Singapore is a tough city to love, so much of it has been
“clean(ed) and green(ed)” of any character. The
old kampong-style seafood restaurants along the east and north
coasts are gone; the last sultan’s residence is a cultural
heritage museum; historic cemeteries have been replaced by
housing developments and MRT stations. Most of what remains
looks like Walt Disney was once Singapore’s chief civil
engineer.
Singapore’s untouched nooks and crannies, though, turn
up in surprising places, none more surprising than the Mitre
Hotel, just 500 meters off of Orchard Road. That’s Mitre
Hotel spelt with a backwards “R” on a crudely
painted sign leaning against a wall at 145 Killeney Road.
It isn’t a place to stay unless you want to brave the
bed bugs and ghosts that must infest the place. However, it
has become a favorite after-club venue in recent years, with
as many as 300 people gathering in its courtyard from the
wee hours until dawn to sing English football songs and buy
beer from the man they call “Uncle.”
The Mitre was once a decent Chinese-run down-market hotel.
The original owners built it in the 1920s or 1930s, and it
might have then been a nice family place. There’s an
overgrown badminton court in the garden. Spectators could
have sat on a stone bench under a banyan tree. It was probably
more raucous in the 1960s and 1970s, when it became the favorite
temporary abode of commercial divers and other oil field workers.
The mirror behind the bar is covered in stickers from oil
companies from those days, and the backroom has a pile of
suitcases left by divers who never returned - because of death
or retirement, nobody can say.
Upstairs, tables in the common area are covered in old newspapers
and plastic bottles, furniture is overturned, and windows
are boarded. A few brave souls still rent out rooms. Maybe
they have financial difficulties; maybe they like to mingle
with the ghosts of another era. Downstairs, in the lobby and
bar, broken down furniture still serves its intended use;
canned or bottled beer runs S$4 a serving.
Uncle isn’t supposed to serve beer beyond midnight to
non-residents, but if you go late, you can rattle the steel
grate he closes at the Cinderella hour. A bit of wheedling
and an extra Singapore dollar or two usually brings him round.
After the first owners died, surviving family members began
fighting over the hectare or two of land that must now be
worth hundreds of millions of Singapore dollars. The case
is still held up in Singapore courts, while Uncle and the
rest of the family wait for a resolution and windfall and
the Mitre languishes in dusty history. Long may they wrangle.
When they are done, the Mitre will be replaced with blocks
of flats like the ones looking down on it now.
Directions: Take the MRT to Somerset station and exit on the
Orchard Boulevard side. Turn left up Orchard Boulevard. The
first intersection is Killiney Road. Turn right and walk a
couple of hundred meters up the road until you see the sign
for Mitre Hotel on the left side of the road. The narrow lane
leading to the hotel can be forbidding at night. Twenty-five
meters in, the lane opens up into the parking lot and courtyard.
The squeamish and timid should try a mid-afternoon visit.
