Signs of the times: RIP, Cafe Lâm

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.