The Downing Centre – Mark Foy's Piazza Store – Liverpool Street, Sydney – From Department Store to District Court – 1909 to Today

Come up the stairs out of Museum Station on the Liverpool Street side and you're looking at a big white building with yellow trim, green-tiled towers on its corners and old mosaic signs along the walls advertising silks and millinery. These days the people going in are lawyers, jurors, defendants and TV crews. For most of the 20th century they were shoppers, because this was Mark Foy's, one of the great Sydney department stores. Now it's the Downing Centre, home of the District Court and the Local Court.

The Downing Centre seen from Hyde Park. Photo: Newhoggy, 2005, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The Foys

The Foy story starts in Victoria. Mark Foy senior (1830–1884) was an Irish draper who ran a shop first in Bendigo and then in Collingwood. In the early 1880s he handed the Collingwood shop to his eldest son, Francis. A partner, William Gibson, came in, but by 1884 the partnership had split. Gibson kept the shop, which became the well-known Foy and Gibson, and Francis went to Sydney.

In 1885 Francis and his younger brother Mark opened a drapery in Oxford Street and named it after their father. The Dictionary of Sydney's history of the firm, by Michael Lech, calls Francis "innovative and flamboyant". The business grew fast. The shop was extended within two years, a London buying office opened in 1890, and Mark Foy's Fair, a big sale held about twice a year, became a fixture on the shopping calendar. The store played up its Irish roots and drew working-class shoppers from the eastern suburbs.

The bargains had a cost. Lech writes that the staff worked some of the longest hours for the lowest pay of any big Sydney store. In 1885 they worked until 10pm on weeknights and midnight on Saturdays. The 1907 Shop Assistants' Case in the NSW Arbitration Court showed that the firm hired a lot of young women because it could pay them less.

Michael McGahey, a grandson of the Foys, arriving in Sydney in 1934. Photo: Sam Hood, State Library of NSW, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

The Piazza Store, 1909

In the early 1900s the brothers bought up the properties on the block bounded by Liverpool, Castlereagh, Elizabeth and Goulburn Streets. The new store opened in 1909. The City of Sydney Archives credit the design to Arthur Anderson of McCredie and Anderson. The Dictionary of Sydney names the architects as Arthur McCredie and Arthur Anderson. The State Heritage Register gives the construction years as 1908 to 1909 and the builders as Douzans Bros.

They called it the Piazza. It was partly modelled on the Bon Marché in Paris, with a turreted mansard roof. Lech says an English firm drew the first plans, but Francis Foy took Anderson with him to England, Europe and the United States to look at the latest store buildings, and the design was reworked when they got back. The Dictionary of Sydney describes the store as three storeys, two floors plus a basement. Sources disagree here: the Wikipedia summary of the heritage listing calls it two storeys.

Inside there was plenty to look at. Both the Dictionary of Sydney and the City of Sydney Archives say it had the first escalator in Australia, which Lech names the Escalier Hocquart. A spiral chute carried parcels down to a delivery office. There was an optician, a florist, a pharmacy, a ladies' reading and writing room, a telephone bureau, a post box and a restaurant. The State Heritage Register describes the white glazed bricks and yellow faience on the Liverpool Street front, and the two corner towers with yellow pinnacles, as showing Art Nouveau influences. Mark Foy's became a public company in 1909, though the Foys and their Macken in-laws controlled the board until the early 1960s.

Mark Foy's around 1930. Royal Australian Historical Society, Osborne Collection, via Wikimedia Commons (no known copyright restrictions).

Growing up and out

Business was so good that a five-storey furniture building went up across the road in 1913, then a hardware store in Elizabeth Street in 1914. Lech says McCredie and Anderson designed both. Between 1927 and 1930 the architects Ross and Rowe built a big extension on the main store. Lech calls the result six storeys plus a basement, while the Dictionary of Sydney's building entry and the heritage listing describe the building today as eight storeys. Ross and Rowe planned to cover the whole block through to Goulburn Street, but it never happened. Lech puts that down to problems with the land and the hard times.

The heritage listing says the new structure had octagonal concrete columns with splayed "mushroom" heads and flat reinforced concrete floors. The engineer was A. M. McDonald. The original store was kept as the base and its style was carried up to the new floors. The listing calls the building an early example of keeping a facade and building sympathetically on top of it.

Museum Station opened next door in 1926, and the store did very well out of it. Lech says the 1908 design had already allowed for a subway entrance straight from the station into the store, and that entrance on Castlereagh Street is still used today. Upstairs was the Empress Ballroom, where police balls, staff balls and debutante balls were held for decades.

Two Mark Foy's stores on Liverpool Street at Christmas 1936. Hall and Co., State Library of NSW, via Wikimedia Commons (no known copyright restrictions).

A police ball in Mark Foy's Empress Ballroom. Powerhouse Museum collection, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

The long goodbye

Lech writes that the store had its best ever year in 1954–55. By the early 1960s it was in trouble, along with most of the big retailers at the southern end of the city. A new board took over in 1962, ending the Foy and Macken families' control. The company opened suburban stores and leased out floors of the Piazza to cover costs. It made its first loss since the Depression in 1966–67. In 1968 McDowells took Mark Foy's over, and in 1972 Waltons took over McDowells.

The store kept the Mark Foy's name until Grace Bros leased it in 1980, and retailing in the building finished in 1983. The City of Sydney Archives say it traded as Grace Brothers Piazza until 1982–83. The heritage listing says AMP owned the whole building for some years and let floors to tenants such as the Housing Commission. Courts had already moved into the upper floors in the 1970s.

The old mosaic signs for silks and millinery are still on the walls. Photo: JohnsonL623, 2012, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

From store to courthouse

In 1983 a government committee recommended putting a multi-court complex, with 16 new courtrooms, into the Foy building. The Dictionary of Sydney says it was converted for courts in 1985, and the heritage listing says plans for the new complex followed that year. The court complex opened in 1991 and was named the Downing Centre after Reg Downing, a former NSW Attorney-General and Minister for Justice. The NSW Legislative Council's 1994 condolence motion for Robert Reginald Downing is the record usually cited for him. In 1994 a 21-storey court tower, the John Maddison Tower, was finished to the south.

The heritage listing counts 16 District Courts and 15 Local Courts in the building. During the 1960s the light well and its famous chandelier had been closed over so the first floor could be leased. The chandelier ended up in a building in Brisbane. It has since been brought back and hung over a new stair. A new jury assembly area on the lower ground floor opened in 2015.

A Mark Foy's mosaic surviving in the Downing Centre. Photo: Kgbo, 2017, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

What the heritage listing protects

The Sydney Downing Centre is on the State Heritage Register. The listing values its links with the Foy family and the history of shopping in Australia, and the way it reminds us that the city's main shopping strip once ran all the way down to Railway Square, past Anthony Hordern's and Marcus Clark's. It singles out the terracotta, the mosaic and terrazzo floors, the gilded brass around the show windows, the plaster ceilings and the wrought iron balustrades. It also calls the white glazed brick and yellow and orange glazed terracotta a rare example of those materials used on that scale.

The Liverpool Street facade today. Photo: Ymblanter, 2024, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The roofline and corner towers. Photo: Sardaka, 2019, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The trials

The Downing Centre is the busiest courthouse in the state, and the cameras outside are a regular sight. The District Court hears most of the serious jury trials in Sydney, and some of them make the national news. In 2025 the burlesque producer Timothy Rowland was acquitted of rape at a Downing Centre trial where his defence was "sexsomnia", the Sydney Morning Herald reported. Former Wagga Wagga MP Daryl Maguire faced a jury there over an alleged visa fraud conspiracy, AAP reported. In March 2026 a District Court jury found Bondi man Alexander Csergo guilty of reckless foreign interference.

Anyone can walk in and sit in the public gallery. The courts' noticeboards list each day's cases by the defendant's surname.

On the big screen

The outside of the building was dressed up as Goode's department store for Bruce Beresford's 2018 film Ladies in Black, set in Sydney in the 1950s. It suited the part, because this building really was a 1950s department store.

The Downing Centre and the Museum Station entrance from the northeast. Photo: Ymblanter, 2024, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

So next time you're at the lights on Liverpool Street, look up at those green towers. This was where Sydney rode its first escalator, and plenty of people danced in the Empress Ballroom before anyone stood in a dock here.

Where this came from

• Michael Lech, "Mark Foy's", Dictionary of Sydney, 2011.
• Dictionary of Sydney: Downing Centre (building entry).
• NSW State Heritage Register: Sydney Downing Centre (SHR 00393), Heritage NSW; and "Former Mark Foy's Emporium including interiors and forecourt" (State Heritage Inventory), as summarised in the Wikipedia article.
• City of Sydney Archives: Mark Foy's Department Store collection.
• Sydney Morning Herald, 30 January 2025 (Rowland) and 13 March 2026 (Csergo); AAP News (Maguire).
• Downing Centre Court guide: School excursions to the Downing Centre.
• NSW Legislative Council Hansard, 13 September 1994: Death of Robert Reginald Downing (cited via Wikipedia).