www.shaproperty.com

HISTORICAL architecture in Jalan Besar has won a reprieve, having been accorded heritage preservation status. Thus, I am dismayed that two art-deco shophouses along Serangoon Road before Sturdee Road had been demolished. What had stood there for the past decades were felled in an instant. Are the owners going to recreate the old facade or they will put up a modern structure in their place? Now they are like missing front teeth along the row of shophouses. Further up near Hindoo Road are two more shophouses boarded up awaiting their fate.

Our heritage is about our ties and roots in Singapore. If we do not take pains to preserve them, all the memories will be relegated to photographs and postcards.

Opposite the Futsing Association is an abandoned old mansion that surely needs looking after. Nearby is the only metal-gate lift remaining here. Singapore in the 1950s was as beautiful as present-day Penang.

Ng Yew Ming