A great investment to own a row of 9 Historic Shophouses in the heart of East Coast

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Salubrious Suburbs:
Joo Chiat Place Townhouses
Joo Chiat Road c.1930
ingapore’s East Coast was one big coconut plantation for most of the nineteenth
century and for a good part of the early twentieth century too. Although there was a
bridge across the Kallang River, at the point where emptied into the Kallang Basin,
from at least the 1850s, it was not until the late 1890s that the first shophouses and other
buildings of a more substantial nature began to be built of the far side of the Kallang
River. One of the first people to build himself a permanent home ‘out East’ was a certain
Mr Chew Joo Jiat [sic]. In 1898, he commissioned local architect, Wee Teck Moh, to build
three shophouse units at the 3¼ milestone along Geylang Road, a little before the
junction with Paya Lebar Road. They were fairly modest, two-storey affairs, comprising
brick piers with timber walls (downtown fire regulations requiring masonry walls didn’t
extend that far), but the central unit — presumably intended for Joo Chiat himself — was
built of brick and had a kind of recessed terrace on the first floor overlooking the street.
Not that there was much to overlook in those days — at that time it was pretty much
coconut plantations all the way from Geylang to Changi, save for the occasional Malay
fishing village at intervals along the way. This was partly the legacy of an earlier period in
Singapore’s history when it was thought that producing copra might be a profitable
activity. In the nineteenth century the coconut plantations had been mainly European-
owned and as a consequence a few seaside bungalows, country houses and holiday
homes had sprung up along the East Coast. Closer to town there was a bit of industrial
activity in the vicinity of the Kallang River — steam-driven saw mills, boat-building and
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that sort of thing — but otherwise the East Coast remained undeveloped until the First
World War: access was difficult and even those on vacation preferred to come by boat
from Johnston’s Pier rather than endure the potholes of Kallang and Geylang unpaved
roads. Postwar, however, circumstances began to change rapidly and Katong suddenly
seemed to be the way to go as inner-city areas became evermore overcrowded and
unable to accommodate the needs of Singapore’s burgeoning middle class. Chew Joo
Jiat, who had been established on the East Coast for several years by now, simply
happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Joo Chiat, who was born in China in the 1870s, but came to Singapore as young man and initially
was involved in trade. He prospered a little and this allowed him to buy some land on the East
Coast which was cheap in those days. Chew cultivated gambier when it was still in demand, and
later coconuts; living frugally, he extend his property, buying up the coconut plantations of his
neighbours who were not much interested in the modest returns afforded by copra. By the early
years of the twentieth century he owned a sizeable chunk of real estate in the Katong area and
when he allowed the government to construct a paved road across his property, they responded
by naming the new thoroughfare Joo Chiat after him. Once the road was built, though, Chew
realised the economic potential of his land in terms of the area’s future development and he
began slowly began selling off parts of his estate to property developers — not all at once, but
strategically so as to keep prices buoyant. This was in the 1920s: Joo Chiat Lane, Joo Chiat Place
and Joo Chiat Terrace, as well as a number of public buildings — Joo Chiat Market, Joo Chiat
Police Station and Joo Chiat Post Office — all date from this time.
The development of Joo Chiat coincided with, and in many respects was a result of, huge changes
that were taking place in Singapore society at that time. In particular, the rise of Joo Chiat charts
the emergence of a new class of well-educated Singaporeans, for the most part white-collar
office workers with a job in one of the big commercial houses down on Collyer Quay or
perhaps occupying some clerical position in the lower echelons of the Civil service. Some of
them were professionals — mainly doctors and lawyers — others schoolteachers. All of them
were Anglophone who read the English language newspapers. They commuted to work in the
city each day from their cosy “cottages” and terraces of genteel townhouses, taking either the
latest trolley buses that had recently replaced the earlier electric trams, or, if they were feeling
courageous, risking their lives in the recklessly chauffeured mosquito buses — cannibalised
motorcars with the coachwork removed and a homemade passenger cabin tacked on the
back. The more affluent may have had their own transport — by the 1920s motorcars were no
longer a rich man’s plaything, but were within the reach of many a middle-income
Singaporean.
For entertainment, these East Coast sophisticates went to the movies or spent an evening at
the New World Cabaret on Jalan Besar, which opened in 1923. At home they read magazines
and books and later, in the 1930s when radio broadcasts began to reach a wider audience,
they listened to the wireless. At the weekends they went to the beach near their homes in
Tanjong Katong, Joo Chiat and Telok Kurau, or swam in the seawater pool at the Chinese

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swimming Club in Meyer road. For those who through enterprise, hard work, diligence and
good fortune had managed to elevate their position in society and thereby escape the
squalor and filth of Chinatown and other inner-city areas, life in Singapore between the wars
was not only pleasant, but also fun.
In its heyday between the wars, the Katong area, which in those days meant Tanjong Katong
Road, East Coast Road, Joo Chiat Road and the upper end of Geylang Road, was a respectable
upper middle class neighbourhood and this is something that we see reflected in the quality
of the surviving shophouse and townhouse architecture in these areas. Apparently, the
Teochew had a saying, which went “Gim Tanglin, ngeng Katong”, “Golden Tanglin, silver
Katong”, reflecting their desirability as residential areas and walking down Joo Chiat Place
today, it is easy to see why.
Nos. 30–46 Joo Chiat Place, designed by Messrs Chung & Wong for Moh Nee Esq., 1929.
The other townhouses featured here, Nos. 30–46 Joo Chiat Place, were commissioned in 1929
by a Mr Moh Nee. Nothing is know about this gentleman, but his architects, Messrs Chung &
Wong, were front rank. The initial plans for the site were submitted by the Eurasian architect F.
J. Pestana, but his proposal was subsequently superseded by plans drawn by Chung & Wong.
Chung Hong Woot had started out in the engineering department of the Singapore Harbour
Board in 1913 and worked his way up, salvaging scraps of paper from the wastepaper basket
in order to learn how senior British engineers did their calculations; he evidently got his sums
right for he was subsequently admitted as an Associate Member of the Institute of Structural
Engineers. After leaving the Harbour Board he worked for a while for Messrs Seah & Le Cain,
whose two principals, E. C. Seah and W. J. C. Le Cain, were the first Singaporean architects to

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have studied overseas (Glasgow and London, respectively), before entering into partnership
with Wong Pak Sham around 1922.
Wong, who was born in 1896, had a precocious talent for drawing and design and began
submitting plans to the Municipality when he was only 14 years old. Upon leaving school he
joined the Government Survey Department where he worked for a few years before joining
forces with Chung Hong Woot. Their earliest work was in the contemporary Modernised
Classical style of the 1920s — something Chung had latched onto perhaps during his time
with Seah & Le Cain who liked to work in this idiom — but by the end of the decade they had
graduated to a Deco-tinged Modernism which became the firm’s signature style right up until
the outbreak of the war in the Pacific, though by this time Wong had left the practice (1933).
These townhouses are a long way removed from the popular Rococo style that had prevailed
since the middle years of the First World War. They, too, partake of the new ‘less is more’
ethos that defines Stripped Classicism, but in this instance the facades are enlivened by a little
Art Deco ornament in the form of swallow-tailed medallions and swags — the latter simplified
to the point of abstraction — which is what gives this particular terrace its own unique charm.
The terrace was built as a ‘mixed’ development with the corner unit at the junction with
Tembeling Road being purpose-built as a coffeeshop or retail space.
Built at a time when Singapore was undergoing rapid social change between the two world
wars, the Joo Chiat neighbourhood was an extremely desirable address for Singapore’s
upwardly mobile professional and mercantile classes, looking to escape from the squalor and
urban decay of Singapore’s inner city areas to a bright and breezy future by the sea. Today,
the sea no longer plays an integral part life in the life of Joo Chiat suburbanites, but the
neighbourhood still retains its bucolic charm for those looking to open up a bit of blue sky
between their working lives in downtown Singapore and the place where they live and breath
and otherwise have their being.