正文
SALARY ALLEY runs from the National Art Gallery to Dongsi North Street in downtown Beijing. It is one of the city’s surviving hutong (alleyways) from the pre-Communist period—a lane of single-story houses, grey brick walls and upturned eaves. It is also a microcosm of changes ripping through China’s cities.
Salary Alley is poor. Large houses have been subdivided into warrens. Few have kitchens or bathrooms, so the lane is lined with public bathrooms and restaurants which are cheaper than eating at home. The hutong boasts ten eateries, four public bathrooms, nine grocery or hardware shops, a pet hospital, brothel, barbershop, four-star hotel, pool hall and a community-police headquarters. Jane Jacobs, an American urban theorist who extolled the varied life of mixed-use streets, would have loved it.
About five years ago, Salary Alley started to gentrify. It already had one of the best Vietnamese restaurants in Beijing. Now it acquired a luxury sushi house, a couple of bars, and—sure harbinger of middle-class demand—a dainty coffee-shop. But recently it has suffered something more like degentrification. Gentrification means protecting old buildings and attracting new businesses, often at the expense of old residents who can no longer afford to live there. Salary Alley is seeing new businesses shut down, buildings torn up and new arrivals, not old residents, forced out.
