The dark brick tower on the north side of the square is the Park Hotel, finished in 1934. Twenty-two floors above ground and eighty-three metres to the top, which made it the tallest building in Asia when it opened. It held the record for the tallest building in China for forty-nine years, until 1983. Shanghai people had a saying about it. To see the top you had to tilt your head back until your hat fell off.
广场北侧那幢深色砖塔是国际饭店，1934 年建成。地上二十二层，到顶八十三米，落成时是亚洲第一高楼。中国第一高楼的纪录它保持了四十九年，到 1983 年才被超过。上海人有句老话说它，要看到顶，头得仰到帽子掉下来。
The architect was Laszlo Hudec, a Hungarian who arrived in Shanghai in a way nobody would choose. He was captured on the Russian front in the First World War, sent to a prison camp in Siberia, and escaped from the train taking him further east. He crossed the border in 1918 and stayed. Over the next twenty years he designed more than sixty buildings in this city, including the Grand Theatre a hundred metres from here and the Wukang Building in the former French Concession.
建筑师是邬达克，一个匈牙利人，他到上海的经过没人愿意复制。一战时他在俄国前线被俘，押去西伯利亚战俘营，从继续东运的火车上跳车逃了出来。1918 年他越境进来，就此留下。此后二十年他在这座城市设计了六十多幢房子，包括离这里一百米的大光明电影院，和法租界那幢武康大楼。
Look at how the mass2 is handled. The lower floors are faced in dark brown glazed brick and the tower steps back three times as it rises, each setback1 a little narrower than the one below. That is the New York skyscraper language of the late twenties, and Hudec used it to make eighty-three metres read as more. Vertical strips of window run the full height without a horizontal break, which pulls the eye up. Stand at the base and the building looks considerably taller than it measures.
请注意体量的处理。下面几层贴深褐色琉璃面砖，塔身往上收了三次，每一层退台都比下面窄一点。这是二十年代末纽约摩天楼的语言，邬达克用它让八十三米看上去不止八十三米。竖向的窗带从下贯到上，中间不设横向断口，把视线一路往上带。站在楼底下看，它比实际尺寸高出不少。
One thing almost nobody notices. Set into the floor of the lobby there is a small bronze marker3. That point is the origin of Shanghai's urban coordinate system, the zero from which the city's surveying grid is measured. Every address in Shanghai is, in a technical sense, measured from a spot under this roof. And on the way out, the queue on the pavement is for the hotel bakery. They sell butterfly pastries, palmiers4, and the line has been forming there for decades. Buy a bag and eat them warm.
有一样东西几乎没人留意。大堂地面上嵌着一块小铜标。那个点是上海城市平面坐标系的原点，全市测量网格的零点。从技术角度说，上海每一个地址都是从这个屋顶底下的一点量起来的。往外走的时候，人行道上排的那条队是饭店的西饼屋。他们卖蝴蝶酥，这条队排了几十年了。买一袋，趁热吃。