Curtains Close...Goodbye is Forever
Oh, How the Mitre has fallen. A haunt for the sentimental - and some say ghostly - the Mitre Hotel now faces the bulldozers
NO doorman will greet you when you arrive at the Mitre Hotel. If Ronko the half-blind dog lets you in, step under a wrinkled cardboard sign at the grand arched foyer and squeeze in through the creaky collapsible gates.
Step in, and step back a century.
These lyrics might drift into your head... Welcome to the Hotel California.
It's the creepy old hotel straight out of a storybook. A giant Texas flag hangs in the lobby, faded. Choose from an odd potpourri of antique couches - lime green leather, yellow flora fabric, teak and rattan. Old suitcases are stacked by the toilet, left there by travellers who never returned. Don't bother asking for beer at the bar. That's reserved for the handful of regulars. If you're a newcomer, you'll have to settle for a Coke.
This dilapidated building located at Killiney Road was at the centre of a long-running court battle. But the battle is finally over and soon, bulldozers will arrive at the Mitre's doors.
When it was first built in 1860, the building lorded over sprawling stretches of nutmeg plantations. Old residents say you used to be able to see Orchard Road from the porch of the hotel. And you could see the shopping centres come up one after the other.
Today, Orchard Road has turned into a shopping strip and towering condominiums have sprouted all around the Mitre Hotel.
It's what turned the 40,000 sq ft site into a gold mine. And what eventually split a close-knit family. Mr Chiam Heng Hsien is 62, the kind of man you won't glance at a second time if you pass him on the streets. But he's the one who runs the Mitre, which some say is now valued at more than $100 million.
Mr Chiam owns 10 per cent of the property. At the stroke of a pen, millions will be his. But he's not selling. He says he wants to be compensated fairly by the 11 other co-owners. But at night, as he sits on an old sofa in the restaurant that once bustled with guests, he'll tell a different story. It's a less spectacular one: He needs to find time to fix the leaking roof.
It was his father who bought the building for $60,000 in 1948 and converted it into a hotel.
Those were the Mitre's glory days.
The Porsches of yesteryear - big, grand Opels and Chevrons - took pride of place on the hotel's front porch. The British held weekend tea parties here and their toddlers played in a makeshift nursery out in the backyard. 'It was like the Hilton in those days,' said a relative of the family, who declined to be named due to family sensitivities.
Mr Chiam grew up here, among the hotel's wanderers. As a boy, he fished and picked up old crates at a nearby canal to bring home for firewood. In the garden, he kept rabbits and two baby crocodiles. Mr Chiam graduated in 1968 with a physics degree from the then University of Singapore and worked briefly as a civil servant. He took over the running of the hotel in 1975.
The British had left and a motley crew of travellers made the Mitre their home away from home. Scruffy oil rig divers who earned US$1,000 ($1,500) an hour doing hazardous repair work spent their cash on drinks and women here when they came onshore. Professors talked philosophy at the lobby. American soldiers dropped off here on their way home from the Vietnam War.
'The soldiers were the worst,' said Mr Chiam. 'They always left without paying.'
BACKPACKER'S SOUL
People didn't come to the Mitre following directions on a guidebook. They heard it on the grapevine. A five-star hotel with a backpacker's soul, they were told. The rooms were cheap. A double room cost $36 a night and a single, $22. Beer was half what it cost elsewhere. Occupancy rarely fell below 75 per cent.
In a Singapore of mushrooming swanky hotels, the Mitre Hotel was the defiant, bad boy on the block. The Mitre's guests left messages on the walls for posterity, words of wisdom from lives spent out on the road. Like voices calling from far away.
Hard-core party-goers used to flock here in the days when clubs closed early, blasting music from open car doors. Some dance to remember, some dance to forget...
Regulars still laugh about a tycoon's son who spent his days here drinking from dawn to dusk. 'No lunch, no dinner, just drink and drink... until he passed his body odour and bad breadth to us,' said Jass, a 32-year-old entrepreneur and patron. He left when he soiled his pants while drunk one day.
When the 1990s swung around, the Mitre's fortunes began to fade and the Chiam family was embroiled in court battle to sell the hotel. 'Because of all these court battles, we didn't have money to renovate the place,' said Mr Chiam.
The Mitre fell into disrepair and in 2002, MrChiam decided not to renew his hotel licence.
These days, visitors are few.
Mr Bill Dahl, a scruffy elderly Australian in his 70s who is said to have once worked on an oil rig as a geologist, remains as the hotel's last guest. He has lived alone in his room upstairs for the past 20 years. 'If I know you, hello. If I don't, I don't wish to,' came the curt reply when journalists knocked on his door.
Every year without fail, an elderly man from Taiwan visits the hotel room where his son died. Like any old hotel, the Mitre has its share of haunted stories. Old-timers whisper of a woman dressed in a flowery red gown, blond hair tied up in a pony tail, who has been putting on makeup in her room for 50 years. Others swear by a baby ghost that sits on the swing. Ronko's odd barking hardly helps. Haunted tales add to its mystique, but the Mitre's wild days are clearly over.
Today, it serves as a car park for savvy workers from the nearby offices. Every day, Mr Chiam spends the day with his wife and two daughters at a semi-detached house in nearby Grange Road. But he spends his nights at the Mitre, in front of an old TV on an older sofa, drifting to sleep.
Once in a while, he entertains old regulars who drop by. There's little here now, but the regulars come to remember a time long gone. Upstairs, Mr Dahl still lives amid lop-sided shutter windows, tables with three legs and fans that have stopped twirling long ago.
- Contributed by an Anonymous Journalist
The Mitre, it seems, is a place you can never leave. For me, the Mitre will always remain in my etching heart. May the Mitre Live Forever. Vaya con dios. Viva la Mitre.
