Part 2 of this demolition scrapbook is not another Domain palace. It is retail Sydney — the city that used to buy a hat, a bolt of cloth and a ticket to the theatre without leaving a covered walk between George and Pitt. The live line is a roll-call: Anthony Hordern’s Palace Emporium, the Royal Arcade, the Sydney Arcade, David Jones’ first shop, Henry Parkes’ shop, Murdoch’s, Victoria Arcade, Imperial Arcade, Farmer’s, Snow’s drapery, Woolloomooloo Fish Markets, Market Square. Read it as a folder of lost interiors, not a single building biography.
The one everyone still argues about is Hordern’s. Ann and Anthony’s drapery of 1823 grew into Anthony Hordern & Sons; the great New Palace Emporium at Brickfield Hill (George, Pitt and Goulburn — opened 1905–06 after the 1901 fire) was once advertised as a city in a building. Waltons took the firm in 1970; the city store closed in 1973; and in 1986–87 the sandstone pile came down for World Square, which then sat as a hole for years. That is the wound this list is really about.
The arcades are the other death. Royal Arcade (Thomas Rowe, 1881–82, George to Pitt) went in 1969 with Tattersall’s Hotel for the first Sydney Hilton. Imperial Arcade (Rowe again, 1891) was demolished in 1961, rebuilt in 1965, and later swallowed into Westfield Sydney. Of the Victorian five, the Strand is the one still standing. Farmer & Co. became Myer and is now the Central Plaza side of Westfield — rebuilt more than erased. David Jones opened on 24 May 1838 at 19 George Street, opposite the old markets; that first shop is an origin story, not the present store. Woolloomooloo Fish Markets already has its own post. This page is a contents list. The photographs, when you add them, have to do the naming.