40 – Hilman Housing Corporation.

Near the edge of the water, we enter the final ethnic enclave on Grand Street. This is the largely Jewish enclave of Co-op Village.  Here, one sees a landscape of towering red-brick apartment buildings with stunning views unto the water or the city.

Residents here are descendants of Polish, German and other Eastern European Jews who fled the Holocaust.  The Jewish community here is close-knit, and a mix of conservative and secular.  Here, on the Sabbath, lifts stop on every floor so those of a more Orthodox persuasion need not “work” the machine.

East River Houses, overlooking FDR Drive, was once sort-of home to me in New York, ten years ago, when I was partnered with a member of the tribe.  And walking past the exact building I had “lived” in filled me with some emotion.

41 – Stately old mansion, East Broadway.

42 – Eastside Kosher Grocery.

43 – Sweeping view of Co-operative Village.

44 – Madison Street.

45 – Hillman Housing Corporation.

46 – East River Houses, overlooking FDR Drive.

F – Cooperative Village

31 – Orchard Street, no longer an orchard.

A bit of the Lower East Side strays into Grand Street.  And this is the Lower East Side as it is traditionally envisioned – a little rough, depressed financially, slightly more religious.  Here there are 99 cent stores a plenty, and buildings appear in shades of grey, washed out brown and brick red.

Ethnically, the tribes occupying this thin sliver of land appear more African and Hispanic.  Any link with Chinatown is severed quite abruptly and you don’t get many Chinese or Europeans, for that matter, here.

Scattered amidst the red brick apartment buildings and tenements are a couple of stunning colonial-era buildings, including the beautiful St Mary’s Church and a mansion that’s now the Abron Arts Centre.  One street name provides a hint of what Grand Street may have used to be here: a grand orchard.

32 – 99 Cent Store

33 – Ludlow Street

34 – Seward Park High School to the left, Essex Street.

35 – Tenements

36 – Apartment on Clinton Street.

37 – St Mary’s Church (1833).

38 – Abron Arts Center (1975), formerly the Harry De Jur Playhouse (1915).

39 – Triangular Park.

E – Lower East Side

22 – Grand Bo Ky Restaurant

Chinatown is the beating heart of Grand Street – its grandest bazaar and marketplace, and also its most colourful and unexpected stretch.  Here’s where most Chinese immigrants in the last century have made their first port of call, upon arriving in the small island.

Chinatown is also the most multi-sensory of all the tribal lands here.  It isn’t just the colour, it’s the sounds – of thousands of Chinese speaking in a dozen dialects, Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghainese and so on – as well as the smells of the mind-boggling variety of foodstuff available for sale here.  One could spend all day just cruising the butchers and the grocers and the fishmongers here, fixing one’s eyes on unusual produce.

Chinatown has grown ever larger over the years, as New York’s Chinese community continues to expand with immigration.  Unlike its neighbour, Little Italy, it continues to be an authentic enclave – residential, commercial, cultural.  It also features in the world’s mind as THE quintessential Chinatown.

23 – Former Bowery Savings Bank.

24 – Streetside Bazaar.

25 – Tu Quynh Center.

26 – The Bowery.

27 – Forever Health Pharmacy.

28 – Ocean Star Seafood.

29 – Lucky King Bakery Inc.

30 – Eldridge Street.

D – Chinatown

21 – Ferrara

Little Italy is one of the oldest and most famous ethnic enclaves in the city, extant since the turn of the 19th century.  Once it used to sprawl over a large expanse of Grand Street, and more than 10,000 Italians called it home.

But today, it is hemmed into a tiny two-block expanse located between Centre and Mott Streets, and surrounded by Chinatown on all fronts.  It has also become more of a theme-park with Italian restaurants and cafes targeted at tourists, rather than a residential enclave.  The few remaining Italian households in the area are very hard to spot.

This specific walk happened to coincide with the Feast of San Gennaro, for which a major street fair, lasting 11 days, is traditionally held.  It heightened the festive atmosphere, but also emphasized just how much this enclave has become a kind of Disneyland.

17 – The ironically Romanesque Chinatown Planning Council Building.

18 – Street Fair in commemoration of the Feast of San Gennaro, traditionally held down Mulberry Street. At the corner is Alleva (1897).

19 – Alternate View of the Fair.

20 – Florio’s

C – Little Italy

15 – Ted Baker and fashionable male ingenue

These lands are the most scenic along the street.  It isn’t just the buildings, which are turn of the century tenements and townhouses, given a fresh coat of paint and a new lease of life as design studios, quaint cafes, uber-hip restaurants and high-end fashion boutiques.

It’s also the people here – which are overwhelmingly young, white and fashionable.  Everywhere you turn, there is the silhouette of a would-be fashion model, or an actor – male, female.  Brigitte Bardot wouldn’t feel out of place here.  Hell, she even turns up, sort of.  Neither would Brad Pitt.

One would feel a little threatened by all the perfection, if it weren’t for the continued presence of old-world pubs and diners, still eking out a healthy living in the vicinity, and a healthy population of “Real People” taking to the streets to, gawking at the beauty the same way you are.

4 – Cafe Noir

5 – Grey

6 – Thompson Street Deli

7 – Brigitte Bardot

8 – Restaurant Felix Bar

9 – Tenements

10 – Lucky Strike

11 – Gang

12 – Team

13 – Greene Street

14 – Mercer Street

16 – Broadway

B – Soho

1 – Canal St Station

Emerging from the Canal St Subway Station, one is thrown into a liminal space, with skyscrapers, billboards and even a view onto the new World Trade Center One building.  This space is America itself; Manhattan itself.

But yet, it is also nowhere in Manhattan, featureless, without any distinguishing aspect aside from having a view unto elsewhere in Manhattan with stronger distinguishing features.  The tribe here is a non-tribe.  One sees people from everywhere and nowhere at once – tourists, residents, Europeans, Chinese, Africans – there is no one converging factor.

This is the threshold, off which we jump into the many tribal lands along Grand Street.

2 – A View towards WTC One

3 – Go Nowhere In Manhattan

A – Nowhere in Manhattan

“The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft,
The winter snows, the sleigh-bells, the broken ice in the river,
passing along up or down with the flood-tide or ebb-tide,
The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form’d,
beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes,
Trottoirs throng’d, vehicles, Broadway, the women, the shops and shows,
A million people–manners free and superb–open voices–hospitality–
the most courageous and friendly young men,
City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!
City nested in bays! my city!”

- Walt Whitman, Mannahatta

Manhattan is a melting pot of peoples – these tribes from all over the world, that have come here on this small island to make a new home and a new life for themselves.  Everyday, as I walk its city streets, I find myself amazed at the many different races and colours I see.  In a sense, every single chapter and street so far has been a variation of this one – an expression of just how multi-cultural and diverse New York City, and Manhattan truly is.

But to get a sense of the island’s cultural diversity at its very essence, the best place to go to, is Grand Street.  Here, in one of the oldest streets in the city, history itself was made and continues to be made.  Here we find evidence of many of the founding fathers and ethnicities of the city – the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), the Italians, the Chinese, the Jewish – all inhabiting their own largely well-defined lands within the same expanse.

Our walk starts on the far western end of the street, where there is a sort of in-between place – a “Nowhere in Manhattan” that is, ironically, well and truly American.  Here the Stars and Stripes flies proudly, and from here, one can get a great view of the new World Trade Center tower that was still being finished when I went on this shoot, but by now, would have been completed.

Past nowhere, Soho begins proper – an ode to New York’s mercantile past.  Here sit some of the most beautiful and evocative tenements in the city, once warehouses or homes to the poorest immigrants to arrive on Manhattan’s shores.  Today, they are home to the most hip, urban, young and affluent of the city’s denizens – these designers, artists, models, fashionistas, and general wannabe types that have colonised Soho and transformed it completely into THE place to be, for anyone wishing to get a leg up into the glamour of Manhattan.

If Soho is the creative brain of Grand Street, the next segment of the street is its beating heart.  These are the enclaves of Little Italy, and Chinatown, the later engulfing but never overwhelming the former within its midst.  Here, one experiences the kinds of authentic traditions, foods and speak that these old-world tribes brought with them from across oceans, and here, allowed to sink deep roots and flourish.  More than a century after these enclaves were established, they still look pretty much the same, nourished no doubt, by new immigrants that continue to arrive in the small island and make these enclaves their first stop homes.

Past Chinatown, there is a brief couple of blocks where there is some degree of deprivation, an obvious sign of which are a sudden appearance of 99 cent stores.  This part of Grand Street underscores just how much Manhattan, despite its glitz, glamour and affluence, still plays host to a startling number of pockets of middling to crushing poverty. It’s an unequal world here, as a walk down any of Manhattan’s streets will demonstrate clearly.

As we approach the Eastern shore, one tribes lands bleeds into another.  Here we find a colony of Jews, many of whom escaped the Holocaust back in the old lands of Germany and Eastern Europe, and came with their families and what they could muster to make a new life here – at the southern end of the island, on the edge of FDR Drive.  I myself once called this home, when I briefly with a member of the tribe here.

Finally, at the edge of the street, an immense bridge links Manhattan with its hinterland, Brooklyn.  Specifically Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the swiftly gentrifying lands of the Hipster and the Yuppie.  A place I myself call Home in the city. Indeed, just across the water, from where Grand Street ends sits my actual physical home; my apartment – separated by the narrowest body of water.

This chapter celebrates people; and the home away from home that the island and the city became for so many peoples, including myself, for that very brief period of time.

Penang has its Pitt Street, known today as Jalan Masjid Kapitan Keling and Malacca its Temple Street, known today as Jalan Tokong.  Both of these were strongly promoted in the cities’ bids for UNESCO World Heritage Site status, and today still feature strongly in the city’s marketing material.

In the case of Singapore, there hasn’t been an official labeling of any one street as a “Street of Harmony” as such, but there are at least three that could possibly be in the running.  This gallery takes the viewer through each of them in turn.

The first and most “harmonious” of the streets are the fraternal twins Waterloo and Queen Streets – with their Catholic Churches, Hindu Temple, Chinese Temple and even a Jewish Synagogue.  The second is Telok Ayer Street, which is one of the oldest streets in Singapore, and in terms of historic credentials, most likely to anointed the city’s “Street of Harmony.”  The final street is South Bridge Road, just north of Telok Ayer Street in Chinatown.

And just because this gallery covers the most important Chinese and Indian places of worship in Singapore – the Thian Hock Keng Temple on Telok Ayer Street, and the Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple on South Bridge Road – I thought it appropriate to also throw in the equivalent for Singapore’s Malay Muslim Community – the Sultan Mosque – even though it sits in its own precinct, Kampong Glam, away from the Streets of Harmony.

With this post, my Grand Tour – all twelve cities and chapters of it – comes to a complete end. How quickly a year has passed by.

A) Waterloo and Queen Streets

St John’s Church (1912), with the National Library Building in the background.

St John’s Church (view from Middle Road)

Cherub at 222 Queen St – the former Catholic High Campus

Church of Saints Peter and Paul (1870)

Colonial-era bungalow.

Chinese Calligraphic Society of Singapore

More colonial-era structures

Sculpture Square

The former St Joseph’s Institution (1855), now the Singapore Art Museum.

Maghain Aboth Synagogue (1878) – the oldest synagogue in Southeast Asia.

Sri Krishnan Temple (1870).

Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple (existing since 1884, rebuilt in 1982).

B) Telok Ayer Street

Shophouses

Chinese Medicine Association

Thian Hock Keng Temple (1842), the oldest Chinese temple in Singapore.

Nagore Dargah Indian Muslim Heritage Centre (1830)

Art Deco Building

Former Hokkien Huay Kwan Building (1913)

Al-Abrar Mosque (1855)

Telok Ayer Chinese Methodist Church (1924)

C) South Bridge Road

Masjid Jamae Chulia (1826)

Sri Mariamman Temple (1827)

The Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Museum (2007)

D) Kampong Glam

Sultan Mosque (1928)

Oxley Mansion, on Orchard Road. Now an Irish Pub.

         What distinguishes Singapore from everywhere else in Southeast Asia, is that here, one still feels keenly, the sense of the colonial.  In fact, the colonial is pervasive in Singapore, not just in terms of the way of life here; but also in terms of the actual physical architecture of the place.

         The Gallery presents just over three dozen views of Colonial Contemporary Singapore, where, ironically, the sense of history and the past is strong, despite a sense of style and general tendency towards the contemporary.  In fact, the city doggedly re-presents its colonial heritage for contemporary tastes, and in so doing, ensures that the former remains relevant, to the extent of being desirable. 

         Whatever the naysayers say, I believe that Singapore has the most progressive heritage policies in all of Asia; one that eschews objectification for something more pragmatic, motivated by a recognition that heritage must be “living,” in order that it may be preserved.  It’s just that what “living” means changes with the times, and so what preservation entails, must similarly adapt. 

         The tour takes in major colonial precincts in downtown Singapore, starting off at Boat Quay and the Civic District, along the banks of the Singapore River, where modern Singapore itself was born; winding its way up Fort Canning, ancient residence of the British Governor; heading northwards up Orchard Road, once home to fabulous colonial bungalows housing the island’s turn-of-the-century rich and famous; and culminating in the Singapore Botanic Gardens, established by the British and kept in a remarkable state of preservation even today. 

Boat Quay – the towering UOB plaza, alongside colonial-era godowns.

Cavenagh Bridge, spanning the Singapore River

The Fullerton Hotel, once the General Post Office

The Asian Civilisations Museum, once the Empress Place Government Offices

The Arts House, once the Old Parliament House

The Dalhousie Obelisk

The Victoria Memorial Concert Hall, currently being renovated.

The former Parliament Building

The former City Hall, currently being transformed into the National Art Gallery of Singapore

The Singapore Cricket Club, with the Padang in the foreground, and Boat Quay in the background

The towering spire of St Andrew’s Cathedral

The Cathedral of the Good Shepherd

The Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, today a bar and restaurant venue

View towards Raffles City

The Raffles Hotel Arcade

Capitol Building, once the city’s foremost dinner theatre and cabaret venue.

Stamford House (1904)

Stamford Court – completely contemporary, but colonial in essence

Malayan Publishing House (MPH) Building.

The former Tao Nan School, now The Peranakan Museum

Colonial juxtaposed against contemporary

The Singapore Philatelic Museum, once the St Joseph’s Institution

The Masonic Building.

The Armenian Church of St Gregory the Illuminator (1835) – the oldest church in Singapore

Central Fire Station, Hill Street

The former Raffles Museum and Library, now the National Museum of Singapore

Gates to the Christian Cemetary on Fort Canning Hill

Fort Canning Centre, today’s Fort Canning Hotel

The Rendezvous Grand Hotel.

The MacDonald House.

The former Cathay Cinema.

The Goodwood Park Hotel (1932)

Black and white bungalow on Scotts Road.

Another black and white, further down Scotts Road

Colonial-era mansion on Gilstead Road

Another instance of a colonial-era mansion, Gilstead Road

Intrepid latter-day botanist and child, Singapore Botanic Gardens

Colonial black and white, Singapore Botanic Gardens

The iconic Bandstand, Singapore Botanic Gardens

The Raffles Hotel – Grand Dame? I’m not so sure.

This was it: the grande dame of not just Singapore, but Southeast Asia.  It was meant to be the glorious climax and culmination of the entire Grand Tour.  But somehow, it fell short, by about a mile.

I think it all boils down to the fact that the “new” Raffles Hotel – the one that was restored and used as the basis of restoration for most of the other Grand Hotels in the region – is now more than 20 years old.  It really is in dire need of a RETHINK.

It’s not the building that needs it though – the Raffles Hotel itself is still immaculate.  Spotless and almost brand new.  The service is also faultless, though a tad on the over-zealous side in the restaurants, as though the service staff were over-compensating.

Which, as a matter of fact, they were.  The restaurants were terrible.  Food was RUBBISH.  Tasteless, textureless, not even fresh in some instances.  My breakfast dhal curry in the historic Tiffin Room was more like “dull” curry.  I mean, I had never had anything so insipid and bland in Singapore. And the buffet dinner in the Bar and Billiard was the worst I’ve had all year – I doubt the freshness of the ingredients.  And that is a serious accusation.

It would all have been forgiven if the Hotel itself felt like it was bustling and alive.  But outside of the Long Bar – which is now a theme bar in a theme park, really – the premises of the hotel itself were DEAD.  I get it though – luxury, privacy, exclusiveness.  But really, the entire experience felt like I was being in a MORGUE.  And this is totally not how the Raffles Hotel was traditionally like.  It used to be the toast of the town – bustling, busy, filled to the rafters with people.  These days, its SOUL-LESS, in more ways than one.

Part of the problem is that it no longer even tries to endear itself to Singapore and Singaporeans anymore.  A few years back it was still doing so.  But perhaps after it had been acquired by foreign investors – YES, it NO LONGER belongs to Singapore! – it no longer felt the need to fit in.

Well, it’s too bad.  I’m sure it still makes tons of money from its mall, and from the ridiculous room rates.  But for that price, I’d say any of the other TEN Grand Hotels in the region over a much better experience, whether it is in terms of authenticity, service, ambience, or MOST IMPORTANTLY (at least to me), food. And most of the other Grand Hotels also probably score more points (ironically) in the ENDEARMENT department.

In short: I’m SORELY DISAPPOINTED.  Time to keep up and stop resting on your laurels, Raffles! The Messrs Sarkies wouldn’t be pleased.

Patronised by Royalty and Nobility

The stately and silent Palm Court Wing

Dhal curry, or rather “dull” curry. Exquisitely presented but soul-less

The Long Bar – like one of the many theme bars in Universal Studios.

The gorgeous lobby – again, beautiful but absolutely SOUL-LESS.