Singapore - Orchard Road shopping & hotel area - postcard c.1970s

Postcard
• Picture / Image:  Orchard Road, Singapore - shopping and hotel district
• Publisher:  A & T International (PTE) Ltd.
• Postally used:  no
• Stamp:  n/a
• Postmark(s): n/a
• Sent to:  n/a
• Notes / condition: 

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Text from the free encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA may appear below to give a little background information (internal links may not  work) :

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Orchard Road is a 2.2 kilometre-long street that is the retail and entertainment hub of Singapore. It is a major tourist attraction, in addition to being the most popular shopping enclave in the city-state. Often, the surrounding area is known simply as Orchard,^[1] partly because the MRT station that serves the vicinity is named Orchard.

The Orchard Planning Area is one of 55 urban planning areas as specified by the Urban Redevelopment Authority and is a commercial district. It is part of the Central Region and Singapore's central business district, the Central Area.

Orchard Road underwent a $40 million revamp in 2009, with the addition of new street lamps, planter boxes, urban green rooms, street tiling and flower totem poles, which have since been removed.^{[clarification needed]}

After a more than a century as a two-way thoroughfare, Orchard Road became a one-way street in 1974.^[2] The ever-lively street starts at the junction with Orange Grove Road which is the location of the Orchard Hotel. It then stretches southeast across the Scotts Road/Paterson Hill junction, Orchard MRT Station, Bideford Road, Somerset MRT Station, Central Expressway, Dhoby Ghaut MRT Station, and ends at the junction with Handy Road (just before Prinsep Street), where it becomes Bras Basah Road. It has an extensive underground infrastructure, including underground pedestrian walkways between the malls running underneath the street and other streets in the vicinity. The numbers begin at Handy Road and end at Orange Grove Road.

Orchard Road got its name from the nutmeg, pepper and fruit orchards or the plantations that the road led to in the mid-1800s. Commercial development began in the twentieth century and took off in the 1970s.

Orchard Road was already cut in the 1830s, though the new road was not named in George Coleman's 1836 Map of Singapore. In the 1830s the Orchard Road area was the scene of gambier and pepper plantations. Later, nutmeg plantations and fruit orchards predominated, hence its name.

By 1846, the spread of houses had reached up to Tank Road. There were none on the left side and only three or four houses went past Tank Road on the right side of Orchard Road.

One major sight during this period was a Dr Jun tending his garden, which helped endorse the road's name. He had a garden and plantation at the corner of what is now Scotts Road and Orchard Road.

Towards the later part of the 1840s, graveyards began to appear along the road. By 1846, the Chinese had a large graveyard around what is now the Meritus Mandarin Hotel and Ngee Ann City, while the Sumatrans from Bencoolen had their burial ground where the current Grand Central Hotel stands. Later a Jewish cemetery was established; it was located where Dhoby Ghaut MRT Station is now and was demolished in 1984.

In the 1860s, Orchard Road had a great number of private houses and bungalows on hills looking down through the valley where the road passed through. Early in the 1890s, King Chulalongkorn, the then King of Siam, acquired ""Hurricane House"" in the vicinity of Orchard Road through Tan Kim Ching, the Thai Consul in Singapore. Two further pieces of adjoining property were added later and these subsequently became the site of the Royal Thai Embassy at 370 Orchard Road.

In the early 20th century, it was noted that Orchard Road ""present[ed] the appearance of a well-shaded avenue to English mansion[s],"" comparable in its ""quiet but effective beauty to Devonshire lanes."" The Chinese called the area tang leng pa sat koi or ""Tanglin market street."" The Tamils refer to the road as vaira kimadam or ""fakir's place"", and muttu than (high ground), a reference to the hilly nature of the area.

Flash floods occurred at the road's iconic junction with Scotts Road on 16 June 2010 after 100mm of rain fell from 8 am to 11 am, reportedly the worst flood at the junction since 1984. Shopping malls along Orchard Road like Lucky Plaza and Liat Towers were affected. The flood had caused some shopping mall and car park basements to be submerged. Rescuers had to pull out about 70 passengers from cars and buses, as flooding shut down Orchard Road. No one was injured.^[3]

The Istana is at Orchard Road's southern end. Nibong palms survive near its entrance, with a plaque that reads, ""As the nibong is a mangrove palm, this site must have once been a mangrove swamp."" This information leads many to believe Orchard Road was once a muddy swamp and these palms are remnants of that original habitat.

On the northern side of Orchard Road is the Botanic Gardens. Along Scotts Road is Goodwood Park Hotel, a fine example of colonial architecture and a monument. At the junction of Scotts Road and Orchard Road is TANGS, the first upmarket department store in Singapore.

About halfway down Orchard Road are Cairnhill and Emerald Hill, where the rich Chinese built their residences, now prime properties sought after by affluent professionals and expatriates. Next to Emerald Hill is Centrepoint, which houses the supermarket Cold Storage, possibly the oldest surviving business establishment in the area. Other establishments have not been so fortunate. Amber Mansions, one of the earliest apartment blocks in Singapore, built around the turn of the 20th century, was torn down in the 1980s to make way for the Dhoby Ghaut MRT Station.

Occupying the site of the former Pavilion Cinema, Specialists' Shopping Centre was one of the earliest redevelopment projects on Orchard Road. The shopping centre has since been demolished (2007) to make way for a new development, Orchard Central. Its flagship store was John Little, which has been in Singapore since the mid-19th century, when it opened its first outlet in Commercial Square (now Raffles Place).

Elsewhere just off Orchard Road on Scotts Road, Scotts Shopping Centre housed Singapore's first food court, which sat below the Ascott Singapore. It was torn down in June 2007 to make way for a new building.