Sham Shui Po and Shek Kip Mei--neighborhoods

The streets of Sham Shui Po

Sham Shui Po is known for its electronics street market. You can have your pick of headsets.

This is a seed store that has been there for many years--the sign above shows a cabbage as a clue.

Most of the old staircases have been closed in with doors, but this traditional one still remains open for a look.

Durian--or stinky fruit--it is banned from airplanes.

We stopped here and bought a bit of brown cake--it was like a sponge cake that is just very lightly sweetened.

A foot message for anyone?

Sham Shui Po used to be the garment manufacturing district before it moved to China. Just like the garment district in NYC, it has maintained some of the garment related businesses even if the items are no longer manufactured in the area.

The sign above says this is a pawn shop--it takes a local to help you understand what is going on. The apartments are so small in this area that in the past, locals would pawn their winter blankets in the spring and buy them back in the fall. It was the equivalent of storage. This particular pawn shop was one of the places where this was done. Now they deal with more valuable items like gold.

One of the unique features of Hong Kong apartment buildings is this rounded corner. I have yet to have someone give me an explanation of its origin. it looks very art deco, but these buildings came after the art deco era.

The wooden boxes hold live snakes because this is a snake restaurant. It is mainly something that is eaten in the winter.

Clothing market street.

Toy market street.

It is lychee season. The ones at the bottom and top are form of lychee. The middle is a fruit that is dark like a plum--but I can't remember what it is!

Traditionally all streets had awning like this. Life spilled onto the streets and it provided coverage from rain (and sun?)

You can see the eras of apartment buildings--all public housing.

These are some of the oldest style of public housing--just after the fire of the 1950s. Apartments were 120 square feet and had 3 families per apartment (sometimes 18 people). The doors opened toward the middle where people cooked outside the door on little stove tops and bathrooms were shared by a floor.

This is more of the second generation of housing. Single families (maybe with multiple generations) per flat, but perhaps originally with bathrooms still shared but moved toward very small apartments with bathrooms and small kitchens.

Still small, the apartments in these most recent buildings are still a great improvement.

Yet more new public housing. To get such an apartment, you have to have an income of less that around $20,000 US.

This old factory, from the 1970s has been turned into a center for creative arts for the community. The factory had this central courtyard which was open to the air--in fact each floor was open as well. Some old machinery has been kept to keep the history present in the building.

Men sitting outside the arts center near the recreation field.

Overview of the neighborhood from the top of the arts center.

The nature of laundry in Hong Kong

Sham Shui Po and Shek Kip Mei are some of the poorer neighborhoods in Hong Kong. This weekend I took a walking tour organized by a local creative arts non-profit through the neighborhood. I had been in these neighborhoods before but it gave me some new views of the neighborhood.

These neighborhoods were not part of Hong Kong until around 1890. They are north of Boundary Street, the northern boundary of British territory until the territory was leased from China. It remained rural until the 1950s. In 1953 a large fire burned down six villages in the area, making 60,000 people homeless. As a result the government started to build the public housing that you see in the area.

In the 1970s there was a great deal of manufacturing in the area. Once China began to open up, all the manufacturing moved across the border.

Today, in Sham Shui Po, you find African and SE Asian refugees come out in the evening to do trading. The African traders send used products like TVs to places in Africa.