Astor House: The Flood

Shanghai is prone to flooding since much of the downtown area is built on a flat coastal delta with nearly no elevation. Over the recent decades, much work has been done to limit the occurence of floods after periods of heavy rain, but in the early years the city streets were frequently filling with water.

Here is a video on archive.org from 1946 that illustrates the severity of the problem. Much of the film by an unknown American visitor to the city was taken from windows in the Broadway Mansions and there are also several scenes on North Soochow Road.

And two short scenes are very close to the specific focus of this series of blog posts. The first scene (at 9 min 36 sec) is a view along the alley behind the Broadway Mansions towards the Astor House block across from Broadway.

(click through for a motion-stabilized gif version of this scene)

On the very left the bright building with the distinctive round windows is the Bridge-Head Bar at the corner of that little alley and Broadway. This is the only film that I have ever seen that shows the Bridge-Head Bar and really only the second piece of any media that shows the bar.

The prominent sign for Harding & Co across the street is interesting. This store is located on Broadway in the Astor House building, possibly at the previous location of Swatow Handwork Co. at 12 Broadway which we have seen here.

(click through for a motion-stabilized gif version of this scene)

The second scene (at 10 min 30 sec) is a brief moment later in the film - a 18-second shot of flooded Broadway with a view of the shops along the Astor House building. On the very left we can see the old HSBC building, stripped of the original sign and most of the old facade. Most of the shops along the block seem to have lost their signage and it's not clear how many of them are occupied, less than one year after the Japanese surrender.

That whole film is a fascinating look at Shanghai after the liberation, the streets busy with American Army trucks and with many of the pre-war businesses closed. Tens of thousands of European refugees had recently left town, and many long-time foreign residents were considering the rapidly changing fortunes of the National Chinese government in the face of the rise of Mao Zedong's Communist party.