The first floor housed retail shops, while the upper floors were operated as a tenement house, boarding house, and hotel until they were extensively damaged by fire in 1946.
However, it is the water, footbridges, historic red-brick tenement houses reflected in the rivers, and the greenery, including old chestnut trees, that create the unique atmosphere of the island.
It then switches to 1980, where the tenement houses have morphed into 250-story buildings, connected by suspension bridges and multi-lane elevated roads.