Shanghai rising
Super-city's growing skyline soars to world-class status
SHANGHAI, China -- With a push of my hotel room's bedside button, the window shade lifted like a theater curtain. Now showing: Shanghai.
Eighty-two floors below, thousands of lights twinkled across China's largest city -- a city packed with six times as many people as Chicago. Tiny pairs of headlights zoomed through the streets, and equally tiny boats navigated their way along the Huangpu River. From way up here in my lofty perch, I felt like I could reach out and pluck the colorful spheres off the nearby Oriental Pearl TV Tower like apples off a tree.
HOTEL: Check the Park Hyatt Shanghai's Web site (shang hai.park.hyatt.com) for the best rates. Rooms in late February started at $277.
TIP: You don't have to stay at the Park Hyatt to take in the view. Request a window seat at the hotel's 100 Century Avenue restaurant, a massive eatery dishing up sushi from Japan, oysters from America, beef from Australia and plenty of Shanghainese staples. Also, observation decks at the Shanghai World Financial Center are open from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. Admission costs $15-$22; swfc-shanghai.com.
VISA: U.S. citizens need a tourist visa. I got mine at the Chinese Consulate's visa office, 1 E. Erie, Suite 500. Your passport (valid for a minimum of six months) should have at least one blank page. You'll also need a passport-sized photo (photo booth on site). A visa costs $130 and you'll pay when you pick it up. It's usually ready within four business days. Office hours are 9 a.m. to noon and 1-2:30 p.m. Monday-Friday.
I've parked my suitcase in a lot of hotels, but none with a view like this. Not even close.
Sorry for the superlatives, but they're hard to resist when you're writing about a skyscraper like the Shanghai World Financial Center, one of the tallest buildings on the planet.
Opened last year, this 1,614-foot-tall monolith contains restaurants, offices, a television news studio, observation decks and a fantastic food court -- complete with D.J. during happy hour -- that serves everything from Korean barbecue to gelato and wood-fired pizzas.
The building also is home to the Park Hyatt Shanghai. The Park Hyatt's plum location on floors 79-93 makes it the world's highest hotel, which happens to include the world's highest pool, restaurant and bar. (Resorts perched on top of mountains and other high-altitude locations don't count.)
I told you the superlatives are hard to resist. Well, here come some more: The Shanghai World Financial Center, or SWFC, boasts the world's highest roof, the highest occupied floor and the highest public observation deck, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a Chicago-based organization that keeps track of these sorts of things.
The SWFC soars 163 feet higher than the Sears Tower, minus the antennas. Only one building is taller: Taiwan's Taipei 101, which will lose its bragging rights later this year with the debut of the 2,684-foot Burj Dubai, designed by Chicago's Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
Leave it to Dubai to raise the bar on tall buildings, an area where the United States had long been the undisputed champ. Those days are done. A recent article in the Architects' Journal noted that North America was home to 80 percent of the 100 tallest buildings in 1990. By next year, only 22 percent of the tallest skyscrapers will be on our continent, thanks to a construction boom in Asia and the Middle East.
Japanese real estate guru Minoru Mori of Tokyo's Roppongi Hills fame developed the SWFC, which stands like a giant bottle opener in the middle of the city's fast-growing financial zone. The rectangular opening at the top of the structure was supposed to be a circle, but the shape was changed after Chinese officials thought it looked too much like the rising sun ... on Japan's flag.
The 101-story "vertical city" can hold 20,000 people, or roughly the population of Bensenville. It takes an ear-popping 66 seconds to zip from the ground level to the 94th floor. From here, you head up to the observation decks, which have quickly become the place to pop the question in Shanghai.
Even though the SWFC is on the other side of the world in a country I'd never visited before, the building felt familiar to me. Maybe it's because I'm from Chicago, where skyscrapers were born. The SWFC's Cold Stone Creamery and Starbucks could have had something to do with it, too.
The city's glistening skyscrapers, being built at a frenetic clip, are perhaps the best symbol of "new" Shanghai. They stand on what was little more than swampy farmland less than two decades ago. Across the river lies "old" Shanghai, with its clusters of former colonial settlements, Art Deco architecture and weathered mansions now shared by multiple families, who hang their ducks and long john underwear out the windows to dry.
In this bustling city of 18 million, the contrast between old and new is everywhere -- right down to the bathrooms.
I couldn't help but be struck by the difference between those common squat toilets, which are little more than holes in the ground with foot holds, and the "commode of the future" in my hotel room. The latter made me jump higher than Yao Ming when the lid automatically lifted upon sensing my presence. If you're going to have the you-know-what scared out of you, a bathroom is probably the best place to have it happen. The World's Smartest Toilet also had a control panel more intricate than most DVD players', letting you customize things like the seat's temperature, where the bowl needs cleaning and how forcefully it should be flushed.
When the Park Hyatt Shanghai opened last fall, it snagged the world's highest hotel title away from the Grand Hyatt in the Jin Mao skyscraper across the street.
Chinese-American interior designer Tony Chi modeled the 174-room Park Hyatt along the lines of a modern Chinese mansion. A series of high-ceilinged hallways leads guests to elevators that whisk them up 87 stories to a communal courtyard of sorts, with a reception desk and lobby/restaurant overlooking the river. The hotel's subdued decor, muted earth tones and soothing music act like a mental martini, taking the edge off the jangled nerves that come with navigating a city twice the size of New York.
Still stressed? The Park Hyatt offers daily tai chi classes at 7 a.m. It's safe to say they're the highest tai chi classes in the world. The 85th-floor spa has a menu of treatments that go way beyond your typical Swedish massage, from acupressure and jet-lag therapy to a "city anti-pollution facial," a brilliant stroke of marketing in a metropolis that makes smog-choked L.A. seem like the Swiss Alps.
You probably guessed this already, but it's the highest spa in the world. At least until Dubai builds something taller.