Drift Like A Ghost Along Tanglin Halt At Night (DEMOLISHED)

Tanglin Halt was one of five neighbourhoods planned within Queenstown, Singapore's first satellite town, developed from the early 1950s under the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT), HDB's colonial-era predecessor. The estate took its name from a stop on the old Malayan Railway, where cross-country KTM trains would slow near the junction of Tanglin Halt Road and Tanglin Halt Close. It also carried a lesser-known nickname, "Ang Chia Keng" — Hokkien for "red vehicle village" — a reference to the red riot vehicles stationed there during the 1964 racial riots. The first low-rise SIT flats went up in the mid-1950s, but Tanglin Halt's defining moment came in 1962, when SIT's successor, HDB, built rows of 10-storey blocks — tall for their era — along the rail corridor. Locals nicknamed them "Chap Lau Chu" (十楼厝), Hokkien for "ten-storey houses," and the name stuck so firmly that it became shorthand for the whole estate. These blocks are historically significant beyond the neighbourhood itself: their distinctive silhouette, with diagonal external staircases running up the sides, appeared on the back of Singapore's old one-dollar note from the Orchid Series and on the Marine Series one-cent coin, both first issued in 1967 — meaning millions of Singaporeans once literally carried an image of Tanglin Halt in their wallets. Daily life there was shaped by the railway running alongside it and by a government push to give residents work close to home. In 1964, the Economic Development Board launched a $1.5 million project to build multi-storey factories at the estate's fringes, an early pilot for light-industrial zones embedded within housing estates. Nippon Paint (then Pan-Malaysia Paint Industry) opened a factory there in 1965, and the district also housed a Van Houten chocolate factory, whose smell reportedly drifted through the estate, along with an electronics plant that produced Singapore's first black-and-white television. By the 2010s, Tanglin Halt had become one of the oldest surviving HDB estates still standing, its low, uniform 10-storey skyline a rarity in a city that had otherwise raced upward. In 2014, its 31 blocks — spanning roughly 3,480 flats and around 200 shops, market and hawker stalls — were placed under the Selective En bloc Redevelopment Scheme (SERS), the largest SERS exercise in Singapore's history at the time. Approval ratings among residents ran high, around 85 to 90 percent, reflecting both the appeal of newer flats and the practical reality that many units were approaching the limits of their 99-year leases. The move played out slowly. Long-time residents, some who had lived there for over five decades, began relocating to newer flats nearby on Margaret Drive, Dawson Road and Strathmore Avenue, while beloved stalls like Evertop Hainanese Chicken Rice found new homes elsewhere. By September 2022, most residents were gone, leaving the estate's empty corridors and diagonal staircases documented by photographers and heritage groups such as My Community before the wrecking crews moved in — a quiet closing chapter for a neighbourhood that had once been literal currency in the story of Singapore's public housing.