Singapore is hip

cities — By Bob Riel on September 14, 2007 at 8:10 am

There is a very good article in the September issue of Smithsonian magazine about Singapore. The article muses about this Asian city-state’s remarkable spurt of development over the past several decades, but mostly focuses on how Singapore these days is a more relaxed and hipper place than it’s ever been before.

I ordered a Kilkenny. The bartender was doing a Tom Cruise Cocktail routine, flipping bottles behind his back and pouring with a flourish. His assistant, a Chinese Singaporean with silken black hair falling to her waist and low-slung jeans, applauded and gave him a hug. I asked the bartender what time last call was. “Dawn,” he said. “We’re in one of the new entertainment zones.”

Whoooa! Could this be the stuffy, somber Singapore I had been warned about? This tiny nation – whose ascendancy from malaria-infested colonial backwater to gleaming global hub of trade, finance and transportation is one of Asia’s great success stories – is reinventing itself, this time as a party town and regional center for culture and the arts. “Prosperity is not our only goal, nor is economic growth an end in itself,” says Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. Translation: let the good times roll. Suddenly people are describing the city with a word that, until recently, wasn’t even in the local vocabulary: trendy.

The government has lifted its prohibition on bar-top dancing and bungee jumping. Cosmopolitan is very much for sale on the newsstands (though Playboy still hasn’t made the cut) and sugarless chewing gum is available (with a doctor’s prescription saying it is for medicinal purposes, such as dental health).

Plans are under way to build two Las Vegas-style casino resorts, worth a combined $3.3 billion, on Marina Bay. International brand-name clubs, such as Ministry of Sound, the mother of London rave clubs, and Bangkok’s Q Bar, have opened satellites here. A colonial-era girls’ school, Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, has been reborn as a complex of upscale restaurants known as Chijmes. All this is enough to make Singapore’s traditionally well-behaved 3.6 million citizens feel as though they went to sleep in Salt Lake City and woke up in pre-Katrina New Orleans.

“Night life started taking off in Singapore when the government extended bar hours, just as Bangkok, South East Asia’s traditional party town, was cutting them back from 4 a.m., to 2, then 1,” says David Jacobson, the American co-owner of Q Bar Bangkok. “It was a pretty draconian turnaround for Bangkok, and what you find is that a lot of people looking for fun these days are avoiding Bangkok and heading to Hong Kong or Singapore instead.”