Profile

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the east and north coasts are gone; the last sultan’s residence is a cultural heritage museum; historic cemeteries have been replaced by housing developments and MRT stations.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.

Upstairs, tables in the common area are covered in old newspapers & 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.