Taipei Restaurant At Night Explained

I received this note from David in response to my previous post:

The picture you posted under "Taipei Restaurant At Night" shows they were serving iced plum juice. I grew up in Taipei and these pictures sure bring back a lot of memories.

I also remember that there seemed to be a small US military base, or maybe just an office, near National Taiwan University (Roosevelt Rd. Sec 4). Does anyone else remember this?

David, you can view a map that Sarj Bloom sent to me a few weeks ago by clicking here. It's from around 1960 and it shows several embassies and US military locations in the city. If you click on the map itself, you can view a larger version. I'm not sure where the university was located, but perhaps you can locate it and then figure out what might have been located close to it. If anyone reading this has an idea, please add a comment here.

Taipei Restaurant At Night

Stev Pitchford sent in this nighttime shot of an area that they used to call "Ptomaine Alley" in Taipei, probably around 1959 or so.

Can anyone tell what was being served here?

Neighborhood Restaurants

Sarj Bloom was reminiscing about the places where we consumed many of our meals in Taipei. He mentioned the Club 63 (more formal) and the Navy Club (more intimate), but the place that he visited most often was the jiaozi stand, just down the alley from where he lived.

He says, "I noticed that someone else mentioned eating 'dumplings' too. You could also get the best beef noodle soup that I've ever had. My roommate Joe Kowalowski and I sometimes went further downtown by the theater to get the best rice soup I have ever tasted. Now, my grandmother made good rice soup and that is probably why it is still my favorite, but the rice soup served on the street corners of downtown Taipei was the best.

I believe that this traveling restaurant was resting and stocking up for the nighttime business."

Floating (Away) Restaurant

Sarj Bloom sent in some pictures of a floating restaurant that was located on the river near USTDC. These shots were taken during Typhoon Gloria in 1963. The restaurant was no longer there when I arrived in 1973.

Here are Sarj's comments:

I'm sorry about the quality of these pictures. They apparently came from 35mm film and I'm not even sure that anyone from our photo lab took them, though the lab was flooded during the typhoon and I may have made these prints in haste.

They show the restaurant floating away with the help of Typhoon Gloria. The sign was at least 15 or 20 feet high. I believe the last photo, showing the gate, was the entrance to TDC.

The restaurant was only there for maybe six to nine months, no longer than that. I left a month after the typhoon but I had a feeling that they would never rebuild.

Taipei At Night - 1959

Stev Pitchford sends along these photographs and comments:

Here are a few pictures of downtown Taipei at night from late-1959. As you can see, downtown was just as busy after dark as it was during the day.


















The two pictures below are in the area known as "Hagglers' Row" or "Ptomaine Alley," depending on whether you were just shopping or looking for something to eat.



















This was a group of shops and restaurants in little sheds that ran along both sides of the train track from near the Shin Sheng Theater back towards the train station. In July, 1960, over the July 4th holiday, an army buddy and I rode the train from Taipei to Taichung to visit his wife's family. When we left Taipei, all of the sheds were as busy as ever. When we came back two or three days later, they were all gone and both side of the tracks were bare. I guess that was urban renewal, Taipei style.

Chow Chow Club Revisited

Back on May 6, 2008, Sarj Bloom wrote about the Taiwan Chow Chow Club, a group that met once a month at local restaurants to eat lots of food, as sloppily as possible.

In that article, Sarj mentioned a metal medallion that each member wore to these affairs. He just located his, and here it is. I don't know what the Chinese characters mean. Perhaps they're ""Ta Fan Tung," which was printed on a menu in the original post, and which Anonymous translated as "Big Rice Barrel."

As I said earlier, I never heard of this group in the 1970s. How about the rest of you?

Map to MAAG Officers Club

Kent Mathieu recently sent this to me. Here's what he had to say:

I worked as a Night Manager at the MAAG HQ Officers Club for two years during my time in Taipei, and we passed out this business card to our customers. It was a great place to work. I ate wonderful meals and it kept me out of trouble.

The card clearly shows the USTDC compound, though the map area might be a wee bit larger than it actually was.

But the card map is interesting. The streets have changed so much in the last 40 years.

Shihmen Dam

Sarj Bloom took this great 1963 panoramic photo of Shihmen Dam, prior to the dam's completion in 1964. He thinks that this may be the only shot of its kind in existence. You can find other historical photos of the dam at the official government website.





Here's the man himself in the process of taking the above shot.







This is a Google image showing the dam's location in relation to TDC.

Sarj also found a link to a YouTube video of the dam in operation today.

1959 Taipei Images - Part 2

Here are the rest of the 1959 Taipei photos that Stev Pitchford just sent to me:














Even then, the street vendors had daycare for their kids.















Most places were within easy walking distance but pedicabs were always around if I needed a ride.





Just as the area around the old Keelung River Bridge has changed, I'm sure I wouldn't recognize downtown Taipei today.

1959 Taipei Images

Stev Pitchford provides us with some views of Taipei as it once was. I'll post more of them tomorrow.

These are some pictures showing Taipei in late-1959. To go downtown from Grass Mountain, I'd catch a bus and ride down to a bus stop near the train station. If I was already at the TDC compound, I'd just call a cab and tell the driver to take me to Shiminding (I think that translates to West Gate District).

I'd have the cab driver let me out on this circle near the Shin Sheng Theater. The Chinese were big movie fans and there were several theaters in the downtown area showing American, European and Asian movies. Shortly after this picture was taken, "The Big Country" starring Gregory Peck and Jean Simmons opened in the Shin Sheng. The theater occupied a whole city block and had entrances on all four corners. When the movie first opened, people were lined up from each entrance back to the next corner to buy tickets.



















Downtown Taipei was always a busy place. Besides the theaters and restaurants, there were shops and street vendors where you could shop for just about anything you could think of.