Camera hounds sour ‘home sweet home’
Imagine you are living in an apartment building that is 100 years old. One day an Internet celebrity visits your neighborhood, takes pictures of your building and posts them online. Then the trouble begins. Every day, swarms of people show up to photograph your building.
This is not the realm of fantasy. People living in heritage or other iconic buildings in Shanghai often discover that “home sweet home” may not be so sweet after all.
The Liangyou Apartment building on Fuxing Road W. in Xuhui District had to install a face-recognition security system at its entrance to prevent strangers from entering the building after its iconic diamond-shaped staircase was featured online.
The four-story, Art Deco-style building was built in 1937 by flour and textile tycoon Rong Hongyuan. Architects designed the wedge-shaped building and diamond stairway to adapt to the irregular plot of land. The building was listed as a heritage structure in 2015.
Wukang Mansion, an iconic downtown apartment block, has long been a magnet for shutterbugs. The building, designed by renowned Hungarian-Slovak architect Laszlo Hudec in the 1920s, was once the home of celebrities. Today the building itself is the celebrity, and residents are not amused.
“I’m not exaggerating when I say that there are tourists gathering outside our building 365 days a year,” says Lily Chen, a resident in the building. “Most of them take pictures and then leave. Some even come in gowns for wedding pictures.”
Chen says she wouldn’t mind her home being a sightseeing spot, but her tolerance ends when gawpers try to break into the building for a closer look.
“Even a sign in the lobby saying ‘no sightseeing’ doesn’t deter them,” she says. “I can’t even count how many times I’ve seen tourists taking pictures in various corners of the building.”
Not far away, another residence on Wukang Road drew public attention recently because of a huge, pink bowknot hung on a balcony.
The owner of the balcony, an 80-year-old woman, said she hung the bowknot there at the request of a neighbor. And before she knew it, people began gathering under her balcony every day to take photos.
Her family said that their elderly relative waved to visitors at the start. But that only made matters worse. People would yell at her to come out onto the balcony to have her photo taken with the bowknot. After several weeks, the bowknot was removed and the distraught woman went to stay temporarily with her family elsewhere.
The Jinshajiang residential complex in Putuo District is another victim of online fame. Built in 2005, it’s hardly old and looks pretty much like any other block of apartments. But the roof on one of the buildings is believed to be the best spot to take pictures of the mega-shopping mall Global Harbor on the opposite side of the street.
It all started when a photo showing a night view of the mall, flanked by two roads, was posted on Xiaohongshu, an online lifestyle platform. The photo was entitled “Hugging Global Harbor in the shape of a heart.”
The netizen who uploaded the picture said it was taken from the
rooftop of one of the buildings in the Jinshajiang complex. The picture went viral, and soon people were flocking into the buildings to see the view of the mall.
“It was terrible until the property management updated the access control system to the building,” says a resident, who asked to remain anonymous. “Until then, strangers were entering our building all the time and going to the roof. The iron door to the rooftop, which is usually locked, was completely removed somehow one night.”
The unwanted “visitors” climbed onto the railing of the rooftop to take pictures, and some even let off fireworks while there. Police were called. The new access-control system finally stopped the influx of visitors.
Residents of Longchang Apartment in Yangpu District weren’t so lucky in finding an expedient solution.
When their apartment became famous because of a movie, swarms of people — even tour groups with guides — appeared at the building to take photos.
The apartment looks very
similar to a building featured in the Hong Kong movie “Kung Fu Hustle,” released in 2004.
Longchang Apartment resembles the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, a densely populated enclave controlled by triad gangs and rife with prostitution, gambling and drug abuse, where derelicts lived in “cage” homes. The area was demolished in 1994.
Now people come to Longchang Apartment for a trip down memory lane.
The apartment, built in the 1930s and designed by a British architectural firm, features a ring-shaped building with a central yard that served as a local police station before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Some of the rooms were actually jail cells with bars.
After 1949, the building was turned into dormitories for the Yangpu District branch of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau.
Oddly enough, an old apartment building in Jing’an District, which is almost a doppelgänger of the Longchang Apartment, has hardly attracted any notice.
The Xincheng Apartment on Chengdu Road, built in the same era as Longchang, has a similar ring-shaped structure and even appeared in the 2006 blockbuster “Mission: Impossible III.”
However, the apartment has remained obscure even though it’s located in the center of the city’s downtown.
Curiosity — and obsession — toward high-profile residences is not confined to Shanghai.
In New York, the infamous Amityville house still attracts visitors 40-plus years after Ronald DeFeo Jr killed his family there and rumors of the house being haunted began to spread.
But it was gawping visitors, not ghosts, that came to haunt the site.
Dealing with this sort of problem can be quite difficult. Extra security can be installed, but that may not thwart visitors from massing outside a building.
To ease the crush of curiosity-seekers around Wukang Mansion, nearby sites have been opened to try to distract people from the building itself. On Wukang Road, vintage cafes, upmarket hairdressers and bookstores are operating in old houses to siphon off public interest in just one place.
Legal experts say it’s actually illegal to treat residences as common sightseeing spots.
“The bottom line is that you can’t disrupt people’s normal lives,” says lawyer Cheng Xiaowen. “According to the current property law, if residents call police about your presence at their building, you can be admonished, fined or even detained. One should never romanticize these unwanted intrusions because they can actually be rather toxic.”