about. To the right on the embankment wall we see a row of tradespeople selling goods and services. Closest to us on the very right the bent over man working intently is offering shoe repair services or leather work, judging from the little portable workbench to his right.

Just beyond the right edge of this photo would be the new Broadway Mansions looming into the sky. Straight ahead we see a row of long-established businesses, mostly trading houses for various goods from all over the world. The long four-story building in the distance behind the stairs should be part of the General Hospital, with the main building being the darker building to its right.

This last photo is not from R. Bartz. This is a shot from a few years later in 1937. I used this photo to identify that the shot above is indeed from just next to the Garden Bridge. It's possible to match the row of buildings along the creek between the two photos.

As discussed previously in a post here, in 1937 the Garden Bridge was the border crossing between the Japanese sector of Shanghai in the north and the rest of the city held by British, French and Chinese troops with a mixed assortment of soldiers of other nations.

It was possible for many people to cross between the sectors, but everyone had to submit to intense and sometimes violent inspections by the Japanese guards on the bridge, as we see here with the occupants of this car.