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The Park Hotel on Nanjing Road, built in 1932, is another landmark work of architect Ladislau Hudec. (Photo: Shanghai Daily)

A table in the hotel’s lobby indicates Shanghai’s geographical center as declared by local surveyors of the time.(Photo: Shanghai Daily)

Shanghai's tallest skyscraper until the 1980s, the art deco Park Hotel on Nanjing Road, stood for a generation as a symbol of golden age modernity. Tina Kanagaratnam writes that the 1934 landmark, built by one architectural genius, served as inspiration for another.
What inspires a genius? Perhaps the work of another genius. At least that was the case for I.M. Pei, the brilliant Shanghai-born architect. In his memoir, Pei recounts coming out of a matinee at the Grand Cinema (at 216 Nanjing Road) with his uncle in 1932 and looking up to see Ladislau Hudec's newly-completed Park Hotel.
The 24-storey (22 storeys above ground, two underground), 83.8 meter-tall brown-tiled building was then (and now) taller than anything else on the street, and like nothing else on Nanjing Road -- or, indeed, Shanghai.
A skyscraper of its day -- nothing surpassed it until the Shanghai Hotel was built in the 1980s -- Shanghainese used to say that it was so tall that if you looked at its top, your hat would fall off. Its profile, too, was unique: substantial instead of slim; the top disconcertingly tapering ever so slightly inwards -- neither flaring out nor tapering to a pencil point, but stacked almost haphazardly, like a child's Lego sculpture. Even the exterior covering was unusual: the first three floors are covered in gleaming black granite from the sacred Laoshan Hill in Qingdao in eastern China's Shandong Province. The upper floors are covered with dark brown tile, also quarried in Qingdao.
The whole effect so impressed the young Pei that he immediately took out a pencil and began sketching -- and, he says, decided at that very moment to become an architect instead of the banker his parents hoped that he would be. Instead of going to Britain, Pei instead headed for the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious architectural school, whose list of Chinese alumni in the pre-1949 period reads like a who's who of Chinese architects.
The Park Hotel sits on a stretch of Nanjing Road that includes several other vintage buildings -- the Foreign YMCA, the Grand Cinema, and the China United Building -- all built in the 1920s as Shanghai hit her stride and city began growing westward.
Originally called the International Hotel, the building was constructed for the Joint Savings Society, whose art deco headquarters was initially on the premises, with only the upper floors given over to hotel rooms. This explains the hotel's original high-ceilinged lobby (since destroyed in a 1990s renovation), more banker-like than hotel. Located across from the Shanghai Racetrack, where Shanghai's elite would race their steeds and bet feverishly on the outcome, the hotel had a prime location -- and perhaps this is what accounted for its popularity. It wasn't long before the owners decided that it would be more lucrative to move the Joint Savings Society and make the entire building a hotel -- which was subsequently renamed the Park Hotel, in honor of its Park Road location (The International Hotel, said an unnamed foreign manager, was ``too bland.'')
From the beginning, the Park Hotel was the site of grand gatherings and celebrity soirees -- it boasted an interior as stunning as its exterior, rich with art deco detailing and luxurious touches in its 200 rooms and suites. There was a nightclub, on the top floor, with a retractable roof, so that the well-heeled patrons could dance under the stars. (The space is now a nightclub and the roof, or so they tell us, no longer retracts.) A second floor exhibit today displays the monogrammed silver and ice buckets that evoke a more gracious era.
In 1935, Peking Opera great Mei Lanfang and movie queen Hu Die (``Butterfly'') were feted there in a farewell gala before they went off to the Soviet Union for cultural exchange. The launch of the first China-US long-distance telephone service was held at the Park Hotel that year, attended by Soong Mei Ling, the youngest of the famous Soong sister. Shanghai's first mayor, Chen Yi, held meetings there; literati like Guo Moruo composed poems from its balcony.
Even today, with high-rise buildings surrounding it (which caused former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to mourn, ``the Park Hotel is lost.''), the Park Hotel still stands out as an architectural beauty, as shocking in its modernity now as it was 70 years ago.
But that was the hallmark of its creator, Ladislau Hudec. Born in the Austro-Hungarian empire (the Czech Republic today) in 1893, he was a graduate of Budapest's Royal University and a member of the Royal Institute of Hungarian Architects. In 1916, he joined the Austro-Hungarian army, when things took a turn for the worse: he was captured by the Russians, and sent to prison camp in Siberia. In 1918, on a prisoner of war train from Khabarovsk, near the Chinese border, to the Russian interior, Hudec jumped from the train, and escaped to China.
Penniless, but with boundless talent and vision, coupled with the energy of being granted a second chance at life, Hudec made his way to Shanghai. Here, he began working with the architectural firm R.A. Curry. For them, he designed landmarks like the American Club on today's Fuzhou Road and the McTyeire School (today's No. 3 Girls' Middle School on Jiangsu Road).
When clients began clamoring for him by name, Hudec started his own firm in 1925, and began creating the Shanghai masterpieces that are his legacy: the Grand Cinema, Moore Memorial Church, the Country Hospital (today's Huadong Hospital on Yan'an Road), the Wu Tongwen house (today's club Mint on Tongren Road) and many, many others -- 37 buildings in total by 1941.
During the 1950s, the splendid hotel was used for government delegations and meetings from abroad, but by the 1960s, perhaps out of concern that it was a symbol of decadence, the Hudec jewel was covered with political banners.
The Park Hotel's stunning interiors remained intact for 60 years, until two disastrous renovations in the 1990s robbed them of all original details and chopped up the rooms, turning them into anonymous hotel rooms.
But still, 70 years after it first awed Shanghai, the Park Hotel remains the center of all Shanghai -- literally. Shanghai's surveyors have declared the lobby in the Park Hotel Shanghai's official geographical center -- a small table in the lobby points this out -- and, so the Park Hotel is once and again at the heart of it all.