Build me a city
Literally.
Today was a gorgeous day here. It rained yesterday and this morning was windy. Thus, there wasn’t a puff of smog or cloud to be seen. We had a lot of fun jumping around the city. What struck us again though is the number of construction projects. It’s like a kid playing with Lego decided to tear down and start from scratch. New modern apartment towers are cropping up everywhere; many replacing the previous generation. There’s a new shopping center everywhere we look (always with a grocery store in the basement). Two car lane streets are being widened into four car lane streets plus bike lanes on each side. Imagine someone deciding that Broadway on Capitol Hill (or St-Denis in Montreal) should be significantly larger and destroying the buildings on each side for the entire length of the street. Elsewhere they’re simply tearing down all of the shops and giving the street a face-lift. The picture shows Qianmen, a street which according to our 2004 book is good for shopping. Right now huge stretches of it have these billboards up instead. With only a few exceptions, the stores there don’t exist anymore. As a tourist walking down one of the remodeled street there are no signs of what was there before.
Still, all of the new construction downtown uses the same basic grey brick. It’s easy therefore to spot new from old. Moreover, as I mentioned in a previous post, this often only masks the old decrepit residences behind. A few times the door between two sets of shops was left open giving us a first eye view of how the inhabitants behind the shops are faring. That’s when the contrast of old Beijing and new Beijing hits you.
All of these major construction endeavors need to be finished by the end of 2007; or so we heard. The government doesn’t want construction interfering with the business of the Olympics. For us, this has also meant that many historical sites and museums are closed for repairs. We can only guess that the city will, whether or not it agrees, look good for the games of 2008.