Today's photos are from the north bank of the Singapore river, near the Raffles Landing Site, looking south across the river. The Boat Quay was the busiest part of the Port of Singapore and handled most of the shipping business in the 1860s. The ships would anchor out in the river and hundreds of lighters and bumboats would fight for space at the quay when transferring such goods as rubber, tin, steel, rice, coffee and a myriad of other items. It's pretty difficult looking at this tranquil place today to imaging the sights, sounds and smells of the Boat Quay at its busiest! The decline of this area as a port really started in the 1960s and was cemented in the the early 1980s when the container port at Pasir Panjang was opened.
About a month before I took this photo this area was gazetted for preservation and transformation to new business. Now the area looks well maintained (i.e. stripped of it's character, homogenized) scrupulously clean and is a hive of restaurants, bars and shops.
The building in the background is the ocbc Bank center, designed by I.M. Pei and constructed in just two years completing in November 1976. At the time it was the tallest building in South East Asia. Yesterday's photo of Telok Ayer Street was taken about 750 feet on the far side of the ocbc Bank Center.
There's a black and white version below the color version if you scroll down the page.
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