By Maya (smartshanghai.com)
Updated: 2007-10-24 09:45

Victor Sassoon was less a typical businessman than an early, circa-1980s Donald Trump, magically transforming the face of the city in less than a decade (while at the same time maintaining a reputation for being a savvy ladies man). By the mid-1930s, Sassoon was the top real estate developer in Shanghai, if not in all of China. He was also arguably the city's top exuberant host, mostly from his penthouse apartment located at the top of his Cathay Hotel (today's Peace Hotel, renamed after the rise of post-war anti-colonial sentiments). Quite the playboy and luxury entertainment pursuer, prior to the war with Japan Sassoon developed and owned most of what we consider today to be Shanghai's Art Deco masterpieces: the Cathay Hotel, the Park Hotel in People's Square, the Jinjiang Hotel on Maoming, Hamilton House and the Hotel Metropole at the corner of Fuzhou Lu and Jiangxi Lu.

Like the spectacle of drunken glamorous partygoers one may see today in this neighborhood, back in Sassoon's time both foreign and Chinese locals sipped (or drowned in) temptation in such Bund area locales. From Charlie Chaplin to Noel Coward -- who notably finished his famous play Private Lives in the Peace Hotel -- the partying did not stop in these Deco buildings despite the beginning of the War with the Japanese. It is often said that the drinking, gambling and women-chasing continued even as the bombs dropped and bullets crashed through Tiffany lamps in the still-standing Jazz lounge of the Peace Hotel. Whether this is true or not is anyone's guess. Fact has long since been reinvented as legend to be endlessly resuscitated in tourist pamphlets and Shanghai city guidebooks. But we do enjoy such romantic allegories.

The first of Sassoon's Art Deco castles to be restored to its former glory is the Hamilton House, soon to be joined by its sister buildings, the Metropole and Peace Hotel (to come in late 2008- 2009). The Deco-Gothic giant "Hamilton House" was commissioned by the infamous property magnate, and finished in 1934 by famous architects Palmer and Turner. Along with P& T’s "Broadway Mansions" at the Waibaidu Bridge, Hamilton House offered the city's first luxury residences. Like the Cathay, Hamilton House also has a glamorously debauched history. The building was even noted in the U.S. military guide for the elite squad the Flying Tigers as the preferable apartment/hotel complex from which to base missions of pleasure from. In its heyday, the Hamilton House was the key destination to stay and chase beautiful women, drinks, and even to procure condoms (although the Kedi has replaced this function today). Today, however, the building has long been destitute and neglected - a shadow of its former glamorous self.

It is widely known that the Peace Hotel is finally being rejuvenated to its former beauty, in the face of horrible reviews as to its decay. The Metropole renovation project has also been recently approved and will be underway in the next couple years. With these projects underway, and the soon-to-be open Art Deco Hamilton House Brasserie, it will be interesting to see if Shanghai's developers can reclaim the glamorous era of Sassoon’s 30s Shanghai, perhaps inaugurating a new character of Bund life.

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