39 Sultan Gate.
The Lee Loy Hin Blacksmith shop is an interesting Chinese blacksmith shop that used to, and still is a significant landmark in the area.
It had been around for more than 80 years, when the blacksmith trade used to be a thriving industry around the Sultan Gate and Beach Road area in the past.
The industry was a support function to other general hardware work. The blacksmith industry is now one of the many vanishing trades in Singapore.
We had a bit of trouble looking for the shop as there was nothing that looks like what we had seen in a book published by the National Heritage Board on the Heritage Trails. The picture in the book depicted a man standing at the gate of his shop with the chinese name of his shop on the signage. After painstaking walking around and around the area, we finally managed to locate where unit number 39 was. But to our chagrin, it looked nothing like what we had expected.
Picture taken of view looking up directly from the shopfront of Lee Loy Hin.
Picture taken of the second level of Lee Loy Hin.
We can actually see through the second level window that portions of the roof are still missing from the fire. The fire had also damaged the adjacent units beside the blacksmith shop :(
Picture of Gary standing in front of the boarded up shop.
To find out more about what happened to the shop, we approached the proprietor of the small coffeeshop to the left of Lee Loy Hin, and found out that the blacksmith had moved away 3 years ago due to the fire and is now relocated in Toa Payoh (Information from coffeeshop proprietors). The shop is probably left in this state and not renovated like many of the shops around the area as it now has historical value to it.
Later along the trail when we were approaching Alsagoff Arab School we did manage to chance upon a second hand shop along Jalan Sultan that sort of carried the same olden-day aura but that's another story for another time.
It was with heavy hearts that felt the loss of a historic experience that our group made our way to Kandahar Street.
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