On a rusty door at the top of a nine-story apartment building that no architect would admire, someone had scratched a declaration: “FALL OF SAIGON.”
Nguyen Van Hiep can still see it happening. On April 29, 1975, as South Vietnam’s government collapsed in the final hours of the war, he watched from next door as an American helicopter landed on the roof of the building’s elevator shaft, a space barely big enough to hold its skids.
A crowd of Vietnamese civilians squeezed their way up a narrow ladder to the military chopper, yelling and jockeying for position. An American with a white dress shirt ushered a lucky few onboard.
“Everyone was fighting to get up there,” said Mr. Hiep, whose father helped maintain the building known as the Pittman, where the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency lived and worked. “It was very chaotic, only people in the building could go.”
What he witnessed became iconic — and misunderstood — after a photo of the scene by Hubert Van Es hit the news wires with an editor’s incorrect caption saying that it showed desperate evacuees at the U.S. Embassy.
I visited the Pittman 50 years later with a simple question: What happened after the Americans left?
Thousands of U.S. bureaucrats once occupied Saigon, doing the unseen work of a cataclysmic conflict from the comfort of ordinary buildings. Between deskbound lunches, they spread anti-Communist messages, calculated costs and worked out logistics for food and ammunition.
When they left in a hurry, Vietnam’s revolutionary victors took over the places of quiet American paperwork and inserted loyalists and the needy — new tenants with new roles, aiming to build a socialist state.
They got in on the ground floor. And as a modern city of nine million grew up around them — renamed for Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam’s revolutionary leader — the old structures became experiments in national evolution.
Inside their walls, family life bridged two eras. The more I got to know the buildings and their residents, the more I saw the time-lapsed drama of a complicated nation. It started with postwar deprivation. Pragmatism then displaced despair — but without fully erasing the distrust born of deep regional divisions and a long war between North and South, in which America played an extended role.
Communist Spoils
The Pittman is shorthand for American. The source of the name remains a mystery.
Sitting squarely downtown, it was one of many buildings the Americans leased across Saigon, in this case for the C.I.A. and U.S.A.I.D., and its elevator used to make it feel modern.
Now, its wide windows look across the street at towers three times its size on top of a mall built by one of Vietnam’s largest developers.
Inside the Pittman, less has changed. Two families that the government moved into the second floor in the 1970s are still there, in side-by-side studios next to a cafeteria where workers in the building now fill the same dining room once used by the C.I.A. and U.S.A.I.D.
Trinh Thanh Phong, who provided an unofficial tour, said he was proud to have grown up in a spoil of war. His father was from Vietnam’s deep south but fought for the north, then worked for a state-owned chemical company with offices upstairs.
“He did a lot for the Revolution,” Mr. Phong said. “That’s how we got this.”
His mother, Truong Thi Net, sat in the doorway. When I showed her the Van Es photo, she shook her head.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it,” she said. “But I recognize the top floor.”
On the fifth floor, two women — Nguyen Chan Thy, an accountant, and Tran My Lien, a customs manager — worked in a quiet office one Saturday.
If the families downstairs represented the thin years right after the war, when Soviet-style planning paralyzed the economy, the business above them spoke to the go-go ’90s and beyond, when Vietnam embraced free trade. Their company handles logistics for leather manufacturers.
“We carry your dream,” a sign at the office’s glass entrance reads.
President Trump’s tariffs, paused for now but set at 46 percent for Vietnam, threaten that optimism. Examining the Van Es photo, both women were surprised. So many people. So few seats on the chopper. It was hard for them not to see Mr. Trump’s trade policy as another example of U.S. abandonment.
The whole region was at risk, they said, but Vietnam had hoped for more respect, given the legacy of war in a country where leftover American bombs and dioxin still threaten lives.
“I’m not saying it’s a betrayal, but it’s not decent,” said Ms. Lien, referring to the tariffs. “It’s not a decent way to treat a place where you caused so many problems.”
A few doors down the street stands a large gray building that once housed the United States Information Service, which had been tasked with winning hearts and minds. Sometimes that involved promoting democracy; at other times it meant using “psyops,” psychological operations seeking to manipulate opinion.
The building was designed by Arthur Kruze, a French modernist, and had included a library and radio studios, according to Tim Doling, the author of several books about Saigon’s architectural heritage. Starting in 1956, the Americans rented three floors rather than build something of their own — a pattern repeated across Saigon.
Mr. Doling said it was one thing that made America’s influence harder to see once the Americans left Saigon.
But there were still hints of past shaping present.
Nguyen Thi Bich Giang, 66, who was selling soda outside the former U.S.I.S. building when I showed up, said she had moved in with her father — who worked with Communist propaganda operations — after the American propagandists left. He got her a job at a printing plant, where she met her husband, Truong Tan Dat, and they’ve been at 37 Ly Tu Trong ever since. They now live above a chic Egypt-themed cocktail bar that plays a lot of Taylor Swift, and a high-end seafood restaurant selling Canadian lobster.
The wealth gap is not the building’s only divide. Mr. Dat and Ms. Giang also represent different Vietnams.
At the war’s end, he was studying to become a doctor for the navy of South Vietnam, like his father. She was from a family of revolutionaries — “V.C., V.C.,” Mr. Dat joked, pointing and smiling at his wife, a former member of his old enemy, the Viet Cong.
They were jovial together when we first met, but in his apartment alone one night, Mr. Dat admitted that he lost a lot with the South’s defeat.
His medical studies, his dreams, his status, they evaporated. All he could do was love and learn to survive in a system that would not see him the way it saw his “V.C.” wife.
“It’s been 50 years, but the wounds are still there,” he said after playing a ballad on his guitar. “The distrust still exists.”
Stability? Or Angst?
Some of the old American buildings seemed to host suspicions less common elsewhere.
Security guards at a tourist agency turned me away from a villa where the American wartime commander, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, lived in the 1960s.
Around the corner, in one of the largest apartment buildings where American officials were replaced with Vietnamese counterparts, one resident refused to provide a name, fearing trouble from the police; another intensely scrutinized my credentials.
The building at 218 Nguyen Dinh Chieu had briefly functioned as the headquarters of U.S. Naval Support Activity Saigon, or N.S.A.S., which focused on logistics. After the war, which officially ended on April 30, 1975, Vietnam’s state news agency moved in dozens of families, concentrating the like-minded into a close community.
Doors stayed unlocked. The wide hallways were soccer pitches, the balconies gardens, as the next generation learned to globalize and compete.
Huynh Kim Anh, 76, a former head of human resources for the city government’s Institute for Development Studies, pointed to a certificate on his wall showing a scholarship for his daughter at Western Sydney University.
“We’ve had a very stable life here,” he said.
The community closeness, however, made the building a labyrinth of whispers. In the early years, meals with better meat were hidden, to avoid gossip, residents said; later on, criticism of anything official caused generational arguments that ran loud, then hushed.
Today, the N.S.A.S. building, the Pittman and others are again in transition, aging into disrepair and reinvention.
Saigon, as many still call it, feels fidgety. The trains on a new metro line are too many minutes apart. A national campaign against corruption has paralyzed construction. In the N.S.A.S. building, graying comrades are dying off and new tenants are turning rooms into yoga studios, seeking wellness, not Lenin.
At the Pittman, the need for renewal is acute. A rooftop bar that had capitalized on the “fall of Saigon” theme, with war and peace graffiti, closed a couple of years ago. Mr. Hiep, who still lives near where he saw the helicopter land, now wonders if the war is too distant to attract tourists for much longer.
Mr. Phong, who provided the tour of the Pittman, wants to move on, but he doesn’t know where to go. He works as a security guard for a big software company, but he’s hoping the government will save him again — by paying for his family to move from his well-placed apartment in the middle of this dynamic city.
“Change is always happening,” he said. “I’ve been proud to be here. But it’s time to go.”
Tung Ngo contributed reporting.