![]() ![]() Yusof Ishak and Puan Noor Aishah with their children in their Opera Estate home on Aida Street, 1955. She would give us kueh during Hari Raya.” 13 She recalled of his wife: “Puan Noor Aishah was a very warm and friendly lady. It was the perfect end to a fine evening.” 12įrom the backyard of Mrs Nancy Tan’s former home on Tosca Street, she could see Yusof Ishak’s house. Kraal recalled: “Before we said our goodnights, the gallant journalist picked a choice orchid from his nearby garden and handed it to my flower-loving mother. 11 Journalist David Kraal had his first encounter with Yusof Ishak and his wife at Kraal’s uncle’s new terrace house in the neighbourhood. He was known among the neighbours to have a keen interest in gardening. One of Opera Estate’s most prominent residents was the first president of Singapore, Yusof Ishak, who lived on Aida Street when he was still a journalist. ![]() An Indian man would go around the estate on a bicycle selling goat’s milk.” 10 There was a small, rocky hill on Aida Street and I’ve seen goats on the hill. My mother would collect the cow dung to be used as fertilisers for her plants. “On the opposite side of the road was a grassy field where cows used to graze. “Tosca Street had only one row of houses,” she said. She recalled that the area was very quiet back then. Her mother had bought the bungalow for $30,000 in the mid-1950s. Mrs Nancy Tan, 75, lived in a bungalow on Tosca Street in the 1950s and 60s until she got married and moved out. The area also lacked facilities and was infested with mosquitoes.) “Tetapi ramai orang tak suka tempat ini sebab jalannya berlekuk, berlumpur, tak ada kemudahan dan banyak nyamuk.” 9 (Translation: But many people did not like this place because the roads were full of potholes and muddy. He recalled that the area was not popular at the time. In a Berita Harian article about Opera Estate in 1989, bangsawan actor Shariff Medan, one of the estate’s early residents, said he bought his single-storey terrace house on Dido Street for only $7,800. Image reproduced from “ Advertisements Column 1,” Straits Times, 21 March 1957, 3 (From NewspaperSG). In 1957, a two-storey a bungalow in Opera Estate cost $24,900. advertised a “modern two-storey bungalow” with three bedrooms in Opera Estate for $24,900. Each came with two bedrooms, a utility room, a spacious lounge and dining room, and a front and back garden. sold single-storey terrace houses along Fidelio Street starting from $14,000. The homes sold by Crédit Foncier were on Dafne and Aida streets and were one-storey terrace houses with asbestos roofs and cement floors. In addition to bungalows, there were also smaller and cheaper terrace houses. A hundred thousand in those days were big money.” 5 Other houses in the other parts of Singapore would probably cost them well over a hundred thousand. These are the kind of houses they can only afford to buy. It took me some time.” 4 Chua built 12 bungalows with modern sanitation which were sold between $15,000 and $18,000 each.Īccording to him, the houses in Opera Estate were not targeted at the wealthy: “They were the usual working-class people who are clerical workers or some semi-professional ones and so on. …, I have to do all this clearance, filling up all the ponds, knocking down the hillocks before I could start building. Then you have small hillocks made of limestone and so on. Chua recalled: “he environment there… it was a semi-deserted place, jungle-like environment with a lot of rubber trees, ponds for the ducks and… pig. in turn sold off a small parcel of land to a developer, Chua Chye Chua, in 1957. Opera Estate is a private residential estate located in the eastern region of Singapore. These included Crédit Foncier itself, the Singapore Trading Company and Nassim & Co. 3 Crédit Foncier d’Extrême-Orient divided up the land and sold the plots to various developers who embarked on different housing projects in the estate. The development of Opera Estate into a residential area began in the 1950s. 2 The area was eventually divided into Frankel Estate and Opera Estate. 1Īround 1947, the land was acquired by Crédit Foncier d’Extrême-Orient, a pioneer Franco-Belgian land developer in Singapore, for about $1.1 million. ![]() The Frankels’ sprawling landholdings in Siglap (which was near the sea at the time before land reclamation) included a house in which the family lived until World War II. Abraham Frankel had arrived in Singapore in 1888 from a poor village in Lithuania to pursue a better life for his family, and eventually became a prominent and wealthy merchant. The area was part of almost 500 acres of coconut and rubber plantations owned by the Frankel family. Bintang tiga means “three stars” in Malay. Jalan Bintang Tiga is derived from Jula Juli Bintang Tiga, a popular Malay bangsawan. Swan Lake Avenue is named after a ballet by the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. ![]()
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