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Tuesday, 16 December 2008
Famous Shanghai bar faces up to forced move
Rupert Murdoch and the Backstreet Boys will have to head elsewhere for drinks when they are next in Shanghai after the closure over the weekend of Face Bar.
Rupert Murdoch and the Backstreet Boys will have to head elsewhere for drinks when they are next in Shanghai after the closure over the weekend of Face Bar.
Face is leaving the 6.8-hectare enclosure, called Ruijin, as the landlord is planning to build a paved road around the lawn in front of the 78-year-old villa that the bar occupied, and a nine-storey hotel nearby.
“The construction will completely change the feel of this place,” said Alberto Nonis, who has worked as Face’s food and beverage manager for six years.
Aside from the News Corp chairman, Mr. Murdoch, and the boy band, tennis player Boris Becker and singer Cliff Richard had visited the bar, he said.
The bar had survived for a decade as an oasis of wood and stone amid a growing number of glass-and-steel skyscrapers, giving visitors a historic setting to unwind with drinks as they imagined the city’s past as the Pearl of the Orient.
The three-storey villa occupied by Face once served as the offices of the Japanese High Command in the second world war and later the East China bureau of the Communist Party after Mao Zedong took control of the nation in 1949, according to Ruijin’s website.
“The whole point of this place is that it’s a little retreat away from the big, ugly buildings,” Face patron Amanda Li said. “Now, they’re going to put one there.”
Shanghai’s economy has more than tripled in the decade since Face opened, fuelling a construction boom that has filled the skyline of the mainland’s wealthiest city with cranes and demolished swathes of old districts.
“Even though the destruction of the old city has been very rapid, there is still much significant architecture left and at last the economic means to preserve it,” said Patrick Cranley, who in 1998 helped found preservation group Historic Shanghai.
Tony Sun, a Ruijin spokesman, said: “The villa Face is vacating won’t be touched in the construction.”
Preservation laws bar wholesale renovations of the city’s historic buildings, including Ruijin’s.
“The bar is expected to reopen in about a year at a new location,” Mr. Nonis said. But that is scant comfort for people like him who say they have been savouring the last moments of tranquillity at the villa that Face is leaving today.
Its stone South Asian reliefs, wooden opium bed and flowering chandeliers will be packed away into storage, leaving the bar’s orange walls bare.
“You can imagine the noise and traffic with all the taxis and cars coming through,” Mr. Nonis said. “It won’t have this nice quiet feeling any more.”
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Famous Shanghai bar faces up to forced move
Bloomberg in Shanghai
15 December 2008
Rupert Murdoch and the Backstreet Boys will have to head elsewhere for drinks when they are next in Shanghai after the closure over the weekend of Face Bar.
Face is leaving the 6.8-hectare enclosure, called Ruijin, as the landlord is planning to build a paved road around the lawn in front of the 78-year-old villa that the bar occupied, and a nine-storey hotel nearby.
“The construction will completely change the feel of this place,” said Alberto Nonis, who has worked as Face’s food and beverage manager for six years.
Aside from the News Corp chairman, Mr. Murdoch, and the boy band, tennis player Boris Becker and singer Cliff Richard had visited the bar, he said.
The bar had survived for a decade as an oasis of wood and stone amid a growing number of glass-and-steel skyscrapers, giving visitors a historic setting to unwind with drinks as they imagined the city’s past as the Pearl of the Orient.
The three-storey villa occupied by Face once served as the offices of the Japanese High Command in the second world war and later the East China bureau of the Communist Party after Mao Zedong took control of the nation in 1949, according to Ruijin’s website.
“The whole point of this place is that it’s a little retreat away from the big, ugly buildings,” Face patron Amanda Li said. “Now, they’re going to put one there.”
Shanghai’s economy has more than tripled in the decade since Face opened, fuelling a construction boom that has filled the skyline of the mainland’s wealthiest city with cranes and demolished swathes of old districts.
“Even though the destruction of the old city has been very rapid, there is still much significant architecture left and at last the economic means to preserve it,” said Patrick Cranley, who in 1998 helped found preservation group Historic Shanghai.
Tony Sun, a Ruijin spokesman, said: “The villa Face is vacating won’t be touched in the construction.”
Preservation laws bar wholesale renovations of the city’s historic buildings, including Ruijin’s.
“The bar is expected to reopen in about a year at a new location,” Mr. Nonis said. But that is scant comfort for people like him who say they have been savouring the last moments of tranquillity at the villa that Face is leaving today.
Its stone South Asian reliefs, wooden opium bed and flowering chandeliers will be packed away into storage, leaving the bar’s orange walls bare.
“You can imagine the noise and traffic with all the taxis and cars coming through,” Mr. Nonis said. “It won’t have this nice quiet feeling any more.”
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