Fall and rise of Ximen Market
Located around the periphery of the Red House plaza is the Ximen Market, which was Taiwan's most fashionable commercial district for daily-use products back in the Japanese occupation era, and was also once the biggest wholesale food market on the whole island.
However, in the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of hypermarts and changes in popular consumption patterns, the tide of people that once enlivened the Ximen Market was on its way out. Despite the designation of Red House as a historic site and redevelopment efforts, there was a long period of stagnation.
Huang Yung-chuan says that when the government decided to put cultural and creative industries at the center of the area's future, more mundane businesses-noodle restaurants, fruit and vegetable stands, and the like-could feel that they no longer fit into the scene, and they elected to take the compensation offered and depart. However, the businesses that came in afterwards did not perform as well as was hoped, and despite two waves of reshuffling of shops from 2002 to 2004, consumers and profit-making opportunities still failed to return.
Completely unexpectedly, about three-and-a-half years ago, the arrival of the first business whose main clientele was gays-the Bear Cafe-sparked a wildfire of change, and gay entrepreneurs and consumers began to arrive in large numbers.
"The atmosphere here is open and fashionable, and it is very accessible from mass transportation but also is very discreet, which are all reasons that have attracted gay shops to the area," is the analysis offered by Cafe Dalida owner Alvin. The people disgorged by Exit #6 of the Ximen MRT station mainly move off to their right, toward the pedestrian area and movie theaters; if they even bother to look left at all, they only see the old structure of the Red House, and may not even be aware of the spacious plaza just next to it. But the area's target customers are well aware of where to go.
Another factor may be that, as Alvin mentions, the connection between Red House and gays goes back even farther. Back in the 1980s, when society was much more conservative than it is now, and gays had to suppress their desires, Red House, experiencing marginalized days of its own, turned into a soft-porn theater, becoming a venue where the older generation of homosexuals could find an outlet for their feelings. You could often see men leaving the theater in couples.
Alvin himself, before hanging out the Cafe Dalida shingle, was the manager of the well-known gay bar Fresh. Thanks to his experience in the food and beverage industry and his connections in the community, Cafe Dalida has had a steady stream of customers since it opened.
As Cafe Dalida got up and running, other entrepreneurs, informed by word of mouth in the gay community, began moving in. Besides an open-air coffee shop and bar, there are now restaurants, clothing stores, photo studios, and more. Gay men congregate here without shyness or fear, in an atmosphere of openness sharply different from older gay shops, which were scattered in isolated, shadowy corners of the city where they were often virtually invisible.
This combination of an octagonal structure with a cruciform structure linked in one building is very unusual. The drawing shows the area surrounding the Red House in the Japanese occupation era, known then as the Shinki-cho Market. On the northern side is a Shinto shrine, which was destroyed by US bombing near the end of World War II.