It was once one of Singapore’s most famous nightlife haunts, whose monicker (“Four Floors of Whores”) was whispered about across Asia as a seedy nexus of bars, clubs, and adult entertainment. Now a church service is going to become part of the once-notorious Orchard Towers, a symbolic turn for a building long typed in travel blogs and urban lore as Singapore’s unofficial red-light district. Cornerstone Community Church this month held packed masses in its newly acquired fourth-floor space.
In its peak heyday from the 1980s through the early 2000s, Orchard Towers on Orchard Road shed its original daytime identity as a mixed retail and office building and morphed by night into one of the most talked-about adult entertainment hubs in Southeast Asia. Construction completed in 1975, the tower’s first five levels became filled with nightlife venues that, together with the crowds they drew, would burnish its sleazy reputation for decades.
Walking into Orchard Towers after sunset in its prime was to enter a world far removed from Singapore’s shining malls or gleaming shopping complexes. Dim neon lights flickered over go-go bars, strip clubs, discos and hostess lounges where patrons and bar staff mixed in ways that skirted Singapore’s strict legal line on prostitution. Bars like Top Ten, later rebranded Top 5, and Crazy Horse, alongside others such as Ipanema and Naughty Girl, became names whispered among expat forums, backpacker guides, and late-night taxi drivers.
Inside those bars, the atmosphere was a blend of pulsing music, cheap drinks, and flirtatious calls that echoed down narrow corridors. Freelance sex workers, often international women who had entered Singapore on short-term visas, circulated among patrons, provoking a dynamic that felt at once exhilarating and illicit. Visitors and regulars alike understood the game: buy a round, share a laugh, and perhaps end up in a nearby hotel room rather than inside the club itself. Orchard Towers was not, strictly speaking, a brothel district in the legal sense—Singapore’s tightly regulated system confined licensed prostitution elsewhere—but its bars and lounges became informal meeting grounds where sex workers and clients connected under the radar.
The women drawn to Orchard Towers during this apex came primarily from neighbouring Southeast Asian countries. Indonesian, Filipino and Thai workers were frequently spotted among the nightlife crowd, a pattern shaped by regional migration realities and the economic pressures that led many to seek income beyond what traditional jobs could offer. Their presence became part of the tower’s international reputation. Although precise data on nationalities is scant, field reports and travel narratives from the period consistently mention a strong Southeast Asian contingent, with other workers from across Asia occasionally present, all seeking the same opportunities in a setting where law and luxury intersected awkwardly.
Clientele at Orchard Towers was as varied as its assortment of bars. Traveling businessmen, expatriates captivated by Singapore’s cosmopolitan promise, and curious tourists eager to experience something off the typical tourist trail drifted through its doors. Some came for cheap drinks and music; others let the mild chaos lure them into negotiations with hostesses who operated on the fringes of legality. In local lore, Orchard Towers was often painted as a must-visit for adventurous visitors—an odd claim for a city known otherwise for its spotless public image but true enough that travel sites once listed it among Asia’s most notorious late-night locales.
Behind the pulsing neon, however, were repeated law enforcement efforts and a persistent tension between the building’s adult entertainment culture and Singapore’s carefully managed public order. Police actions over the years chipped away at visible vice, and by 2023, licenses for most nightlife operations were not renewed, hastening the decline of the old sex-themed scene.
Today, as Cornerstone Community Church rings hymnals where disco balls once reflected flickering lights, Orchard Towers stands as a curious testament to change. Its transformation from a seedily famed “sex hub” to a place of worship and mainstream commerce captures a city in motion, one history buff and nightlife veteran alike might recall with equal parts nostalgia and disbelief.
Singapore, my Singapore… I won’t go into the usual rant about your hypocrisy. I promise. I’ll try to be gentle. But allow me this small, affectionate eye-roll, the kind reserved for a city that prides itself on being hyper-modern, hyper-controlled, and hyper-selective about which sins it tolerates—and where.
You “clean up” Orchard Towers, and suddenly the neon ghosts are exorcised. The bars fall silent, the bass stops thumping, the women disappear from the corridors, and—hallelujah—a place of worship moves in. From “Four Floors of Whores” to folded hands and PowerPoint sermons. Redemption arc completed, Instagram-ready. Urban renewal as moral cleansing. Very efficient. Very Singapore.
But here’s the thing, my dear Lion City: while you’re busy polishing Orchard Road for tourists, families, and luxury brands, Geylang remains carefully preserved, almost like a heritage site. Not in the UNESCO sense, of course—but in the quiet, pragmatic, don’t-ask-don’t-tell way that Singapore does best. Regulated prostitution is allowed there. Managed. Contained. Zoned. Sanitised by policy, even if not by public rhetoric.
So let’s not pretend Orchard Towers was shut down because Singapore suddenly discovered virtue.
It was shut down because it was inconvenient.
Orchard Road is your glossy shop window. Geylang is your back room. One must sparkle; the other must function. Sex, it seems, is acceptable as long as it stays where you’ve decided it belongs—away from luxury malls, expats’ brunch routes, and the carefully curated image of a “global city for families.”
And what about the women?
They’re rarely part of the redemption narrative. When Orchard Towers was “cleaned up,” nobody talked much about where the freelance sex workers went, how many lost income overnight, or how suddenly becoming invisible doesn’t magically make you safe, legal, or protected. Vice disappears from buildings; vulnerability does not disappear from lives.
I’m not here to romanticise Orchard Towers. Anyone who’s spent time around that scene knows it was messy, exploitative, thrilling, sad, and unequal—often all at once. But let’s be honest: you didn’t end vice. You relocated optics.
And now a church moves in, preaching salvation on floors once sticky with spilled beer and broken promises. Maybe that’s poetic. Maybe it’s progress. Or maybe it’s just Singapore being Singapore—managing morality the same way it manages traffic, housing, and chewing gum: strictly controlled, spatially segregated, and never openly acknowledged.
So yes, Singapore, my Singapore. You clean up the Towers, but you still protect Geylang. And that tells us everything we need to know—not about sex, but about power, image, and who gets to decide where sin is allowed to exist.