Once, the WORLD was GREAT
Read about Great World City's past
By TAN SAI SIONG
NOW that Great World City is buzzing with life, like the old Great World Amusement Park used to in its heyday, the inevitable comments have followed.
Old-timers say it will never replace the Great World Amusement Park, complaining that the new mall's snazzy facade says nothing about the site's rich history.
Great World City is buzzing with life but old-timers complain that its snazzy facade says nothing about the site's rich history.
One interviewed in the preview published last Saturday of this grand new Singapore landmark found "it eerie how people can build something so lifeless over something that used to be so vibrant".
Such sentiments are predictable and understandable, as humankind does not like change and tends to hold nostalgic memories of the way things used to be as sacred.
Such sentiments also tend to be unfair to the Johnny-come-latelys like the new Great World because they compare an idealised past - never mind what it actually was - with the concrete and stainless steel of present reality which may seem harsher.
In Great World's case, the sentiments are doubly unfair because the project is not an attempt at conservation, merely building a new edifice on an old site and assuming an old name.
And frankly, how many old-timers lamenting today had concerned themselves with the fate of the amusement park after its site was left to go to seed for the best part of 20 years?
Great World Amusement Park ...
very vibrant with a ferris wheel, a carousel
and a 'ghost train'.Anyone who really cares one scrap about that memory would be grateful that it is, at last, throbbing with life and laughter again.
Just as anyone who cares about Singapore's past would appreciate the Government's conferment of conservation status on the myriad shophouses built across the island between 1840 and 1960.
But the initial reaction to the first major batch of shophouses in Chinatown restored to almost pristine newness in the late '80s was not unlike that evoked by the new Great World.
The pastel-coloured houses, with their second and third storeys overhanging the standard five-footway prescribed by Sir Stamford Raffles to a town planning committee in 1822, were a sight for sore eyes.
But critics likened them to toy-houses, complaining that in many cases, little more than the original walls remained in their resurrected forms. So, was it conservation or merely copying details from old photographs and old drawings?
They carped that the terracotta-coloured roof tiles were too shiny and new. The timber floors and door and window frames and decorative details on the columns supporting the shophouses' facade, they charged, came from late 20th-century materials shaped by craftsmen of the same era capable only of crude imitations.
In short, the conservation project's earliest detractors saw the results as not being true to the spirit of the original buildings.
To be sure, a walk around Chinatown, Little India, Emerald Hill or the Katong/Joo Chiat area where clusters of these old houses now stand restored, will show that they are not what today's old-timers can recall from the reservoirs of yesterday's memories.
Moreover, today's youngsters enjoying life by the riverside pubs and restaurants in Clarke and Boat quays will probably have little inkling about the historic significance of the buildings in which they make merry.
Yet, there is nothing wrong with the spruced-up shophouses not looking at all as some Singaporeans remember them, because if they do, then the millions of dollars spent on restoration would have been wasted.
This is because what we remember was the lowest point of their existence, when they had degenerated into dilapidated tenements, housing the poorest of the poor in overcrowded unsanitary conditions.
Moss covered their roof tiles while little trees sprang from cracks in their walls, blackened with age and dirt.
In was in one such house that Mr Lim Kim San, now 81 and head of Singapore Press Holdings, had found the needed inspiration to throw himself into the task of solving Singapore's housing problems in the early '60s.
He visited houses in Upper Nanking Road to see for himself the reality of overcrowding and recalled thus in Melanie Chew's book on Singapore's pioneers: "I went into a three-storey shophouse with one lavatory and two bathrooms.
"We counted 200 tenants living there. It was so dark and damp. It was an inhuman and degrading existence.
"Underneath the staircase was a single plank. A man was lying on the plank. He had rented it. That was his home!"
None of Singapore's historic shophouses had started life shabby and rickety, of course. They only grew that way with the passage of time, when one generation of the shophouse form was succeeded by another more sophisticated and better-built, in line with Singapore's economic progress.
The earlier ones then lost their status as their owners moved out and on, and new residents divided and subdivided the older houses to accommodate each wave of new immigrants into Singapore.
One octogenarian I know, who grew up in Boon Tat Street, remembers that even in his youth, his neighbourhood was lined with older houses where indentured labour and other new arrivals were kept. He, of course, lived in the more salubrious shophouses of those days.
What conservation has done is to take these shophouses back to the days when they were in their prime and then outfitted them for current use, with modern sanitation, lighting and other comforts suitable for today's aspirations.
Thus the old order yieldeth making place for new and good fulfills itself in many economic ways.
Similarly, Great World Amusement Park is no more, but for today's young, new memories will spring from Great World City, as they are springing from yesteryear's shophouses dressed in '90s-made garb.
First published in The Straits Times, Oct 17, 1997
Copyright © 1998 Singapore Press Holdings. All Rights Reserved.
