Neon lights flicker and music spills out of the pubs lining Taipei's Shuangcheng Street. Girls in high heels and short skirts saunter onto the blacktop and wait. Then wait some more.
"Beer only NT$99," one calls out to a passerby.
"Happy hour. Two for one," says a girl form a pub across the street.
The problem is that the bar hostesses greatly outnumber the potential bar guests. Wednesday nights or weekends, the situation is the same. Though it used to be the nucleus of Taipei nightlife, the Combat Zone, as the area popularly called, is now fighting for its future.
FROM HIGHLIGHT TO RED LIGHT
The area got its moniker for being the favorite R&R spot of US soldiers stationed in Taiwan decades ago. With the closest fighting thousands of kilometers away in Vietnam, the joke was that the only action soldiers here saw was in the bars of the Combat Zone.
When the troops pulled out of Taiwan in 1979, the Zone suffered its first big blow. But it was still a popular nightlife location among the remaining foreign community and even gained in popularity among locals after the troops' withdrawal, according to long-time pub owners and patrons.
"It all started at the President Hotel," said Diane Liu (劉明明), who met her husband at the Farmhouse disco and live music venue in the early 1990s. "Green Door was the first of the bars, I think, but Farmhouse was a great place to hear rock bands. Their house band, MIT, was very well known. Wu Bai and China Blue even played there. ? But the feeling of the whole area changed."
That change, many say, was the appearance of several hostess bars that sprung up next door to the more traditional European-style pubs and eventually outnumbered them. The area slowly became less a place for singles of both sexes and began catering to career men.
Girls lure in patrons who are then obliged to treat the hostesses to thimbles of "red wine" -- usually grape juice -- that is topped off several times at maybe NT$300 or more each time. While most all the bars in the area are staffed with young woman who will sit and chat with customers, it's only a minority of them in which you don't pay for the privilege.
"It never used to be like that," Liu said. "Yes, there were also a lot of bars back then, and even hostess bars, but you saw couples in the area and girls who had come to have fun. Now you don't see that."
As the mixed crowd shipped out, platoons of professional men marched in, keeping bar hostesses busy and bar owners happy. The traditional bars, too, still saw a steady stream of customers, albeit of reduced numbers.
SLIM PICKIN'S
"Even three years ago business was good," said Corina Yung (泳美歷), the owner of Euro Pub at the far end of Lane 32, the busiest lane off Shuangcheng Street. "Of course SARS scared everyone away. And after that the economy was still bad. But people just seem to have forgotten about the area."
"A friend at one of the bars up the street was joking with me a while back. She said, `Corina, you're in a bad location. By the time the pot gets to your end of the street, there's no meat left, only broth.'"
With over 30 bars along Lane 32 alone, she said, some nights there appears to be more pubs than punters.
Rick Monday, a disc jockey on radio station ICRT and 21-year resident of Taiwan also remembers the Combat Zone's golden years. Standing outside what used to be Montana Pub, across from Yung's bar, he recalls when the establishment did big business.
"This used to be where all the baseball players hung out and the fans," he said. "Little Dick Sedges would be out here selling hot dogs and the place would be packed. That was before the first game-fixing scandal."
Next door to where Montana was, another once-popular
establishment, Hollywood Baby, has boarded up.
One of the area's problems, Monday said, is that the Combat Zone is actually a residential zone and complaints of noise over the years have kept business quiet, both literally and figuratively.
"You can't bring in bands to perform because doing so will bring the police to your door after 10pm," he said, referring to the curfew for noise in Taipei.
Monday and ICRT, with the help of the Chungshan Community Association, various chambers of commerce and local pubs, organized a block party in June that brought some 3,000 patrons to the area to listen live bands perform outside and to drink NT$100 bottles of Corona beer being sold out of participating pubs.
Despite having the community association's backing, police still shut down the band Red 23 halfway through their set, just after 10pm. Ironically, the noise complaint had come from one of the local pub owners.
Still, pub owners say, it was a red-letter day for business and they are planning a second block party for the first weekend of November. This time, they say, more of the area's streets will be blocked off to traffic, more television news will be invited to cover the event, and they're hoping for 10,000 or more people to attend. They plan to start the festivities in the afternoon, in order to have bands perform before the 10pm curfew and in the hopes of bringing a more diverse crowd to the bars, many of which are also restaurants whose menus are overlooked by beer-and-peanuts punters.
PAVING THE WAY
Behind the bar of the Volcano pub on the corner of Shuangcheng Street and Lane 32 hangs a painting of Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of the volcano and an inspiration to the pub's owner, Ann Fan (樊彥伶). With the exception of the time she's spent in Hawaii, Fan is a life-long resident of the Shuangcheng Street area and one of the driving forces behind grassroots efforts to re-energize the district.
"Do you think she's happy or sad?" Fan asks, pointing to the painting of the goddess with long flowing hair. "She's happy, because her hair is flowing. Her hair is the lava that comes from the volcano and if her hair is flowing, she is happy and the people will have land. Without land we have nothing."
Unlike the majority of pub owners along Shuangcheng streets several lanes, Fan owns the building that houses her Hawaiian-themed pub. Upstairs is the Ohana Hula Cultural Center, which will soon open as a studio for teaching hula dancing.
It's one of the ideas Fan has for turning the Combat Zone into a cultural zone that could attract more than just the drinking crowd. Another is to turn Lane 32 into a walk-only area similar to Taipei's Ximending District, where cars and scooters are prohibited.
Helping her to champion that cause is Larry Yang (楊為榮), the chairman of the Taipei Commercial Center Walking District Association and the city government's point man on efforts to re-energize the area. Yang has drawn up plans to turn several blocks of the area into a walking district, at the heart of which would be a US military-themed "culture park" built as a kind of tribute to the days when US soldiers were a common sight in the area.
"That was an exciting time for this neighborhood," Yang said. "Had there been no US military advisory here, there would never have been a Chin-Guang business circle," as he calls the Combat Zone and surrounding commercial district."
Yang hopes his plans for a walking district can start to be realized as early as next year. He has the support of Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and the city government, he says, but needs the financial backing of local corporations, who would provide the sponsorship capital.
"The hope is that, by turning this area into a place that is about culture -- American culture, Filipino culture, even Hawaiian culture -- all the businesses in the area will benefit, not just the pubs," Yang said.
Fan agreed: "This area needs to be more about culture and less about curiosity."
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