With a stack of old photos in his possession, Robert Jedrek — the dad of Singapore’s only female race car driver Claire Jedrek — decided to scan them before the prints degrade for good.
Luckily for us all, he uploaded the scans onto Facebook, providing folks with a nostalgia-fuelled glimpse of Singapore in the 1970s.
Some places are instantly recognizable, though a lot has changed since then. There are the familiar red-bricked chalets that used to occupy a stretch of East Coast Park:
There’s the North Bridge Road stretch close to Masjid Sultan:
There’s the Merlion statue near Clifford Pier, situated at the mouth of the Singapore River as a tourism symbol. Now, of course, surrounded by skyscrapers.
There’s Lucky Plaza, which was one of the more successful malls in Singapore during its heydays in Orchard Road. It’s still a bustling shopping center today, but patronized more by the local Filipino community.
While tourists today see Boat Quay and Clarke Quay as a hotspot for bars and restaurants, back then it was a hotspot for bumboats and barges. It was in 1977 that the late Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew initiated a clean up of the once-polluted river as well as pushing squatters and street hawkers to settle elsewhere in public housing and centers.
Then, of course, there are just some things that you don’t see that much along the streets of Singapore anymore. Cobblers, street side vendors, cages of animals (including what appears to be bats), and fresh fish killed on demand.
Check out Jedrek’s collection on his Facebook page, where the man promises that there’ll be more to come soon.