Market Street Carpark Building

This used to be a familiar sight along Cecil Street. There are only 2 buildings of this nature in town where the dominant usage is car parking and not retail. The other building is the Golden Shoe Carpark building which ironically is on Market Street itself. 

The Market Street Carpark building was build in 1964 which made it the oldest carpark building in Singapore. This is a picture of it taken just after it was built.

Picture from the National Archive

In 2008, the building got a reprieve from the demolition man when the building owner, Capitacommercial Trust decided to defer the redevelopment of the building. Instead, it embarked on a facelift which resulted in  the now familiar orange sight for office workers in the area in the past 2 years. They even added some food outlets on the ground floor and spiced up the few shops along the front.

Sometime this year up came the hoarding and down went the building.

Now you see it, now you don't. The empty space where the building used to stand and now you can see right through to the buildings behind.

Coming up in its place will be another high rise office block all the more to capitalise on the demand for office spaces in the area. The new building will cost an estimate $1.4 billion.

Picture from Capitacommercial Trust's website.

And those hoping that the building will replace the 700 car park lots, dream on. According to the information from their website, the building will only have 170 - 180 car park lots.