Okay, now I'm really sad. Ask a longtime Hà Nội resident, and they'll be able to tell you about Cafe Lâm at 74 Tô Hiến Thành (and not to be confused with the even more famous Cafe Lâm on Nguyễn Hữu Huân) . It is an institution on the order of Cafe Nhân, Cafe Quỳnh, Cafe Thọ, Cafe Giảng, and all the other lovely one-name cafes with original art on the often-mouldy walls, watermelon seed shells on the worn tile floors, and that uniquely Hanoian mix of old-school intelligentsia, new-school businessmen, students, taxi drivers and policemen, drinking their morning coffees and reading their morning papers. These places are part of Hà Nội's history, and as you get to know the owners, you'll learn which famous authors once got into a fight there, or which painting was a gift of a struggling artist long since made good. My own connection to Cafe Lâm is a little more recent: it is the cafe where my Ph.D. supervisor, Peter, and his wife, Cầm, courted each other back in the early days of Vietnam's re-engagement with the West (the owner still asks after you, Peter and Cầm). Add to that the fact that it was one of the few cafes I knew where sidewalk seating was still on the back-breaking tiny plastic stools, and it was pretty much guaranteed that I would stop by for a coffee every few weeks. That's not an option any more. Cafe Lâm is gone, the space at 74 Tô Hiến Thành sold to investors who plan to build a mini-hotel. Whether Hà Nội really needs another mini-hotel is questionable, and it seems pretty clear that Tô Hiến Thành street, its spatial and infrastructural resources already stretched to their limits, cannot support the increased demands that even a "mini" hotel will make. Even more important, though, the end of Cafe Lâm also marks the destruction of another part of Hà Nội's built heritage.
Cafe Lâm is one part of a larger row house built during the early twentieth century. While it may not feature the unique design of the modernist-inspired villas and houses that were to follow, it is most definitely a genuine example of early French colonial architecture. After 1954, the use-rights (and now effective ownership) of larger properties was divided, and the building that stretched along half the block of Tô Hiến Thành was no exception. As today's investors in the hotel project have only been able to acquire the property at number 74, then that's what they'll "develop." So this concrete part of Hanoi's history will die a strange and slow death, cut in thirds by a six-story slice of architectural disaster. Is there not just a little irony in the that fact that while developers are creating ersatz "French-style" "new cities" in Hanoi's urban fringes, they're destroying real French architecture in its historic core?
Rest in Peace, Cafe Lâm.
ears later, the area is still filled with the physical remains of this impulse. One of my favorite streets in the city is Triều Việt Vương, where a particular convergence of the local and the global has left us with fascinating vestiges of a hybrid Franco-Vietnamese modernism. In this context, perhaps the house at 96 Tuệ Tĩnh isn't particularly special. Yet its curves and its graceful detailing will always make it infinitely more pleasing than the six-storey glass and steel office building that will soon take its place. For that is what will happen. 98 Tuệ Tĩnh has already been sold, and as soon as the property rights of the owners of 98 Tuệ Tĩnh can be "acquired," then this building will disappear in a matter of weeks, if not days, and Hanoi will have lost another part of its built heritage. I can't help comparing this process to the sort of "development" that gutted Singapore's historical core. Yet where modern and utterly characterless Singapore was the result of conscious choices by a ruling elite committed to a certain vision of modernity, in Hanoi the same outcome will occur building by building as a thousand lovely old villas are replaced by a thousand identical and ultimately unsustainable office buildings. In some ways I prefer the Singapore version: at least there was a larger, if utterly wrongheaded vision at work. By contrast, Hanoi's lovely old buildings will be the victim a thousand cases of shortsighted greed and brided local officials. Yet whatever the vision (or lack thereof) at play, the end result will be the same: in another five years, Hanoi will have little to recommend it aside from its bún. And the honking, of course.
At the same time, though, what struck me about the Manor was how real life kept sneaking back in. At the first hint of uncontrolled space, you'd find tea stalls, where the real people who actually do all the work in The Manor, The Garden, and all its associated developments can get an inexpensive drink, a cigarette or a hit of thuoc lao, and some time to interact with other humans (not to mention a place to sit; in all the "parks" and green spaces of The Manor and The Garden, there is not a single chair or bench. Don't linger, and for god's sake don't chat: you've got consuming to do!).