Adelphi Hotel stood alongside Raffles Hotel, Hotel de L'Europe and Hotel de La Paix as one of the Big Three hotels in Singapore at the turn of the 20th century. Arathoon Sarkies and Eleazar Johannes purchased the originally small hotel on Coleman Street in 1903 and converted it into a grand 100-bedroom hotel, complete with a dining hall that seated 400. During the Japanese Occupation, the new masters of Singapore – renamed Syonan-to (the Southern Island of Light) – also saw it fit to claim the Adelphi Hotel as their own and called it Nanto Hotel, while Raffles Hotel became Syonan Ryokan. In the end, Adelphi closed its doors on 25 June 1973, almost a century after its establishment, with a grand farewell party in its premises. The venerable building was demolished seven years later to make way for a less-impressive ten-storey office and retail complex.
