Local Arts News: A taste of nostalgia in historic Wan Chai building - SCMP (19-07-20130 CITY4 | CITY | development | By Olga Wong Some of the city’s oldest restaurants opened for business yesterday in century-old Wan Chai tenements, taking advantage of below-market rents in buildings that have been renovated as a home for comic artists. Their rents will help offset maintenance and operation costs for the Urban Renewal Authority in the HK$200 million preservation of the tenements, popularly known as the Green House. “The rent is at least 50 per cent lower than the market rate. I don’t need to worry about cost recovery now. I can do the business any way I want,” said Ho Cheuk-man, owner of Ho Wah cha chaan teng, as the project opened yesterday. Tenants get lower rents in return for higher renovation costs resulting from conservation requirements in the refurbished buildings. But it creates a challenge for the authority in covering its own costs – which it declines to disclose – as most of the comic exhibitions that are the project’s main focus are free. Ho, the second-generation operator of Ho Wah, said his uncle opened a tea stall in front of the grade-two historic tenements 60 years ago. The stall was closed down by the government and later moved into a shop next to the tenements, selling local tea and sandwiches favoured by some film stars. That shop remains and he has opened a new one in the tenement. Another tenant is the westernised Queen’s Cafe. “I won’t measure it this way,” owner Susanna Tsang said, refusing to estimate the size of the rent discount. “It’s our luck to run a cafe and a cake shop surrounded with old red bricks and stylish ambience.” The cafe was founded by her father-in-law on nearby Lee Garden Road in 1952. The menu included Russian food which the founder had learned to prepare from a chef from Belarus. Both Tsang and Sunny Pang Chun-kwok, supervisor of a shop selling comics and animated figures, said their renovation costs were higher. For example, no nails or permanent attachments were allowed in the red bricks or wooden fittings. It took the authority 10 months to inject micro-cement into the porous soil 10 metres underground in order to support beams and staircases strengthened with steel. All the original red bricks were treated and kept. “The strengthening of the foundation was our biggest challenge. We couldn’t add piles,” the authority’s planning and design director Michael Ma Chiu-chi said. The facades of four tenements on Burrows Street have been retained, and the remaining six on Mallory Street are intact. Other features include a new block for exhibitions and a public garden. An exhibition of comics from the 1960s is now on show. Two studios are occupied by comic artists Kongkee and Zcratch. Arts Centre executive director Connie Lam Suk-yee, who operates the comics centre, said the project provided a key platform for exchanges between local artists and the public.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 01:59:26 +0000
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