Lost in the rising sea at Telok Ayer

It is hard now to imagine the sea coming right up to Telok Ayer Street where the original shoreline had once been.  The Telok Ayer Reclamation scheme of the 1880s moved the shoreline to where Shenton Way is today, adding some 1,808,028 square feet or 167,971. square metres of land where Telok Ayer Bay had been. A portion of the land, reclaimed at a cost of 51 cents per square foot, was sold initially (in 1896) for an average price of $1.13 per square foot.

One of the earliest structures to be erected in the land where the bay had been is what we now know as Telok Ayer Market or “Lau Pa-Sat” – meaning old market in the Hokkien dialect with pa-sat being a Hokkien loan word from Malay used locally. The “New Town Market” replaced a 1833 market that had been built along the earlier shoreline and would possibly be the only one of the reclamation’s early structures to have stood to this very day (it did disappear over a three year period in the late 1980s when it was dismantled to protect its structure from damage from tunnelling works for the MRT).

A National Monument, the former market and now a food centre, is a showpiece of exquisite Scottish ironwork. Although it still remains very recognisable for its distinctive octagonal plan and its clock tower, the old market has become a lot less noticeable now that it is lost in the new sea at the former Telok Ayer Bay; a sea not of water but of towering skyscrapers that has risen in the last four decades or so.

Lost in the sea of skyscrapers, the former Telok Ayer Market. This view of it is down Maxwell Link, running in between Robinson Road and Shenton Way, along which newer and taller buildings are now replacing the first generation skyscrapers of 1970s vintage.

When the air was much clearer – a view from Mount Wallich, which was soon to be levelled, towards the Telok Ayer Reclamation, possibly in the late 1890s, soon after the “New Town Market”, also seen in the picture, was constructed. The road closest to the viewer would be Cecil Street, with Robinson Road running parallel and what would became Shenton Way just by the sea.

Carnival time on the reclamation – the Manila Carnival during the Malaya-Borneo Exhibition in 1922 where Shenton Way is today. The market can be seen in the background (National Archives of Singapore Photograph).

 

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The “bright” lights of Prince Edward Road and the Polytechnic by the sea

There was a time when my parents used to take us, my sister and me, to Mount Faber on quite a regular basis. The excursions were almost always, done in the evenings when it was a lot more pleasant, and would more often than not, culminate in a drive down Keppel Road for  dinner. Then, there were plenty of choices of street food, that seemed to taste a lot better then than it somehow does in the food centres of today. For reasons that have escaped me, my parents avoided going to nearby Chinatown, and Keppel Road seemed an obvious choice, as it was well known for the two dimly lit car parks which would came to life each evening, illuminated by the relatively bright lights of hawker stalls, the bustle of a hungry crowd and the metallic sounds of noodles being violently tossed in the wok. One of these was the car park in front of Tanjong Pagar Railway Station, one that we didn’t frequent as much as the one down by the east end of Keppel Road, at the large car park on Prince Edward Road.

Looking down Shenton Way and the former Quays towards Prince Edward Road in the early 1960s. The Singapore Polytechnic buildings can be seen at the top of the photograph (Source: http://www.singas.co.uk).

The car park that hosted the hawker stalls of the early 1970s?

I only have vague memories of where it was exactly, unable perhaps to make very much of the visual picture presented, beyond the distraction provided by the mess of hawker stalls, tables and chairs, seen in the half light that was filtered by the greasy smoke that filled the air with its pungent lard laden aroma. The car park I suppose would be the one opposite the old Singapore Polytechnic campus that we see today, or perhaps not, but what I did remember were the rows of lighted pushcarts from which there would have been a choice of everything the Singaporean hawkers were known to conjure up. There was the tomato ketchup stained mee goreng that I so loved, the starch laden oyster omelette that was a favourite of my father, and the spicy piping hot sup kambing that was my favourite. That was a place that perhaps I took for granted, never for once imagining that it would disappear one day. It did eventually, I don’t quite remember when, and in going the way of the many other street food places, flavour somehow gets lost in the relocation to the sanitised premises of the new food centres which were built to get the hawkers off the streets. Perhaps it was with the sanitary conditions that made the difference, where dish washing would have been done in basins of water next to opened drains into which flowed not just the washing water, but the contents of that were on the plates and bowls on which the drain’s residents would have thought of as a feast.

The Singapore Polytechnic operated at its former premises on Prince Edward Road from 1958 to the mid 1970s (photo courtesy of Mr Ma Yoke Long).

Prince Edward Road then, was also home to the premises of Singapore’s first Polytechnic, the unimaginatively named Singapore Polytechnic. The Polytechnic was established in 1954 with the passing of the Singapore Polytechnic Ordinance and classes began with an initial enrollment of 2800 students when the building was completed in late 1958 (it was officially opened in early 1959). The Polytechnic initially offered 58 different courses to train a pool of technicians for the developing economy of the island and remained at Prince Edward Road until the mid 1970s when it moved in stages to its present campus at Dover Road. The building that housed the Polytechnic still stands today as the Bestway Building, offering us a glimpse of an architectural style that is very typical of the era during which it was built. It was designed by Swan and MacLaren, which has had a hand in designing much of Singapore’s magnificent colonial buildings and civil infrastructure, and remains somewhat forgotten in a little pocket of land that time seems to have forgotten, at odds with the skyscraper infested financial centre that has sprouted up next to it. Whether it and the area around it would stand the test of time that many of the older buildings in the area have yielded to, perhaps only time will tell.

The original Singapore Polytechnic building has a new lease of life as the Bestway Building.

Another view of the building that was once the Singapore Polytechnic.

The premises of the former Singapore Polytechnic is still used as an education centre.

The basketball court of the former premises of the Singapore Polytechnic.

A view of one of the buildings that housed the Singapore Polytechnic.

Another view of the façade.

The “Corner House”

On the subject of our lost swimming pools, I was reminded of another one that I frequented in my early primary school days. It was one that I referred to as “Corner House” for sometime, before realising that its name was actually pronounced as “Connell House”. Connell House Swimming Pool belonged to Connell House, which, for a better part of half the twentieth century since 1925, a mission to seafarers. Situated conveniently at Anson Road, close to the old port area along Collyer Quay, where seafarers would come ashore and the newer port area of Tanjong Pagar, it offered lodging to seafarers in transit, as well as catering to the other needs of seafarers. The swimming pool was added in 1955, and operated for a few years after the seamen’s mission at Connell House shut in late 1971 as a private pool. It was during that period that my parents took me there on several occasions, accompanying one of my mother’s colleagues who liked to go to the pool as it was relatively quiet. The entrance fee for guest of members if I remember correctly was $2 which wasn’t cheap by standards back then.

The Fuji Xerox Towers (formerly IBM Towers) which I had mistakenly thought was the location of the former Connell House.

Where a 3 metre high diving platform once rose over a swimming pool, the towers of the Fuji Xerox Towers now rises 165m above the ground where the swimming pool and Connell House stood.

When Connell House shut its doors to seafarers in 1971, the building housed several Government departments and Statutory Boards including the Singapore Telephone Board (the original STB), the Telecommunication Authority of Singapore (TAS), and the Public Works Department (PWD) , until the colonial building was pulled down in the 1980s, to make way for the site’s present occupant, the Temasek Tower (former Treasury). I can’t quite remember when the pool closed, but I do remember visiting the pool right up to the time when I was in Primary 4 or 5 which was around 1974 to 1975.

Another view of the Fuji Xerox Towers.

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Correction:

I stand corrected on the location of Connell House, which Peter Chan has correctly placed opposite where International Plaza is today. I did remember it as being close to the Singapore Conference Hall, but was probably confused by its address which had it at 1 Anson Road, which is the address of the Fuji Xerox Towers today. It does appear from the photographs on the PICAS site that it was on the site of what was the cylindrical block that was the Treasury which is now the Temasek Building which rises 235 metres above the ground.

Erratum: Temasek Tower stands in place of Connell House.Where a 3 metre high diving platform once rose over a swimming pool, the towers of the Temasek Tower now rises 235m above the ground.