An important duty

Today, I took some time to chat with one of Haw Par Villa’s two artisans, Ah Long.

Ah Long is currently repainting this sculpture near the Entrance Archway. He told me he has to spend nine hours a day for three straight weeks to complete the job - provided the weather is good. If it rains, he’ll need even more time, as the rain makes it harder for fresh paint to stick. Considering how Haw Par Villa has over 1,000 sculptures and dioramas, Ah Long’s job is a never-ending one.

It is also a reminder that Haw Par Villa may be 83 years old this year, but it’s never a finished work of art.

It’s a joy watching Ah Long do his work. He’s good at what he does, and what he does is very important for historical and cultural conservation in Singapore. Thank you Ah Long!

House of Maxwell

Urban renewal of Singapore’s historic old city began in the 1960s. This involved tearing down age-old, crumbling, one to three-storey buildings - some with heritage value exceeding a hundred years - and replacing them with larger, taller buildings which allowed for more intensive land use. Entire neighbourhoods were razed; a new city rose above the rubble of the old. This is detailed in my book Jalan Singapura.

The thing about urban renewal in Singapore is that it never truly ends. Because of 99-year-leases and the open market, buildings which were erected in the 1960s and 1970s as urban renewal projects are gradually being put on sale, to be sold and torn down for newer, even taller buildings, before their leases run out. Again, my book gives some examples; a prominent urban renewal landmark which was recently demolished to much sadness was Rochor Centre.

Rochor Centre undergoing demolition in 2018. Credit: Bob Tan, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One example to be added to the soon-to-go list - Maxwell House, at 20 Maxwell Road, the junction of Maxwell Road and Tras Street.

Maxwell House. Credit: Cushman & Wakefield.

Maxwell House, which has been around since 1971, is up for collective sale with a new mixed-use commercial and residential project or hotel possibly taking over the site.

Owners of the 13-storey building at 20 Maxwell Road have set a reserve price of $295 million, sales consultant Cushman & Wakefield said yesterday.

The block comprises mainly offices and sits on a trapezoidal island site of about 41,801 square feet (sq ft), with views from all four sides of the building.

The site has a plot ratio of 4.3 under the Urban Redevelopment Authority's (URA) Master Plan 2019.

But Cushman & Wakefield noted that the URA said in January last year that it would support a mixed-use commercial and residential development with a 30 per cent higher plot ratio of 5.6, and a gross floor area (GFA) of 234,086 sq ft.

This is subject to a rezoning. Another caveat is that the commercial part of the new project must not exceed 20 per cent of the total GFA.

The allowable building height has also been increased to 21 storeys...

Maxwell House sits at the fringe of the Central Business District but is also near the conservation shophouse enclaves of Tanjong Pagar and Chinatown and within a few minutes’ walk of Maxwell Food Centre and the Tanjong Pagar and Chinatown MRT stations.

The upcoming underground Maxwell MRT station on the Thomson-East Coast Line is expected to be completed in 2022...

The public tender closes at 3pm on Nov 12.

Originally, Tras Street ran from Maxwell Road in the north to Enggor Street in the south, and was lined by shophouses.

The Tanjong Pagar area in 1966. Tras Street is shaded blue.

This changed at the end of the 1960s when urban renewal arrived. A cluster of shophouses at the Maxwell Road end was torn down for an urban renewal project, Maxwell House, named after Maxwell Road. The length of Tras Street in front of the shophouses was also expunged for a pedestrian walkway, cutting the road back to the Cook Street junction.

The Tanjong Pagar area in 1975. Tras Street is shaded blue; Maxwell House is shaded yellow.

Maxwell House opened in 1971. The following is a Straits Times advertisement dated May 1971, advertising the impending completion of the project:

Some of Tras Street’s shophouses next to Maxwell House were eventually conserved, and they stand to this day.

Maxwell House and Tras Street, looking south. Base picture credit: Google Maps.

Even though Maxwell House is a non-residential office block, its architecture is reminiscent of multi-use residential complexes constructed around the time, such as Rochor Centre and People’s Park Complex - a podium block of three to four storeys, then at least one tower block rising above the podium block. It is this class of post-independence, urban renewal projects that is ironically threatened by urban renewal today. When will Maxwell House go? We’ll find out in November.

Maxwell House, seen from Cook Street. Credit: Google Maps.

The poor man’s potato

Thanks to National Education and constant reminders about the suffering endured during the Japanese Occupation, most Singaporeans are familiar with tapioca and how it was an emergency ration during the war years of 1942 to 1945. An area in the east of Singapore was even named after the root - Kampong Ubi.

Credit: David Monniaux, CC BY-SA 3.0.

In a wonderful bit of foreshadowing, this column appeared in The Straits Times in 1937, written by Anak Singapura, the pseudonym of editor George Peet (yes, the author of the invaluable time capsule Rickshaw Reporter). The column introduced tapioca to the newspaper’s readers, which would have been mostly Europeans who had never heard of the root before, let alone tasted it.

Breakfast Kayu

Today let us talk about tapioca. There is something very satisfying about tapioca - to the soul, I mean, as well as the stomach - in these days when the headlines are full of guns and warplanes and other products of our magnificent civilisation. For tapioca takes us back to earthy, elemental unchanging things. It is the poor man’s potato in Malaya.

And very good too. I had my first ubi kayu for breakfast this week, having asked our ayah to serve it exactly as she was accustomed to eat it herself.

She placed before me a large white root, scraped, boiled and sprinkled with sugar, and tasting rather like a mealy potato but nicer, having a chestnutty flavour which the potato does not possess.

The Sakai, I learnt from Mr. Noone’s radio address, start the day with a hot roast tapioca root, and I now know that they might fare very much worse.

Not “Yellow Peril”

As I can see many Europeans involuntarily gagging at the mere mention of tapioca I hasten to explain that this vegetable, as cooked and eaten fresh from the garden in Malaya, bears no resemblance to the loathsome, glutinous, yellow pudding of shark’s-fin-soup consistency which used to overshadow our lives in our nursery days. No, the local ubi kayu is a really excellent vegetable, and Europeans could easily use it (together with the sweet potato) instead of imported potatoes if the necessity arose.

But at present, as I have remarked, it is the poor man’s potato. It grows anywhere and everywhere, taking 18 months to mature and yielding ten tons of roots per acre.

In the kampong land on both sides of Grove Road, just before reaching Joo Chiat Village, sheets of tapioca have appeared under the coconut palms in the last two years. One wonders why. The probable explanation is that out-of-work men in that suburb are turning to the local equivalent of the British working-man’s allotment.

Little would Peet have predicted that, in just a few years, the “poor man’s potato” would be planted all over the island out of necessity, and become a lifesaver for hundreds of thousands of people!

A tapioca farm in 1959. Credit: The Ralph Charles Saunders Collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore.