Wednesday 5 February 2014

Queenstown

Styled like a tent, it is meant to symbolise the “tent of meeting” from the Bible


I went on a trip down memory lane recently by signing up for the Queenstown Heritage Trail, organized by a group of volunteers keen to preserve the heritage of Queesnstown. It turned out to be a journey filled with much quiet happiness. Mainly because Queenstown was a place where my adolescent days were spent, when I was a student of Cresent Girls’ School. I spent my first year in the old campus next to the Alexandra fire station, and the next three years in a brand new campus in Tanglin.

It was amazing first and foremost to know that before I know Queesnstown in the 90s, it was the Orchard Road of Singapore in the hey days of 60s and 70s!

It was even more fascinating to hear of stories I never know existed about Queesnstown. Such as how a notorious jewellery robber in the country who purported once called the police commissioner to boast that he would never be caught was gunned down near two popular cinemas back then which are now churches. Or how the Queesnstown Hawker Centre used to have only tables that were fixed to the ground. This meant seats could be moved from table to table and the guide shared this meant many seats were often moved to outside of the hawker centre as it was much more airy since it faced an open field. What a scene then I could only imagine!

It was even more fascinating when my father and uncle added further stories from their childhood days, during our Chinese New Year reunion dinner. It turned out that the practice of having movable seats stopped the year when two stall vendors fought over customers due to the unclear seating. From then on, my uncle and father told me, that was where hawker centres came to have seats fixed to the ground. Am not sure how true that was – but what a great urban legend it made!

Several familiar sights were now gone, such as the Queenstown Remand Prison, the Hawker Centre and the shopping centre where the NTUC Fairprice was, replaced either with condominium projects or open fields with fates yet unknown. Unknown too is the fate of the Queenstown Sports cum Swimming Complex – a place which brought back lots of memories for me. After all, it was the place where I first picked up swimming under the tutelage of a terrifying swimming coach back in secondary two. The sports complex was also a place where Crescent Girls held all of its sports days, of which I never took part despite my athletic interests because I was just too shy! When I was 21 and had the rare opportunity of an internship with Straits Times Sports Desk, it was also where I interviewed tall, lanky and handsome Lim Tong Hai after one of the S-league matches there. Those were indeed memories!

It is heartening to know some places will continue to stay. Such as the Queenstown Library where my then-best friend SY and I usually headed to, for our post-exam celebrations (by going on a reading spree!). And the very fact that we have our very own church here in Singapore (see picture above) which is entirely beamless (and grandeous to boot!), a la, the Luce Chapel at Dong hai University in Taichung, Taiwan! It was the church I always passed by whenever I headed to SY’s house to do our school projects, which I never really took a second look back then.

Am very grateful for this opportunity to remember these places which brought me so much memories.

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