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The forgotten architectural features that dot Hong Kong’s streets, and why such phenomena are called Thomassons after an ex-New York Yankees baseball player
- Hong Kong is a city filled with Thomassons – objects ‘completely purposeless but also maintained’, from staircases to nowhere to windows that will never open
- The subject of a forthcoming TEDx talk, they are named after Gary Thomasson, an ex-New York Yankees player paid generously but benched by Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants
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Quiz question: what connects an obscure professional baseball player with a protruding piece of pavement, in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay district, over which you might well have tripped?
The bizarre answer is that when ex-New York Yankees first baseman Gary Thomasson joined Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants towards the end of his career, in 1981, a startling nosedive in performance meant he spent most of his time benched.
Enter Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei, who, having spent years detecting and photographing useless architectural oddities around the city, settled on a name for them, which he shared in his 1985 book – Hyperart: Thomasson.
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Although apparently a cruel designation, Genpei, a devoted baseball fan, always insisted that the name was chosen out of respect for Thomasson and his predicament (whatever Thomasson’s reputedly irritated family might say). Which brings us to that health-and-safety-nightmare strip of pavement believed to be a remnant of a forgotten shopfront.
The concrete curiosity near the corner of Cannon Street, which features in a forthcoming TEDx talk by Nikolas Ettel, lecturer in the Division of Landscape Architecture at the University of Hong Kong, satisfies the “classic” definition of a Thomasson.
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