No 5 Kadayanallur Street, the former St Andrew’s Mission Hospital, looks fresh and new in its makeover as ‘KADA’. The latest addition to Chinatown’s developing lifestyle scene began its life just a little over a hundred years ago in 1923. Built as a hospital for poor women and children, it was shuttered following a hit during a Japanese air raid on 17 December 1941 before being reopened in April 1942 as the Syonan Byoin. After the war, it featured as the Government Medical Store for two decades before it last found long-term use as the Maxwell Road Outpatient Dispensary or OPD until the end of the 1990s. It also featured as a temporary corporate headquarters for CK Tang Ltd in the 2010s.
The building has been the subject of a number of tours that I have conducted to it since 2018. A lot more interesting on the inside than it is from the outside, it features an old lift that should not be missed. Retrofitted in 1929, the lift was used to carry children suffering from tuberculosis of the bones from their wards on the ground floor to the roof. The warmth of the sun brought relief to sufferers of the particularly painful disease. As any attempt to move would have caused extreme pain, the child patients could only be moved bed and all to up to the roof, requiring the installation of the lift – now Singapore’s oldest!
More information:
- 110th Anniversary of St Andrew’s Medical Mission (Oct 2023)
- From phantom thieves to guardians of hospital gates, find out more about Singapore’s intriguing medical history (The Straits Times, 10 May 2021)
- The forgotten hospital off Maxwell Road (CNA, 19 Apr 2019)
- The hospital at Mount Erskine and what may now be Singapore’s oldest lift (27 May 2018)
- Story of a lift nearing 90 (The Straits Times, 27 May 2018)
Photographs of KADA
