1957 Pavilion at The Fairview, 41A Conduit Road (Former Mok Residence, later the FCC)

This is such a nice color photo of the Pavilion at 41A Conduit Road. This place became famous in the fifties when used as the hospital backdrop in the movie “Love is a Many Splendored Thing” when Jennifer Jones ran up the stairs next to this Pavilion to meet William Holden. Unlike in the movie, there was no flat grassland but steep hill behind 41A Conduit Road. This Pavilion and the decorative Spanish-style sentry post were the two iconic features of this residence and in my opinion, this residence should have been kept as a historical landmark like the Ho Tung residence and never be demolished.

The main focus of this photo is of course the Pavilion but the background of this photo, though a little blurry, also reveals several prominent landmarks around the HKU area worth noting.

The hill behind is the lower section of the Hill Above Belchers and this is now called Lung Fu Shan. You can see part of the Big Green Island just behind the right side of the Pavilion. The big island in the background is Lantau Island. The three red brick buildings on the right used to be part of the HKU student resident halls, the May Hall, the Elliot Hall, and the Lugard Hall. If you pay a little more attention, you can see a small part of the Conduit Road in the lower right-hand side of the photo. In the far right-hand side of the photo, one also can see part of the PokFuLam Road and three of the HKU Engineering Lab buildings (Northcote Science Building, Peel Engineering Lab., and Ho Tung Engineering Workshop). These buildings had given way to high rises now. The two-story mansion on the lower right side of the photo was Mount Richmond. This building was demolished in 1968-69 and is now where Belmont Court and Alpine Court are located. I believe this was the very last mansion, originally built by the Richmond Estate Company back in the turn of the century in this area next to HKU, demolished for the modern-day high rises. Just behind the HKU red brick buildings is a piece of flat land with an English country-style bungalow. This was the PokFuLam Elliot Pumping Station and Filters area, and the bungalow was the residence for the staff working there. I always have this question at the back of my mind since  I was young: How come this bungalow was built so differently from other houses in the neighborhood?  I believe the pumping station and the bungalow are long gone.

In my last posted remark above, I forgot to mention the residences on the far left side of the photo.  These houses were at Po Shan Road which is a continuation of Kotewall Road on the west side but looped back towards the Central direction. It is a dead-end street and ends not too far away from this Paviion. I remember I took a hike with my parents all the way to the dead end of Po Shan Road in the mid-sixties.  But by then this Pavilion and all the buildings at 41A Conduit Road had already been demolished and the site was in derelict condition with no sign of any new construction. This site was finally rebuilt into Realty Gardens, a prime residential property, in the early seventies.