Respect our monuments

Commercial use robs them of significance, experts say

By Kimberly Spykerman , Lester Kok and Yeo Shang Long

MENTION Lau Pa Sat, and many Singaporeans will think of satay, barbecued seafood and steamboat.

Is that any way to remember a unique 150-year-old building that looms large in Singapore's history?

No, says senior lawyer and former judicial commissioner Joe Grimberg, who wrote to The Straits Times last week to say the majestic building is in a miserable state, cluttered by 'stalls and murky tarpaulins'. A new flyover nearby does not help, he added.

Mr Milo

13 Apr 10, 15:18

Very true

Commercial interests always comes first

Clivebenss

13 Apr 10, 15:25

The whole thing started many, many years ago, when URA let out the 'Thong Chai' Medical Institution located along Eu Tong Sen street to night club operator, which transformed that medically and spiritually holy monument into one h@ll of a decadent school.

Hordes of opposing voices arose from four corners of Singapore, when Singaporeans heard that the vey building that had housed great, charitable physicians who took a huge part of their lives out for the dedication to services of free medical treatments for sick and poor Chinese immigrants in our early pre-war days of the nineteenth century was turned into a free-flowing of booze and late-night sex.

Ohh...so after a round or two of opposition and interaction, the relevant authority finally did the right thing by taking the licence off from the poor building, and now it has become a...what? Sales company selling 'living products'. By then, damage was already done to this rare monument of Southern Chinese secular architecture.

One look at our current historical and cultural monuments and even the blind will be able to tell that URA and whichever relevant department know NUTS about preservation. All they care is one thing: '$', i.e. how to make money out of these old, almost useless pre-war buildings...?

"Tear them down, Singaporeans will make noise. Leave them to rot, Singaporeans complain. Convert them into something else, Singaporeans moan. So in the end, we will just 'retain' the building and re-cycle the name".

Thus we we see what is being made of right now, where Lau Pat Sa is NOT 'the' old market Singaporeans know of, Chinatown has become a dunno-what place selling dunno-what items, Old Thong Chai Medical Hall has changed into a faceless building, and Boat Quay shophouses just became rows and rows of memory-lost lanes with no trace whatsoever of our past water-dependant 'coolies' and commercial trades.

What is left are just bronze plates nailed on walls of these locations, carrying paragraphs of our past, and letting some heart-felt tourists who happened to walk past and catch a tale or two of our shimmering history. As for the rest, they would not so much into what the place was once, and has been now; they would be much more interested in knowing which is the best place to sing, dance, drink and get high, indeed the very ones URA wishes to have and see. Money does spin and makes the world go round and round.

Posted by: Stormrider65 at Tue Apr 13 11:38:58 SGT 2010

ST Forum

Dondontan

13 Apr 10, 15:31

Money over every other things.

Parliament buidling now become restaurant. tsk tsk tsk, product of practice of gre.....

Clivebenss

13 Apr 10, 17:07

time to turn Istana into a casino...

Dondontan

13 Apr 10, 17:09

high time to turn 10 Oxley Rise to the second geylang, restaurants or hotel.

Clivebenss

13 Apr 10, 17:10

Originally posted by Dondontan:

high time to turn 10 Oxley Rise to the second geylang, restaurants or hotel.