Hang Da Street

At midday, car horns sound from the Hàng Bông crossing. On the far side, a straight street runs toward Đường Thành Street. It is quieter there, with fewer signs, as if this stretch of the Old Quarter were lost in thought. This is Hàng Da Street, one of the shortest and least mentioned streets. Yet its name belongs to a trade that, many centuries ago, helped people of the northern delta earn a living.

A Hanoi newspaper gives the street's length as 240 meters and its width as 8 meters. It runs from Đường Thành Street in the north to Hàng Bông Street in the south. It lies in Cửa Đông ward, in Hoàn Kiếm.

Long ago, the street stood on the land of Yên Nội village. The village belonged to Tiền Túc canton. The canton was later renamed Thuận Mỹ and lay in Thọ Xương district. These administrative names come from the Lê period and the early years of the Nguyễn dynasty, Vietnam's last royal dynasty. Today they survive only in history books and in the memory of the Old Quarter.

The name says the old trade outright. Da is the Vietnamese word for hide or leather. The same newspaper says the street once sold tanned buffalo hides and cow hides. The tanning itself did not happen on the street. It was done in workshops outside the city, usually near wide grassy fields where the hides could be spread to dry. Once tanned, the hides were brought back to storehouses on Hàng Da and sold wholesale to craftsmen who made shoes, bags, saddles and other leather goods. So the street was a middle link. It joined the workshops on the edge of the city to the craft streets in the heart of the Old Quarter.

The French called the street rue des Cuirs, which means Leather Street. The name matched the trade carried on there. Since 1945 it has been Hàng Da again.

The street shares its name with the Hàng Da market. The Hanoi paper adds that at first the market was only a small, village-style market, selling fresh food and dry goods. A more permanent building went up around 1937 and 1938. For several decades after that, it was a familiar place to shop for the people of Hoàn Kiếm district. Cloth and clothing were the specialty, and that trade clustered in the area near Hàng Bông and Cửa Nam.

But the newspaper Nhân Dân reports that the market was later renovated and rebuilt as a shopping center combined with a modern market for daily needs. After that, it did poorly. The design put the stalls in the basement, which made shopping less convenient. Shoppers gradually got into the habit of buying food and fresh goods at the informal street markets that had sprung up around the area, rather than going into the new building. Nhân Dân counts the Hàng Da market as one example of a traditional market that had not yet found a model that suited it.

Together, the street and the market keep a piece of the city's memory. One is a street named for the leather trade, from the days when the Old Quarter was still a network of crafts. The other is a market that was crowded for half a century and then ran into the problems of urban growth that many traditional markets in Hanoi now face. The simplest and most lasting trace of the trade that once fed a whole string of streets is the name on the blue street sign.