The Delikat – Chusan Road

There’s been a bit of buzz around the blogs about the parlous state of Hongkou and the widespread destruction there of late as Shanghai ‘prepares’ for the pointless EXPO next year. I’ve noted the coming down of several former sites in the old Jewish ghetto while Adam Minter on his Shanghai Scrap blog has also noted the levelling of Hongkou and elicited plenty of responses predictably taking both sides.

One road to get hammered is the old Chusan Road (now Zhoushan Road) ,which was also part of the ghetto. The road was home to the Hongkou’s Chusan Road Market where many Jewish refugees shopped in the 1940s – to them it was known as the Die Markthalle. The road became lined with cafés and meeting places for refugees as the official Jewish Zone of Security expanded during the Japanese occupation but only those with certain passports could get out of the ghetto to the strip of European-style cafés.

The refugees transformed Chusan Road from a fairly ordinary Chinese road to something approximating a slice of Vienna with groceries, pharmacies, bakeries, plumbers, locksmiths, barbers, tailors, milliners, cobblers – and, of course, there were the inevitable Viennese coffee-houses, such as the Vienna Café Restaurant, the Delikat at 23, the Barcelona at 21 (home to the Jewish Barcelona Football Club), the International at 81 and Hesky and Gerstl’s tearooms at 252. For those a little short of money but still hungry there was a popular wurstelstand parked in the kerb selling hot dogs. Several small-scale factories were also established producing soap, candles, knitwear, leatherwear and especially European-type food products such as sausages and confectionary.

Here’s an ad for the Delikat from the late 1930s.

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