During the 1950s, Tsim Sha Tsui slowly became an area of small hotels and luxury shops catering to tourists. An epidemic of building fever swept over it in 1959, and the place will never be the same again. Three huge hotels—the Ambassador, Imperial and Park—opened in 1961 with a total of 1,025 rooms. Two years later, the 800-room President was to join the Kowloon tourist parade. Tall apartment buildings, reaching almost as high as their rents, and an assortment of compact luxury hotels, sprouted through the thick crust of tourists and shoppers. Guests at the top of the newly opened Imperial Hotel looked down on a scene of general devastation at the opposite side of Nathan Road; dozens of old structures being demolished to make way for larger and more expensive ones. New hotels opening throughout the colony in 1963 will add 3,368 rooms, doubling its tourist capacity. Many of them will show the familiar marks of speculative building—undersized rooms, insufficient elevator service, thin walls and cracked masonry. The best hotels will stay the course, but the merely flashy ones may be pulled through the same wringer as the overly eager, overnight speculators in other industries. The construction industry, which employs 160,000 people, roughly estimated, was also active in less speculative projects. From 1957 through 1961, it erected more than 200 factories, many of them on reclaimed land. Government construction on water-supply facilities, land reclamation, and resettlement estates ran just over $40,000,000 in 1960-61, and was scheduled to increase considerably in the next fiscal year. All of the large new hotels in Hong Kong were built to serve a tourist trade which could scarcely have supported three of them in 1940. For well over a century, Hong Kong had about as much tourist appeal as the islands of Langerhans; and in its early days, the English used to sing a derisive song, “You can go to Hong Kong for Me.” In the popular mind, it was associated with such disagreeable phenomena as rainstorms, typhoons, floods, pirates, malaria, bubonic plague, squalor and poisoners. Most of these scourges have disappeared, but it took travelers many years to forget them. People went to Hong Kong only on government or private business or because, being either rich or retired, they had been everywhere else and wanted to add one more odd-sounding place to their itinerary.