A Boon to Social Climbers in Hong Kong

The gates of hell have opened, and the ghosts are hungry and restless. In a ceremony to placate unsettled spirits, a ribbon of red-robed Taoist priests unfurls through a hillside neighborhood where narrow streets slice into the slope like terraced rice fields.

Sweating under their robes, the priests circuit the area’s temples, horns whining, cymbals clashing, then pause for breath on the way up the steep streets. But at one corner, the purveyors of ancient ritual find newfangled help in ascending to the next level: One by one, they delicately lift the hems of their robes and step serenely onto the world’s longest outdoor escalator.

As the procession glides up the hill, chanting prayers, a passerby smiles at the exorcism by escalator. “Hong Kong,” he says, “must have the world’s most spoiled commuters.”

The Central Mid-Levels Escalator--a serpentine moving staircase that stretches almost half a mile up Victoria Peak--started as a unique solution to an old traffic problem in a city whose high-rises clamber up its steep slopes: how to swiftly transport people up and down.

A century ago, one of the earliest residents of the Peak, a trader from Baghdad named George Belilios, reached his home by camel. Most others relied on sedan chairs carried by coolies. The city built the Peak Tram in 1888, a green funicular that still beetles up the mountain, packed with tourists.

Today, the city’s topography is still a map of social climbing. As the altitude rises, so do rents. While the truly rich own homes with astronomic prices on the Peak, Hong Kong’s upwardly mobile residents have clustered half-way up the mountain in an area known as Mid-Levels, in tall thickets of $10,000-a-month apartments with names like Fortune Court and Wealthy Heights. In the morning rush, their Mercedeses and BMWs overflow the narrow, traversing streets, jamming traffic.

Hong Kong opened the escalator, with its many stops, in 1992 as a mechanical river to divert the flow of commuters gridlocked on the Peak’s winding roads. Meant to entice drivers out of their creeping vehicles for a quick, straight shot from Mid-Levels to the Central business district, the free service has also propelled them into worlds unexplored, brought bottom dwellers up to the Mid-Level’s rarefied realms and created neighborhoods with a wild mix of ancient and modern--bald nuns in robes and men in dresses, hungry ghosts and gourmet restaurants.

“This escalator is the most famous in the world,” boasts its operator, Lam Him-fat, 57. “Tourists from every country come to ride it. Engineers came from Singapore to study it.”

At 6 every morning, Lam and his partner Yau Tung-chi, 48, switch on the escalator from a control room beneath one of the walkways. Lam monitors passengers on six TV screens--one camera is trained only on people’s feet to make sure they don’t trip on the first step.

For the next four hours, thousands of wingtips and high heels and a few pairs of sandals step onto the walkway or the adjacent stairs that wind along for much of its path. Besuited bankers and carefully coiffed lawyers are “conveyored,” as in a scene from “The Jetsons,” from their ritzy neighborhoods, past a mosque, cracker-box Chinese apartment blocks, antique stores and markets, straight into skyscrapers housing Hong Kong’s biggest banks and investment houses and its stock exchange.

“In the morning, everyone is rushing for work,” says Lam. “Everyone walks down the escalator, or sometimes runs. Only old people and tourists stand still for the ride.”

One Way at a Time

The city decided that building both an up and a down escalator would be too expensive. So at 10 a.m., Lam and Yau flick a series of switches and the escalator gradually reverses, carrying riders back up the hill until 11 at night.

Each morning, Philippine maids and elderly Chinese women wait by the market at the bottom of the hill with bundles of fruits and vegetables; they time their shopping to catch the turnaround.

Ironically, the $30-million project has failed, so far, to solve the traffic problem: Studies by Hong Kong’s Transportation Department found that few motorists were willing to give up their air-conditioned commute for an open-air glide down the mountainside. Many of the 37,000 passengers who ride the escalator daily say they walked or took the bus before, so their use has little effect on traffic.

And the escalator’s convenience attracted more residents and builders, further congesting the roads.

There has been a bevy of other unintended side effects. The mechanical river also ferries ideas, influences, explorers and infiltrators up and down, forcing a mix and an intensity of contact on people who otherwise move in parallel strata.

Staunton Street--named after a Hong Kong governor--is at the crossroads of change. About halfway up the escalator’s path, it has been transformed by the thousands of riders who have glimpsed its charming low buildings and streets narrow enough for neighbors to chat across without leaving their doorways. The escalator opened up the sequestered streets and brought strangers--and their money--who wandered through, explored, then moved in and sank roots.

Then came the shops and cafes. Since 1994, 16 restaurants have opened on Staunton Street and around the escalator. From a stool in the airy Staunton’s Bar + Cafe or behind the inviting French doors of the Bayou, a Cajun restaurant, patrons can observe commuters glide by blank-faced at a 45-degree angle, in a strange twist on people-watching.

‘Like a Movie’

But, in this case, the real entertainment is not on the streets--or the escalator. It is in the canyons of life that have sprung up around it.

“Riding the escalator is like watching a movie,” says designer Isabella Au. “You can observe people on the streets or even through their windows, arguing, making dinner or,” she smiles, “making love.”

Indeed, the escalator has become a favorite scene for movie makers.

Wayne Wang shot part of his soon-to-be-released “Chinese Box” here. Director Wong Karwai’s “Chungking Express” was filmed from cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s apartment overlooking the escalator. In it, a lovesick policeman talks to objects in his apartment while a parade of faces floats by his window like a silent Greek chorus.

But what draws most people off the escalator and into the neighborhood now is food: Vietnamese, Nepalese, Spanish, French and Mexican restaurants--few of them seating more than 20 people. Until a few weeks ago, a Greek-Austrian-Finnish takeout doled out grub for the adventurous.

Food-loving Hong Kongers have thronged to the area, happy to have a culinary alternative and drawn by the village-like feeling.

The Bayou Cajun restaurant has been fully booked almost every night since opening in February. “The escalator helps our business a lot,” says manager Rob Cooper. “With thousands of people passing our doors every day . . . we don’t need to advertise.”

But neighbors have mixed feelings about the new businesses that have enlivened their once-sleepy streets. “Most of our customers are local,” says Andy Clarkson, manager of Staunton’s Bar + Cafe, “so we try to be neighborly. We shut our front doors at 6, and we have to stop serving alcohol at 11.”

The Urban Services police make sure, staging raids on places that serve liquor without a license or violate a ban on outdoor dining.

The street is forging a quiet modus vivendi: Some days, elderly women burn offerings to the spirits beside cafes, covering al fresco diners with ash. The residents complain about loud music, too many cars and boisterous tipplers.

“The neighborhood used to be quite a quiet place,” said a Buddhist nun wearing simple beige robes and cloth slippers, her head shaved. In the street-front temple, other nuns pray before pictures of devotees’ ancestors. “It used to be a street of nuns and temples. Now it has become more complex.”

A few steps down the road from the nuns’ house of worship is the House of Siren, where Hong Kong’s most dramatic parties are created and costumed. The director, Australian Gregory Derham, looks great in a dress, but today he wears black trousers as he outfits his friend Anthony to be “a door bitch” at an upcoming concert. Anthony has donned a blue wig, gray briefs and a black strapless bra. He is about to wriggle into a blue-sequined cowgirl outfit when a water delivery man walks in. The man chortles, hands over two water jugs and walks out.

Baskets of ‘Hell Money’

“Oh, yes,” says Derham. “We get along with our neighbors just fine. But sometimes the fellows who load the trucks across the street are a bit naughty and sit on my step and drink their bevvies.” Behind the beer-drinking workers, red-lipped mannequins in mermaid skirts beckon to passersby from the storefront display. “I have to go out there and say, ‘You’re not blocking my window, are you, handsome boys?’ ”

A few doors down, Chan Kwei-chou, 65, assembles baskets of “hell money” to burn as offerings for the hungry ghost festival that night. Though the paper goods store she owns has been here for more than 100 years, she says proudly, she has kept up with the times. Along with incense and paper money, customers can buy paper versions of Rolexes, cellular phones and cognac bottles for their dear departed who miss their earthly pleasures.

In the same progressive spirit, she welcomes her new neighbors. “I don’t mind different kinds of people, and I don’t mind competition,” she says. “People around here work hard, Western and Chinese.”

Not everyone can keep up with the changes. “Auntie!” shouts Chan, greeting an old friend who has dropped by to show off her new gold tooth and visit her old house. She moved away when the newcomers pushed rents out of reach, Chan explains: “The rent goes up, then our prices go up. Things get too expensive, and people move out.”

That’s one reason why among Chan’s most popular items are convex feng shui mirrors meant to deflect bad fortune. They shimmer all along the escalator route.

Chan says she is lucky--her landlord is not greedy. After the escalator came, her rent rose “only” from $400 to $1,300. “But some of the restaurants pay $7,000” monthly, she says.

Behind the story of gentrification, however, there may be surprises. At one storefront, a man says that his rent has quadrupled in six years and asserts: “I’ll tell you a secret. The nuns are one of the biggest landlords in this neighborhood. The nuns are rich.”

No one knows the area’s secrets better than Chan Kam-heung, also known as the garbage, or lap sup, lady. Starting at 4 a.m., she collects trash from each building and piles it onto her pushcart, which she wheels to bins at the end of the street and back, again and again.

She keeps to herself but knows when times are tough and when people are doing well, judging by what they leave behind. These days, an empty case of expensive wine is an indicator that the neighborhood is thriving. She adjusts her prices for collecting trash accordingly.

“She’s the boss of this area,” says Bahadur K. C. Shiva, who owns five neighborhood restaurants. “We can’t cross her, or she’ll bring lap sup from other places and leave it on our doorstep.”

Shiva says he was first impressed by her business savvy when she sold him a Nepali music tape that he realized he had earlier thrown out himself.

Indeed, that is what he likes about living here, he says. The can-do impulse that made Hong Kong build a staircase up the mountainside transformed his garbage lady into his landlord.

Shiva admits the escalator brought him a bit of personal growth as well. “There’s only one drawback” to not having to trudge up and down the steep hill, he says, patting the result of taste-testing at his restaurants. “Now I have to pay to do the StairMaster.”