Monday, November 4, 2013
I Spy (TV Series) - Robert Culp (1965) - Kowloon Panorama
Here is a great panoramic view of the Kowloon peninsular (mainly TST) courtesy of AP who stitched together several panning shots from the episode So Long, Patrick Henry. Lots to be seen so I won't bother trying to list it all, however, I do still like seeing any shot of the old KCR Terminus. Sometimes I wish HK was still low rise like this, but I guess that's progress for you...
8 comments:
Very nice and interesting photo! It shows a lot of spatial compression, which is like a picture taken with a very long tele lens. Not easy to recognize where the other less well know buildings were. Are the buildings on the very top at Ngau Tau Kok?
Hi Arthur - it's actually a stitch of 4 screen shots, but yes, lots to see. You may be right about Ngau Tau Kok - or perhaps Kwun Tong resettlement estate? I'm not sure which area over there was built up first.
Cheers
Phil
Yes, very good visibility back then as well. Lots to recognize there:
Plenty to see, including Kowloon Station still standing in the foreground. Behind it, the Peninsula looks surprisingly dark next to the sparkling-white YMCA building. Across the road, the Sheraton Hotel is still a vacant carpark, but the nearly-new Middle Road carpark has sprung up on the same lot.
Behind that are the Ambassador Hotel (you can just see its mural), one of the older stepped-back buildings that according to Gwulo was called Far East Mansions next to it, and you can just see the four story Cable & Wireless Building peeking out from behind the carpark, where Hermes House would later appear.
Further up is what I'm presuming to be an as-yet unoccupied corner of the Tsim Sha Tsui East reclamation. At left and slightly further back is a significant hill, but I'm not sure precisely which. One of the hills around Ho Man Tin? Or King's Park, perhaps? (But I think that'd be out the left of the picture.)
In the background, you can see more reclamation to extend the apron at Kai Tak. I *believe*, although I'm not 100% sure, that what look like taxiways in the rear left are in fact the remnants of the original concrete runways 13/31 and 07/25, created at the behest of the Japanese army by prisoners of war. The new runway extending on landfill into the harbour had only opened about 6-7 years earlier, and the new passenger terminal was just a few years old.
http://www.saintgeorges-hk.com/pgalleries/hkv01/hk1.html (see here for the old runways alongside the new one)
And at the very back is the brand-new Choi Hung Estate, just completed that year or the year before. (You can see another, earlier picture of it from above here, and the building arrangements match: http://www.p-t-group.com/history/choihung.jpg )
Pretty darned cool what can get caught in the background of a five second video pan.
thanks gweilo8888 - some keen eyes there. Look how shiny and bright that car park is - it's a kind of dirty yellow these days...
Yes, the multi-colour facade on the right side of the building on the very top of the photo look indeed like Choi Hung Estate. Thanks gweilo8888 for pointing that out.
As for the stony cliff, I suspect that it look like the cliff that had been blasted off in the process of building the Ho Man Tin MTR station of the Shatin-Central Line. But I'm not sure. It looks too tall and stony to be Ho Man Tin Hill, and there shouldn't be much building near the hill where the British Military Hospital used to be.
Nice to include what looks like to be an American President Line (APL) cargo ship in the bottom too.
Those two big blocks of public housing are probably the Choi Hung Estate by the middle left (with the distinguished low-rise in the foreground), and Ping Shek Estate by the right.
Best Regards,
T
Oh, not quite the Ping Shek Estate as it won't be completed until 1970. However some of the buildings might be in the different construction stages and I suspect the one or two in the most right might become Ping Shek Estate later.
It is difficult to tell if the Gap between the building is Choi Hung Road though.
T
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