Blocks 74 to 80 Commonwealth Drive were one of the first public housing blocks built by the HDB under its first Five Year Programme. They are located in Queenstown, Singapore’s first satellite town, and were depicted on the one-dollar note of the Orchid Series (Singapore’s first currency series) in 1967. Colloquially known as the Tanglin Halt chup lau chu (’10 storey flats’ in Hokkien), the construction of these flats sought to alleviate the overcrowding problem in Chinatown in the 1960s.
