Looking at past albums of our cities today, I’m always stricken by a bewildering vastness — every street, every square, every building seemed to have been constructed in a ghost town, serving lonesome phantoms and nonchalant horse-drawn wagons.
That sense of eerie emptiness extends to this collection of black-and-white shots taken in Hanoi in the 1920s, serving as stock images for postcards and illustrations for books about the city under French rule. Be it major avenues or tiny lanes, the thoroughfares of Hanoi past hosted few pedestrians and fewer vehicles, so they appear breezy and tranquil, a far cry to the pandemonia of today.
This cognitive dissonance can be attributed to Vietnam’s skyrocketing population, the growth rate of which would quickly render even the most generously designed streets narrow and ineffective. When these images were recorded, Hanoi had a population of 81,000, compared to New York’s 5.6 million and Paris’s nearly 3 million. Flash forward to today and Hanoi’s size has ballooned to over 8.5 million people, while the streets depicted here have not changed much throughout the years.
Have a closer look at Hanoi in the 1920s via the images below:
The building that housed the French Veteran Club, and then Unity Club. Today it has been demolished for an office.
[Photos via Flickr user manhhai]
