Chan Is Missing - Buddha Buddies
Then … Jo has given up on finding Chan Hung. “Here’s a picture of Chan”, he says, “and I still can’t see him”. The two friends are posing on either side of a Buddha in front of a gift shop. (That’s director Wayne Wang posing as Chan). The reflection in the window of the building across the street was the clue that led CitySleuth to this location.
… and Now, here’s the same shop window today with the same reflection. This is the Canton Bazaar gift shop at 616 Grant Avenue. Compare the Then and Now reflection within the highlighted area but don’t be fooled by the fact that one of the reflected building’s windows below its carved wooden pediment has since been bricked up.
… and Now, the reflected building was then, and still is today, the Bank of America Chinatown branch at 701 Grant on the corner of Sacramento. Note the carved wooden pediments that span groups of three windows; one of each group is now bricked up. The blue box outlines the area reflected in the Canton Bazaar shop window (that reflection of course is a reversed mirror image).
Bank of America opened the branch in 1962 in what was originally the Nanking Fook Woh Company building. In this 1960s photo we see the window (at left, partially obscured) before it was bricked up.
The Canton Bazaar building was built soon after the 1906 earthquake - it’s seen here in a 1910 photograph that also shows the Nanking Fook Woh Co. building on the left. Had the man next to the Canton Bazaar entrance stopped and looked back he would have seen the same reflection in its window of the area outlined in yellow that director Wang captured behind Jo seventy years later.
… and Now, it’s been 114 years since it opened and the Canton Bazaar is still there. In Chinatown, a neighborhood of relative stability, many things resist change.
On a historical note, the Nanking Fook Woh Company imported and sold oriental fine arts. This colorful lithograph depicted it soon after it was built. Note the cable car on Sacramento Street running on the Sacramento & Clay line that would eventually close down in 1942.
And, thirty or so years later, here’s a cable car at that corner one year before the line closed down; the tenant in the Nanking Fook Woh Company building at that time was T. Iwata & Co. Incidentally, the telegram office on the left appeared in scenes in the 1948 noir Walk A Crooked Mile and in the 1949 noir Impact - each posted in this blog.