It is evening on a sultry Sunday and a meandering crowd of families, tourists and food delivery riders jostle for space on the footpath outside Concorde Hotel. Yet all is still and silent inside the building’s shopping wing, except for two units offering massage and facial services.

In one of them, located beside the security desk, a middle-aged lady wearing a lime green halter top and beige miniskirt performs a series of jumping jacks in full view of passers-by.

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Her eyes dart occasionally at male tourists, cajoling them to join her. For those who do stop by to chat, she gesticulates towards a partitioned room behind her and indicates that “it’s safer to talk inside” while pointing to the CCTV cameras near the unit.

On the floor above, a group of toddlers run amok at the lobby of Concorde Hotel while other hotel guests read, dine and natter.

Orchard Road, the barber’s pole of capitalism in Singapore, is a conglomeration of contemporary urban lifestyle clichés that is home to world-renowned hotels, Michelin-star restaurants and global brands such as Hermès, Cartier and Apple.

Yet, beneath this well-curated veneer of glitzy malls and high-end living lies a thriving sex trade catering to tourists and locals alike. In a country with strict anti-vice laws and legalised brothel areas, the existence of a covert sex trade in a high-end shopping district touted as the “Milan of Asia” is something of a social anomaly.

“I’ve worked at Orchard Road for more than 30 years and till today I get tourists who get so surprised when they see the seedy side of Orchard Road,” says a 63-year-old tailor at Orchard Plaza who asks to be known only as Richard. “As long as there are desperate men around, there will always be sex even in the cleanest of places – you can be 100 per cent assured of that.”

The open secret

The vice central of the shopping belt is Orchard Towers, only a short walk from the Shangri-La Hotel and St. Regis where US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un stayed, respectively, for their recent summit.

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Built in 1975, the 18-storey office building is notorious for its assortment of girlie bars, massage parlours and seedy nightlife that occupy four storeys, earning it the nickname “Four Floors of Whores”.

A visit to the building after midnight on a Friday is illuminating. Four law enforcement officers attend a report of disorderly conduct outside a hostess bar on the second floor, while less than 20 metres away, three massage parlours continue to operate with scantily clad women on high stools calling out to male passers-by.

Outside the building, taxi drivers roll down their windows and offer to take male tourists to places where they can have “extra fun” depending on their budget.

But if Orchard Towers is an open secret, there are many other lesser-known spots of sleaze along Orchard Road, most of which coexist quietly, if somewhat bizarrely, with family-friendly services.

The rise of vice

At Far East Plaza on Scotts Road, throngs of families tuck into hotpots and sizzling hotplates at a Muslim food place named Puncak while three massage parlours located just behind the eatery carry on with their business having Vietnamese and Thai women proposition men.

University undergraduate Nasruddin Islam Ramli, 26, frequents the eatery with his grand-aunt and brothers and he says that there is a mutual respect for the space that allows everyone to coexist.

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