Life in Toa Payoh

My family moved to the newly built housing estate of Toa Payoh in the late 1960s. Toa Payoh was built in an area which was supposedly a large swamp, “Toa” being the Hokkien word for “large”, and Payoh, the Malay word for “swamp”. Toa Payoh was laid out as an island, linked to the outside by three main exit points, two to Jalan Toa Payoh, now part of the Pan Island Expressway, on the south, and another to Bradell Road on the north. The roads around Toa Payoh were arranged such that traffic lights could be avoided, there being no traffic lights – at least for maybe the first five years or so.

The very distinct “Y” shaped 19 storey block of flats that I lived in stood out among the mainly 12 storey blocks of flats. The block of flats, Block 53 was built with a viewing gallery on the roof, to provide foreign dignitaries visiting Singapore with a vantage of Toa Payoh, giving the dignitaries an appreciation of Singapore’s successful public housing programme. Right on top of the block stood a cylindrical shaped structure housing a water storage tank. At a time when neon lighted advertisements were common, an advertisement for Setron, a local brand of television sets was mounted on the cylindrical structure. The entrance to the viewing gallery was closed by a heavy padlocked gate at the half landing of the flight of stairs leading up to it. Besides being opened for the purpose of the visits, twice a year, I would have the opportunity to go up to the gallery to assist a Sikh neighbour, whom I referred to as “Uncle Singh”, to help put up and take down flags and lights decorations during the National Day period.

A large children’s playground stood at the foot of the block, bound by a wide oval shaped pavement. The playground featured a very high steel slide, a large globe shaped climbing apparatus, and another one shaped like a wave, and the usual see-saws and swings. The oval shaped pavement provided an ideal place for me to pick up cycling and roller-skating.

Down a flight of stairs from the playground, across Lorong 4, was the market – housed in a 2 storey building with open sides. The market was laid out with stalls selling cooked food arranged around the outside, allowing tables and stools to be arranged in the open areas around the market. A wet section of the market on the inside of the ground floor was where the stalls selling fresh produce were arranged. Four poultry stalls occupied the central area of the wet section where there was an air-well. Live chickens and ducks were kept in cages and were weighed, slaughtered and de-feathered in-situ. One of my earliest memories of the market was a rather unpleasant one, when on a visit to the market with my mother, I was pushed into a basin of salted vegetables, by a vegetable seller’s daughter, who was about my age.

There was a large variety of cooked food in and around the market. I have many memories of my mother bringing home a variety of food from the stalls. In those days, there was little by the way of disposable food packing and containers, except maybe some kind of leaves used to pack fried noodles. Customers would normally carry metal containers and “Tiffin carriers” to take away food from the stalls. My mother would bring back Prawn Noodles or Fishball Noodles, with cut red chillies that went with it placed in the upturned cover of the Tiffin carrier, and also food such as Kway Chap and Fried Carrot Cake. It was common in those day to bring our own eggs to add to some of the food, such as the Fried Carrot Cake, Fried Kway Teow, or Roti Prata, saving some money on the cost at which the hawker would charge for supplying the eggs.

There were two stalls selling steam buns or “pau” that were facing each other, one in the market, and the other in a Coffee Shop across the open space. I can’t remember which was which, but it was quite amusing seeing them – one was named “Come Every Day” and the other named “I am Coming”.

If I remember correctly, the Soya Sauce Chicken Rice restaurant in the area named Lee Fun Nam Kee, started off operating from a stall in the market, next to the pau stall. I remember seeing the man who ran the stall pushing a tricycle every morning up Lorong 5 to the market. He moved into the corner shop lot which the restaurant occupies maybe a couple of years later and has been there since.

There were two slab blocks behind Block 53, Blocks 54 and 55, which housed provision shops, coffee shops, some clinics and two banks on the ground floor. One of the provision shops supplied my childhood cravings of Walls ice cream and ice lollies – my favourites were the Rocket – a multi coloured ice lolly shaped like a rocket and ice cream packed in a small plastic ball – the name of which escapes me. The two banks, OUB and Chung Khiaw, occupied the extreme ends of the two blocks. I remember there being a run on Chung Khiaw Bank in the 1970s – and there were large crowds of people trying to withdraw their savings from the bank. I had particularly a memory of Chung Khiaw bank – the façade of the block of flats above the bank was decorated with a fairy tale like castle.

I used to go down to one of the coffee shops to get my family’s daily supply of freshly baked bread, which would arrive in the early evening at 7 pm. The lady who sold the bread would stand behind a foldable table at the front of the coffee shop, slicing the crust off the large loafs of local bread, each sliced into two, and sliced further to be packed into plastic bags, as her customers shouted out their orders as they joined the crowd other customers gathered around the table..

In 1973, Toa Payoh was transformed into a “Games Village” for what was known in those days as the SEAP Games – the South East Asian Peninsula Games, which Singapore hosted for the first time. The athletes were housed in the new HDB flats built in Toa Payoh Central, including in the four “point” blocks of four room flats. A new swimming complex was also built in the southern part of Toa Payoh, which served as the venue for the swimming and diving competitions during the Games. The swimming complex was where I learnt to swim.

The playground below the 'Y' Shaped Block