Sydney Trams – From Horse Trams to Light Rail – A History of Sydney Transport

If you grew up in Sydney before 1961, or if your parents or grandparents did, you've probably heard the stories. The rattle of the old toast-rack trams down George Street, the conductor swinging along the footboard collecting fares, packed trams heading out to the Showground, the races at Randwick or the beach at Bondi and Coogee. For about eighty years trams were simply how Sydney got around. Then, almost overnight it seemed, they were gone, and for a long time all we had left were a few rusty rails poking through the bitumen and the old saying "shoot through like a Bondi tram". Now trams are back in George Street, so I thought it was time to tell the whole story, from the first horse tram in Pitt Street to the new light rail, with a look at the buses, trains and ferries along the way.

The Pitt Street Horse Tram, 1861–1866

Sydney's first tram ran along Pitt Street, between Circular Quay and the railway terminus out at the Cleveland Paddocks, roughly where Prince Alfred Park and the southern end of Central are today. The idea was as much about freight as passengers. The government wanted to haul railway goods wagons through the town to the wharves, and the passenger traffic came along with it.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald of 24 December 1861, the line "was permanently opened for traffic yesterday", so that's 23 December 1861. The first car, pulled by four horses, left Circular Quay at 6.25 in the morning to meet the 6.45 train at Redfern, and covered the mile and three-quarters in less than ten minutes.

It was never a happy line. The rails imported from England turned out to be unsuitable and were laid upside down, so the flanges stuck up above the road surface. Carts and carriages came to grief on them, and the Pitt Street shopkeepers complained almost from the start. Then on 15 January 1864 the composer Isaac Nathan, often called the father of Australian music, was crushed by a tram after getting off at the corner of Pitt and Goulburn Streets, near his home. He is thought to have been the first person killed by a tram in Australia. A parliamentary committee recommended the line be removed when its lease ran out, and it closed at the end of 1866. Horse-drawn omnibuses took over straight away.

Steam Trams and the Garden Palace, 1879

For nearly thirteen years after that, Sydney had no trams at all. What brought them back was the great Sydney International Exhibition of 1879, held in the Garden Palace, the huge timber exhibition building in the Domain that burnt down in 1882. The government needed a way to get crowds from the railway terminus to the exhibition, and a line was hurriedly laid from the station along Elizabeth Street to Hunter Street. Steam tram motors were ordered from the Baldwin works in Philadelphia.

The line opened on 16 September 1879, the day before the exhibition, and the plan was to pull it up again afterwards. People still remembered the Pitt Street fiasco, and nobody expected much. Instead it was a runaway success. The Commissioner for Railways reported that it had carried more than 400,000 passengers by the end of 1879, or about 4,000 a day, and returned a handsome profit on the money spent. The temporary line stayed, and in April 1880 Parliament passed an Act allowing tramways to be built through the city and suburbs.

King and Elizabeth Streets on the first night the first tram ran, 1879, drawn by J. Flynn.
Credit: State Library of New South Wales (call no. SSV / 23), no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.

From there it grew fast. The first suburban extension went out to Randwick Racecourse in 1880, the line up Crown Street to Surry Hills opened in 1881, Botany followed in 1882, Coogee in 1883 and Bondi in 1884, and more lines kept coming. The Dictionary of Sydney says the network grew from 2.5 kilometres in 1879 to almost 50 kilometres by 1884. A steam tram was a small engine, or "motor", pulling one or more trailers, some of them double-deckers, with the passengers sitting crosswise and the conductor collecting fares from the footboard. Tramwaymen called a motor with two trailers "two rooms and a kitchen". They were quick and reliable, but noisy, smoky and dusty, and they struggled on steep hills. The Herald remembered in 1961 that drivers on the Surry Hills line liked to race the five-horse omnibus up Crown Street from Oxford Street to the Cleveland Street terminus, whips cracking and throttle wide open, and the tram didn't always win.

A steam tram motor and its trailer at the corner of Market and Elizabeth Streets, about 1885.
Credit: NSW State Archives and Records (Digital ID 17420_a014_a0140001142), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Cable Trams for the Steep Bits

Steam motors didn't like hills, and Sydney has plenty of them. Two lines were built as cable tramways instead. A steam winding engine kept an endless steel cable moving in a slot under the road, and the gripman on the open "dummy" car clamped onto it to move off, pulling an enclosed trailer behind.

The first ran up the steep climb from the ferry wharf at Milsons Point to Ridge Street, North Sydney, opening in May 1886, and was later extended to Crows Nest. The second opened on 19 September 1894 and ran from King Street, near the wharves on Darling Harbour, up through Darlinghurst to Ocean Street, Woollahra (Edgecliff), worked from a winding house at Rushcutters Bay. The Herald later recalled that the cable ran at a steady 12 miles an hour, and if a gripman misjudged a curve and stalled, the passengers got out and pushed. The cable trams didn't last long. The North Sydney line went electric in 1900, and cable working in King Street ended in January 1905.

A cable tram climbing King Street towards Queens Square in early 1895, with a crowd gathered outside the Daily Telegraph office to read the latest news.
Credit: Photo H. King; Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.

Horses Again

Horse trams made a short comeback in the 1890s and 1900s, as a cheap stopgap on lines that didn't have the passengers to pay for steam. From December 1894 to July 1898, two little one-horse cars, numbers 198 and 199, ran a shuttle between Newtown and St Peters stations. Over at Manly, the new line to Curl Curl (North Manly) opened with steam in February 1903, but when passenger numbers dropped off it switched to horses that July, and steam didn't come back until October 1907. Car 199 survives in the Powerhouse collection.

Horse car 199 outside Newtown Station, waiting to run the shuttle to St Peters, about 1894.
Credit: NSW State Archives and Records, public domain (PD-Australia), via Wikimedia Commons.

Going Electric

Electric trams were what really made Sydney a tram town. There were experiments first: a battery tram at Botany in 1888, and an overhead-wire line on the Waverley to Randwick extension in 1890. The first permanent electric line opened on the North Shore in 1893, running from Ridge Street along Military Road towards Spit Junction and Mosman. The early cars had bamboo trolley poles, and because there weren't enough of them, they sometimes towed a cable trailer behind. An electric line from Rose Bay to Ocean Street, Woollahra, followed in 1898.

The real turning point came on 8 December 1899, when the first electric trams in the city proper began running along George Street, from Circular Quay to the Railway and on to Pyrmont via Harris Street. Power came from the new government power station at Ultimo. The public loved the quiet, clean new cars. According to the Sydney Tramway Museum's journal Trolley Wire, the trams carried 76.4 million passengers in the year to June 1899 and 176.2 million ten years later. By 1909, between 5 and 6.30 on a weekday evening, a tram crossed the corner of George and King Streets every eight seconds.

Most of the steam lines were converted by about 1910, and the steam motors were sent out to the edges of the network. A few lasted much longer on isolated lines. The Kogarah to Sans Souci steam tram ran until 1937, when trolleybuses replaced it, and the privately owned line from Parramatta Park down to the ferry at Redbank Wharf kept going until 1943.

An electric tram for Dulwich Hill passing David Jones on the corner of George and Barrack Streets, about 1909–1910.
Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (PXE 711/369), public domain (PD-Australia), via Wikimedia Commons.

The Network at Its Peak

By the early 1920s the network had reached its full size. The Dictionary of Sydney puts the peak at 1922, and the figure usually quoted is about 291 kilometres of street track in 1923. It was the biggest tramway in Australia, and it is often described as the second largest in the British Commonwealth after London. When the trams finished in 1961, the Herald went further and called it the second largest in the world after London. Around 1,600 tramcars were in service at the peak, and the busiest year of all came in 1945, with about 405 million passenger journeys.

Circular Quay was the hub. Lines fanned out to the eastern suburbs and beaches, to Watsons Bay, Bondi, Bronte, Coogee, Clovelly, Maroubra and La Perouse; south to Botany; south-west through Newtown to Cooks River, Dulwich Hill, Canterbury and Earlwood; and west to Glebe, Balmain, Leichhardt, Five Dock, Abbotsford and right out to Ryde. The tramwaymen grouped the western lines as the "red lines", after the colour of their destination symbols, and the south-western lines as the "green lines". Every tram carried a coloured symbol on the front so the signalmen at the big junctions could tell where it was going, and the Herald remembered that every small boy knew them by heart: red and green for Woollahra, two red circles on white for Glebe, a red St George's cross on white for Leichhardt.

The trams left their mark on the map too. Bondi Junction, Maroubra Junction, Spit Junction and Cremorne Junction all take their names from tramway junctions.

Toast Racks and Corridor Cars

From 1905 the trams were sorted into classes by letter. A and B were the steam stock, and the electric cars ran from C to R, roughly in order of size. The early C-class cars were small enclosed saloons, but Sydney soon found that the old steam-tram layout, with crosswise bench seats and the conductor working from the footboard, was the best way to shift big crowds.

The tram everyone remembers is the O class, the "toast rack", named for its rows of cross-bench wooden seats. The first ones came out in the years just before the First World War, and 626 were built. Each car seated 80, part open and part enclosed, and they were often coupled in pairs for the Easter Show crowds and race days at Randwick. They started out in buff and chocolate and were repainted green from 1920. The P class, with concertina doors on its compartments, followed in 1921. Racegoers could even travel first class, with cushions and red carpet, for the Saturday run to the course.

The toast racks were wonderful crowd-swallowers, but they were dangerous for the conductors, who had to edge along the outside of a moving tram to collect fares as the motor traffic grew heavier. By one count there were 282 accidents to conductors on the NSW tramways in 1923, 289 in 1924 and 233 in 1925. The answer was the corridor tram. The first R-class car, number 1738, went into service in September 1933, enclosed, with padded seats and an aisle down the middle. The R1 class followed. A big order for 250 more was placed in the late 1940s, but post-war steel shortages held it up and the order was cut back. The last new R1 car was delivered to North Sydney depot in September 1953, only eight years before the trams finished.

Depots and Workshops

The trams were looked after at depots all over Sydney. The best known was probably Fort Macquarie depot on Bennelong Point. It opened on 10 August 1902 on the site of the old Fort Macquarie and was built to look like a fortress, with castellated walls in honour of the fort it replaced. It had a 12-road car shed with a loop line running right around it, so trams could turn without changing ends. The depot closed in October 1955, and on 18 August 1958 work started on knocking it down "to make way for an Opera House", as Trolley Wire put it at the time. If you walk around the Opera House today you can still spot old rosettes for the overhead wires on the rock wall nearby.

Fort Macquarie Tram Depot on Bennelong Point, with its castellated front and the loop line around it. The Sydney Opera House stands on this spot today. Date unknown.
Credit: NSW Government Railways archives, public domain (PD-Australia), via Wikimedia Commons.

Rozelle depot opened on 17 April 1904 and grew to hold 200 trams. It closed on 22 November 1958, went through a long, sad spell of neglect, and reopened in 2016 as the Tramsheds. Dowling Street depot, opened in 1909 near Moore Park, was the largest tram depot in Australia, with 27 tracks. It served Coogee, La Perouse, Maroubra and the southern lines, and it was the last depot to close, on 25 February 1961. Its site is now a shopping centre. The big engineering works were the tramway workshops at King Street, Randwick, set up in 1881 (I wrote about the Randwick Tramway Workshops a while back). Trams were built and overhauled there for eighty years, and it was also where most of them met their end.

Across the Harbour: The North Shore Lines

The North Shore had its own tram system, cut off from the rest until the Bridge was built. Everything started from the ferry wharf at Milsons Point, where passengers stepped off the ferry and onto a tram. From there the lines spread out to Crows Nest, Chatswood, Lane Cove, Neutral Bay, Mosman, The Spit, Balmoral and Taronga Zoo. A second ferry connection from McMahons Point opened in 1909. The hills over there were fierce. At Athol Wharf, near the zoo, runaway trams went down the hill and into the harbour in 1942, 1952 and 1958.

The tram and ferry terminus at Milsons Point in 1906, where North Shore people changed between tram and ferry in the days before the Harbour Bridge.
Credit: Photo by Key, North Sydney; State Library of New South Wales, public domain (PD-Australia), via Wikimedia Commons.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge changed all that. Bradfield built it with two tracks on its eastern side, meant one day for a railway to the northern beaches, and in the meantime they carried trams. When the Bridge opened on 19 March 1932, the North Shore trams ran straight across and down into their own underground platforms at Wynyard, the only underground tram terminus in Australia. The NSW State Archives has a photo of the first tram across, dated 9 March 1932. The trams stopped crossing the Bridge when the North Sydney system closed on 28 June 1958. Their tracks became the two eastern road lanes that now lead onto the Cahill Expressway, and the old tram platforms at Wynyard became a car park. That's why Wynyard's railway platforms are still numbered 3 to 6. Platforms 1 and 2 belonged to the trams.

The first tram across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, 9 March 1932, ten days before the official opening. It's an O-class "toast rack", with men riding on the footboard.
Credit: NSW State Archives and Records, public domain (PD-Australia), via Wikimedia Commons.

Manly also had its own separate system, with lines to The Spit, Harbord and Narrabeen. It closed on 1 October 1939, and the Herald recalled that 26 of its trams were floated across The Spit on a punt to go and work at North Sydney.

The Decline, and the Last Tram in 1961

In a way, the trams were victims of their own success. Overcrowded trams running every few minutes down narrow streets got the blame for traffic jams that private cars and buses were making worse. The first closures came in the 1930s. Hurlstone Park to Summer Hill went in 1933, the Woolloomooloo line in 1935 and Manly in 1939. The war held things up, but by the end of it the system was run down after years of short supplies and patchy maintenance.

In 1948 Premier McGirr brought out three transport experts from London, and their 1949 report recommended phasing the trams out by 1960 and replacing them with double-decker buses. The government accepted the idea, and in the early 1950s closure became official policy. People didn't give their trams up quietly. When the Watsons Bay line beyond Rose Bay was closed in 1949, public protest got it reopened in 1950. After that, the government made sure the tracks and wires came out quickly after the last tram on each line, so there would be no going back. Meanwhile the Dictionary of Sydney notes that car trips went from 13 per cent of all trips in Sydney in 1946–47 to 50 per cent by 1960.

The big closures came one after another. The Pitt and Castlereagh Street lines and the south-western lines finished on 27 September 1957. The North Shore went on 28 June 1958, and the George Street lines to Glebe, Balmain, Leichhardt and the west on 22 November 1958. The Bondi and Bronte trams stopped in February 1960. The last of all were the Maroubra and La Perouse lines, on Saturday 25 February 1961. That day the Herald wrote that "the city's most characteristic, most criticised and most loved form of transport will have disappeared for ever", and pointed out that Sydney's trams had died "at the age of exactly 100 years", counting from Pitt Street in 1861. Crowds packed the last trams out to La Perouse. Late that afternoon R1-class car 1995 came back from La Perouse and rolled through the gates of Randwick Workshops, the last tram to run on Sydney's streets.

Crowds on the street on 25 February 1961, the day Sydney's last trams ran.
Credit: NSW State Archives and Records (Digital ID 17420_a014_a0140001149), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

What happened next still makes tram lovers wince. Most of the old cars were stripped of anything useful and burnt on a siding at Randwick that the tram men called "burning hill". Some of the R1 cars that went up in smoke were less than eight years old. A few were sold off as sheds, holiday shacks and workers' huts.

What Survived

Thankfully, a few people saw it coming. In 1950 four young enthusiasts, Norm Chinn, Robert Young, Ken McCarthy and Ben Parle, saved L/P-class tram 154, the first Sydney tram to be preserved. That was the start of what became the Sydney Tramway Museum. From 1957 they had a site on the edge of the Royal National Park at Loftus, and they began running trams for the public in 1965. In 1988 the museum moved to its present home beside Loftus station, and since 1993 its trams have run down the old Royal National Park branch line, which makes a lovely day out. The museum has kept at least one of nearly every Sydney electric tram class (only the G, H and M classes are missing), and it is run entirely by volunteers. It's usually open on Wednesdays, Sundays and public holidays, but check their website before you go.

Other pieces survive around town. The Powerhouse owns steam tram motor 1A (lately on loan to the museum at Loftus), C-class car 11 from 1898, horse car 199 and a trailer from the King Street cable line, which was found in use as a holiday house at Cronulla. Steam motor 103A runs at the Valley Heights Rail Museum in the Blue Mountains. Car 1995, the last tram of 1961, sits on display at the Tramsheds in Rozelle. If you keep your eyes open, you'll also spot old rosettes for the overhead wires on city buildings, rounded street corners cut back so trams could turn, a short stretch of track left exposed in Glebe Point Road, and the very wide median strip down Anzac Parade where the La Perouse trams once ran.

The Trams Come Back: Light Rail

Trams came back to Sydney on 11 August 1997, when the first stretch of light rail opened from Central to Wentworth Park, mostly along the old Darling Harbour goods line. At Central it uses the old tram loop around the Grand Concourse, which the Circular Quay trams once used. It reached Lilyfield in August 2000 and Dulwich Hill on 27 March 2014, and it's now the L1 Dulwich Hill Line. (I also wrote a while ago about the Sydney Light Rail Project from Circular Quay to Randwick.)

The big moment came on 14 December 2019, when the L2 Randwick Line opened from Circular Quay, down George Street and out through Moore Park. As Trolley Wire pointed out, that was 120 years and one week after the first electric trams ran down George Street, and 61 years after the last old tram left it. When the builders dug up the streets, they kept finding the original tram tracks buried under the road, and rail that could be saved went to the tramway museum. The L3 Kingsford Line opened on 3 April 2020, very quietly, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Out west, the Parramatta Light Rail opened on 20 December 2024, running from Westmead through Parramatta to Carlingford, partly along the old Carlingford railway line, and work on a second stage, towards Wentworth Point and Sydney Olympic Park, is under way. Somewhere, I like to think, the old toast-rack conductors are having a quiet laugh.

The Rest of the Family: Omnibuses, Trains, Ferries and Buses

Horse omnibuses. Before the trams, and for a long time alongside them, there was the horse bus. One of the earliest, called The Australian, was started in 1843 by Charles Underwood and ran from the city to Newtown and the Cooks River dam. After the Pitt Street tram closed in 1866, horse buses were Sydney's main public transport. The Dictionary of Sydney says they peaked in 1889 with some 64 services, and the Powerhouse counts 290 omnibuses on Sydney's roads by 1894. The biggest operator, the Sydney Tramway and Omnibus Company, painted "S T & O Co" on its buses, and regular passengers said it stood for "sugar, tea and oats". The electric trams finished off the horse bus, and by about 1910 it was gone.

Railways. The trains came well before the trams. The Sydney Railway Company was formed in 1849 to build a line to Parramatta, and the first sod was turned at the Cleveland Paddocks on 20 May 1850. Money, men and materials all ran short, partly because of the gold rush, and the government took the company over in September 1855. The first railway in New South Wales opened a few weeks later, on 26 September 1855, from the Sydney terminus at the Cleveland Paddocks, commonly called Redfern Station, to Parramatta Junction near today's Granville. There were stations at Newtown, Ashfield, Burwood and Homebush along the way, and the line was carried on into Parramatta itself in 1860. The first terminus was little more than a wooden platform in a corrugated iron shed. Central Station replaced it in 1906, built on the site of the old Devonshire Street Cemetery. The suburban trains and the trams were both run by the government railways for years, and the trams did a roaring trade carrying train passengers between Central and the city, especially before the underground railway opened in 1926.

Sydney's first railway terminus at the Cleveland Paddocks, usually called Redfern Station, photographed in 1871.
Credit: NSW State Archives and Records, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Harbour ferries. Ferries are as old as the colony. In 1789 a convict-built boat, the Rose Hill Packet, was sailing and rowing between Sydney Cove and Parramatta, and a return trip could take a week. By 1830 Billy Blue was rowing passengers across from Dawes Point to Blues Point. The first Australian-built steamship, the Surprise, began a Parramatta service in June 1831, and cross-harbour steam ferries were running by 1842. In 1900 the North Shore company became Sydney Ferries Limited, which took over most of the harbour services. Manly had its own famous line of big ferries. The first direct service came in 1855, when Henry Gilbert Smith chartered the paddle steamer Huntress to bring people over to his land near The Corso, and the double-ended Manly ferries became a Sydney institution. For a ride to the zoo, Mosman, Neutral Bay or Cremorne, you caught a ferry to the wharf and a tram up the hill, and the two worked hand in hand for decades. The Harbour Bridge hit the ferries hard. Sydney Ferries' passenger numbers fell from 44 million to 20 million a year almost overnight, and in 1951 the government took over the fleet.

The Harbour Bridge and the City Circle. The Bridge opened on 19 March 1932, carrying road, rail and trams together, and it went hand in hand with Bradfield's underground city railway. Museum and St James stations opened in 1926, Town Hall and Wynyard followed with the Bridge in 1932, and Circular Quay finally joined the two ends together in 1956. Despite its name, the City Circle is really more of a horseshoe.

Motor buses. The railways tried a steam bus between Potts Point and Darlinghurst in 1905, but it lasted less than a year. A private motor bus company started running between Manly and Newport in 1906, but it was wound up in 1908. After the First World War, with plenty of returned men who knew how to handle heavy vehicles, private buses boomed, from about 15 in 1915 to more than 600 by 1929. To protect the trams, Jack Lang's government passed the Transport Act in 1930, and in 1932 the trams were handed to a new Department of Road Transport and Tramways. It ran its first government bus, from St Leonards to Manly, on Christmas Day 1932. In the end, of course, it was the buses that replaced the trams, and if you catch a bus to Coogee, Maroubra or Balmain today, you're still following the old tram routes.

So next time you're rattling down George Street on the light rail, spare a thought for the horse cars, the smoky steam motors, the cable gripmen and the brave conductors on the footboards of the old toast racks. Sydney's trams have come a long way, and in a sense they've come full circle.

Sources

• Garry Wotherspoon, "Trams", Dictionary of Sydney, 2008 – dictionaryofsydney.org
• "Buses", Dictionary of Sydney – dictionaryofsydney.org
• "Opening of the Pitt-Street Tram-way", Sydney Morning Herald, 24 December 1861, reprinted in "From the Archives, 1861: Sydney's first tram line opens" – smh.com.au
• Report of the Commissioner for Railways for 1879, "Report on the Tramways of New South Wales" (1880), Mitchell Library – State Library of NSW (PDF)
• "From the Archives: Sydney takes a final tram ride", Sydney Morning Herald, 25 February 1961, reprinted 2019 – smh.com.au
• Sydney Tramway Museum, "About us" – sydneytramwaymuseum.com.au; "George St 120 Years" – sydneytramwaymuseum.com.au
• Trolley Wire (Sydney Tramway Museum): August 1958, November 1999, August 2007, February 2020 – sydneytramwaymuseum.com.au
• Powerhouse Collection: horse tram car 199; King Street cable tram trailer; C-class tram 11; horse-drawn omnibus – 207034, 207898, 207883, 207261
• Wikipedia: Trams in Sydney, Fort Macquarie Tram Depot, Rozelle Tram Depot, Dowling Street Tram Depot, R1-class Sydney tram, Sydney Tramway Museum, Isaac Nathan
• Wikipedia: Inner West Light Rail, CBD and South East Light Rail, Parramatta Light Rail
• Wikipedia: Main Suburban railway line, Sydney Ferries, Buses in Sydney, Sydney Harbour Bridge, City Circle
• Images: Wikimedia Commons, from the State Library of NSW, NSW State Archives and Records and the NSW Government Railways archives – Category: Trams in Sydney

Assorted Demolished Mansions In Sydney & Surrounds

This is a grab-bag of newspaper clippings I've come across about Sydney's big old houses and what became of them. Some were cut up into rooms, some were stripped, and a lot were simply pulled down. Between the wars the grand family homes of the harbourside suburbs were worth more as land than as houses, and the clippings show it.

In 1937 “Grantham” at Potts Point – once Granthamville, and before that Dangar Castle, standing on Judge-Advocate John Wylde's 1822 grant – was sold for demolition for £530. The Daily Telegraph in 1939 counted how few Sydney homes were still worth £20,000, and mentions that Edgecliff House, the old Terry home, had already gone. There's also a 1931 story from the Kyogle Examiner about thieves stripping a mansion at Onion's Point, Hunters Hill. And from The Age in 1946, homeless ex-servicemen move into a 20-room mansion at Kings Cross. At the other end of the scale, the Daily Standard in 1935 found 30 people living in one house at Paddington.

Related posts on this blog: Demolished Sydney · Demolished Buildings Of Sydney · Tusculum Part 2 – 1–3 Manning Street – Potts Point

“Merioola”, Edgecliff Road, Woollahra, c. 1860–1870 – built in 1859 by John Edye Manning and since demolished (Manning family album, State Library of NSW)
Image: Unknown photographer, Manning family album (State Library of NSW) – via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). Source

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Assorted Demolished Mansions In Sydney & Surrounds

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30 Live In One House – Atrocious Overcrowding In Sydney
The Daily Standard – Tuesday 1st October 1935 – Page 2

Transcription (The Daily Standard (Brisbane), Tuesday 1 October 1935, page 2)

30 Live in One House
ATROCIOUS OVERCROWDING IN SYDNEY
Stables "Converted"

SYDNEY, Monday.

Thirty people living in one house, 10 eating and sleeping in one room, stables converted into "residential chambers," stair-wells used as kitchenettes, and a kitchen that also served as a laundry and bathroom—these were mentioned by Martin Gallagher, health inspector, of Paddington Council, in describing the housing conditions in Paddington at Cost of Living Inquiry to-day.

MOST of the houses in the Paddington district had been converted into residential chambers, he [illegible] and there were from two to six [illegible] seven families in each house. In [illegible] street he had inspected 16 houses, and found that in 10 cases single rooms were occupied for sleeping and eating, sometimes by the whole family.

The rentals of these rooms were from 10s to 12s 6d. For 5s one could get a converted woodshed, 6ft by 6ft, with a height of only 7ft between floor and ceiling, he added.

Mr. Justice Cantor: You regard that as unhealthy?

Witness: It is an awful state of affairs. The situation has got right out of control. We can't find place for people to go.

Mr. Justice Cantor: In Paddington but how about elsewhere?

Witness: It's a job to get them to go out of Paddington. It's so handy, and in some cases their parents before them have lived there.

3000 New Homes Needed.

Witness said that to provide decent housing in Paddington at least 3000 new houses would be required. But there was no room to build them.

The President (Mr. Justice Browne): What about flats?

Witness: Yes, the only way would be to build up in the air.

The big houses, he said, were the worst. In one old "mansion," which was now being demolished, 30 people had been living in it a week ago. There was only one bathroom, and the rooms were subdivided by curtains.

In another house, he said, we found a stable with two stalls, which had been converted, and they were let to two old age pensioners at 5s a week.

"The ventilation in such homes is bad," Gallagher said, "the stench, particularly of cooking, being awful. In some places it would turn your stomach sick."

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Few Sydney Homes Worth £20,000
The Daily Telegraph – Sunday 26th November 1939 – Page 7

Transcription (The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), Sunday 26 November 1939, page 7 – Parts 1 and 2)

FEW SYDNEY HOMES WORTH £20,000

Sydney estate agents agreed yesterday that there were probably fewer than 20 homes in Sydney worth £20,000.

On Friday, Mr. A. W. Olbers, Rosedale Road, Gordon, bid £20,000 for Woolcott Forbes' home in Gordon.

The bid was refused.

"There are only two Sydney homes in the £100,000 class," one leading city agent said.

They are:—

"Mr. Frank Albert's home, Boomerang, Billyard-avenue, Elizabeth Bay.

Mr. Robert Dixan's [sic] home, Elwaton, Castle Hill."

Other Owners

Owners of homes worth £20,000 or more, other agents said, include:

MR. ANTHONY HORDERN, Retford Hall, Darling Point.
CAPTAIN PATRICK, Darling Point.
MR. E. RESCH, Darling Point.
MR. WARWICK FAIRFAX, Bellevue Hill.
LADY FAIRFAX, Bellevue Hill.
MR. ALEXIS ALBERT, Vaucluse.
SIR SYDNEY SNOW, Bonnie Brae, Wahroonga.
SIR FREDERICK STEWART, Dundas.

The home at Turramurra of Mr. Eric Campbell, former organiser of the New Guard, is probably worth about £15,000.

Effect of Sub-division

Mr. L. J. Hooker, another leading agent, said that the Woolcott Forbes home cost from £35,000 to £40,000 to build.

"Subdivision of the property would largely spoil its value," he said, "but it might take a year or more to sell it otherwise.

"One old home in Macleay Street, bought not long ago for £24,000, realised from £30,000 to £35,000 on subdivision.

"The old Terry home, Edgecliff House, Edgecliff, brought £18,000. It was demolished to provide sites for luxury homes."

CASTLE OWNER BIDS FOR MANSION

Here [pointing hand] is Mr. Adolph W. Albers, of Rosedale Road, Gordon, who owns the famous castle on the [pointing hand] heights at Mona Vale. On Friday he bid £20,000 for Woolcott-Forbes's Gordon home (lower picture.)

Read Mark Time, Page 6, Col. 7.

[Photographs: Mr. Albers; the castle at Mona Vale; the Woolcott-Forbes home at Gordon. No captions printed.]

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Historic Home Sold For Demolition
The Sydney Morning Herald – Saturday 16th January 1937 – Page 18

Transcription (The Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 16 January 1937, page 18)

HISTORIC HOME
Sold for Demolition.

One of the old homes of Sydney, Grantham, in St. Neot-avenue, Potts Point, is to be demolished. Yesterday, the mansion was offered at auction by Richardson and Wrench, Ltd., for demolition and removal, and was sold for £530.

After its removal, the grounds will be subdivided and submitted at auction.

Grantham was previously known as Granthamville and Dangar Castle. The site originally formed part of a grant of 11 acres made in 1822 to the Judge Advocate, Mr John Wylde who later received a knighthood.

The first house on the property was built about 1835 by Caleb Wilson, an ironmonger, and all that remains of the original building is the present tower and kitchen quarters. Wilson's house was known as Caleb Castle but it was referred to jocularly as "Frying Pan Castle of Woolloomooloo."

Mr. F Parbury later owned it, and named it Granthamville. He was one of the port's best-known wharf proprietors. Parbury's wharves accommodated in their time many of the early wool ships which helped to develop the port of Sydney.

Whereas Caleb Wilson had paid £405 for 4½ acres of ground, Mr. Donald Larnach, who later owned it, paid £5000 for the house and the 4½ acres. This was later subdivided, and part was resold in 1853 to Mr. Henry Dangar for £6000. After his death in 1861, his widow occupied the house, and left it in her will to Mr. H. C. Dangar in 1869. He lived there until 1917. Since then the house has been owned by several persons.

Mr. H. C. Dangar rebuilt the home to his own design, and followed the Norman style of architecture. The palatial home, as it was known to most people, was built of solid dimension stone quarried on the waterfront. Mr. Dangar brought into his design the battlemented walls and the old-fashioned stone fence. The entrance porch was tiled and led into a vestibule, in which a fine mahogany staircase was built with an overhead balustraded gallery. Upon the rebuilding in 1870, Mr. Dangar renamed the house Grantham.

To-day, the house has cedar fittings throughout, and contains 22 bedrooms and five bathrooms.

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Homeless Occupy Sydney Mansion
The Age – Friday 22nd March 1946 – Page 8

Transcription (The Age (Melbourne), Friday 22 March 1946, page 8)

HOMELESS OCCUPY SYDNEY MANSION
Council Begins Demolition

SYDNEY, Thursday.—A court order has been served on the Sydney city council by one of the ex-servicemen who forcibly entered and occupied a 20-roomed mansion at King's Cross last night. The order calls upon the town clerk to show cause why the house should not be let to him as an ex-serviceman.

The case is listed for hearing to-morrow in Paddington court.

When the council learned this morning of the occupation, workmen were sent to commence demolition of the building.

The council was to-day ordered by the Minister for Labor (Mr. Hamilton Knight) not to demolish the premises.

"I will not allow any building capable of housing people in decency to be demolished while the present housing shortage exists unless some very good reason is advanced," Mr. Knight added.

Under the terms of the late owner's will the mansions are to be demolished to provide an extension to Fitzroy Park.

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Work Of Thieves – Mansion Demolished
Kyogle Examiner – Tuesday 22nd December 1931 – Page 1

Transcription (Kyogle Examiner, Tuesday 22 December 1931, page 1)

Work of Thieves.
MANSION DEMOLISHED.

A beautiful old mansion at Onion's Point, on the Parramatta River, has almost been demolished as the result of persons stealing portions of the building, according to Sergeant Elliott, at the Hunter's Hill Court, when Percy Carruthers and Bernard Moran, laborers, were charged with having window frames in their possession suspected of having been stolen (says the Sydney Sun).

He said that the flooring, windows, roof, doors, and even some of the bricks and stone had been carried away because the place was unoccupied.

Each defendant was fined £[illegible].

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Demolished Sydney

 

Demolished Sydney 

DEMOLISHED SYDNEY

Significant Houses, Mansions & Public Buildings Lost Over Two Centuries

This reference chronicles some of the most culturally significant buildings demolished in the City of Sydney and its harbourside suburbs since the early 19th century — grand civic structures, hotels and theatres, and the private mansions that once lined the eastern harbour foreshores. Entries are ordered by demolition date, with a note on the forces (fire, redevelopment, infrastructure, changing taste) that brought each building down.

Chronological Register

Demolished Building Type Built / Era Significance Source

1882 (fire) The Garden Palace Public/Exhibition Hall Built 1879 for the Sydney International Exhibition A vast Crystal-Palace-style hall with a 65m dome in the Domain — arguably Sydney's single greatest architectural loss, destroyed by fire after only three years. Beside the Yarra blog / Sydney Living Museums

1915 Goderich Mansion built earlier (owners incl. Surveyor-General Samuel Perry & the Tooth family) Demolished for the Hampton Court Hotel (now Hampton Building), Potts Point. Jason Boon: Lost Mansions of Potts Point

1926-32 Brisbane House & c. 1,000 North Shore dwellings Houses Brisbane House built 1831 by settler James Milson, Lavender Bay Cleared for the Sydney Harbour Bridge approaches — the single biggest wave of house demolitions on the North Shore. Northside Living / Stanton Library

1937 Grantham House Mansion 1837-1845, Gothic Revival, built for Felix Caleb Wilson One of Potts Point's first grand estates, resembling a Gothic castle; demolished for apartment blocks (one still bears its name). Jason Boon: Lost Mansions of Potts Point

1940s Commissariat Stores Public/Government Convict-built, early colonial Rare surviving convict-era government stores at Circular Quay; site later redeveloped as the Museum of Contemporary Art. ArchitectureAU: Demolished Sydney

1954 Maramanah Mansion 1840s, built for shipping merchant Deloitte Later a WWII naval recreation centre and postwar squat; demolished to form Fitzroy Gardens. Jason Boon: Lost Mansions of Potts Point

1958 Fort Macquarie Tram Depot Public/Transport Castellated tram shed, Bennelong Point Cleared for the Sydney Opera House — a rare case where the replacement eclipsed the original in fame. ArchitectureAU: Demolished Sydney

c.1958-61 Bell'vue House (19th c.) 19th century, Kirribilli Its demolition for Harry Seidler's Blues Point Tower directly triggered the founding of the North Shore Historical Society (1958). Northside Living: Lost Houses of North Sydney

1959 Cairo (formerly Prestonville) Mansion/Guesthouse Mansion from c.1900s, hotel from 1911 One of Kings Cross's most admired buildings, with tennis courts and gardens; demolished for the Chevron Hotel (now Ikon). Jason Boon: Lost Mansions of Potts Point

1960 Miandetta House Federation era; home of PM Edmund Barton Home of Australia's first Prime Minister; demolished with little public objection for the Quarterdeck Apartments. Northside Living: Lost Houses of North Sydney

1969 The Metropole Hotel Hotel Built 1890, once Sydney's finest hotel 260 opulent rooms and rooftop garden; hosted Kipling and Jack London; demolished for a skyscraper, later replaced again by Governor Macquarie Tower. Beside the Yarra blog

1970 The Palace Theatre & Royal Arcade Theatre/Arcade Victorian-era Part of Sydney's lost 19th-century arcade network (only the Strand Arcade survives); cleared for the Sydney Hilton. Beside the Yarra blog

1971 (closed) / demolished Hotel Australia Hotel Sydney's grandest hotel for 80 years A landmark of the CBD's social life; demolished for Harry Seidler's award-winning MLC Centre (1977). ArchitectureAU: Demolished Sydney

1982 Rural Bank of NSW building Public/Commercial (Art Deco) Art Deco, Martin Place Its demolition, despite protest from the National Trust and RAIA, directly led to the founding of the Art Deco Society. Sydney Living Museums: Unlocked

1988 The Regent Theatre Theatre Early-mid 20th century Fought over in a four-year court battle before demolition; the site then sat vacant for over 15 years. Beside the Yarra blog

1989 Penta Kala House Early 20th century, Cremorne Demolished without council approval — an early flashpoint for heritage enforcement debates. Stanton Library / Lost Houses

1996 State Office Block Public/Office (Modernist) 1964-67, Ken Woolley A celebrated piece of Scandinavian-influenced modernism; demolished for Aurora Place despite architects' objections. Sydney Living Museums: Unlocked

2008 Kent Brewery (Tooth & Co.) Industrial Est. 19th century; closed 2005 The city's last real industrial precinct; largely demolished for Central Park, though the 1911 Irving St Brewery and Kensington St terraces were retained. Sydney Living Museums: Unlocked

Themes and Patterns

Convict & Early Colonial Losses

The earliest losses were largely uncontested. Convict-built stores and Georgian cottages were cleared with little ceremony as the colony rebuilt in more permanent materials; almost nothing survives from Sydney's first fifty years within the modern CBD footprint.

The Mansion Era, c.1830s-1930s

Grand harbourside estates at Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay, Darlinghurst and the North Shore — Grantham House, Maramanah, Cairo, Goderich, Brisbane House — were progressively subdivided or demolished as land values rose and family fortunes changed. Elizabeth Bay House itself narrowly escaped this fate only because its interiors and setting were judged exceptional enough to warrant 1970s restoration; its near-neighbours were not so fortunate.

Infrastructure-Driven Clearances

The Sydney Harbour Bridge (1924-32) and the Warringah Expressway (1960s-70s) together account for roughly 1,000 demolished buildings on the North Shore alone, mostly ordinary houses rather than mansions — a reminder that heritage loss was as much about scale and infrastructure as about individual landmark buildings.

Postwar Modernism vs. Victorian & Art Deco Heritage

From the 1950s to 1980s, Victorian, Federation and Art Deco buildings were frequently dismissed as outdated. Losses such as Bell'vue (for Blues Point Tower) and the Rural Bank building provoked the strongest public backlashes of the entire period, each directly spawning a heritage advocacy body (the North Shore Historical Society; the Art Deco Society).

The Turning Point: NSW Heritage Act 1977

The cumulative public anger over these losses fed into the NSW Heritage Act 1977, after which formal listing made demolition of significant buildings dramatically harder — visible in the drawn-out legal battles over later cases like the Regent Theatre (demolished 1988 only after a four-year court fight).

Sources Consulted

Sydney Living Museums (Museums of History NSW), "Demolished Sydney" exhibition and "Unlocked: Demolished Sydney" — sydneylivingmuseums.com.au

ArchitectureAU, "Demolished Sydney exhibition remembers Sydney's lost buildings" (2016) — architectureau.com

"Beside the Yarra: Sydney's Wonderful Demolished Buildings" — marvmelb.blogspot.com

Jason Boon Real Estate, "The Lost Mansions of Potts Point" — jasonboon.com.au

"Lost Houses" and "Lost houses of North Sydney," Stanton Library / Northside Living — athomeinnorthsydney.com.au; northsidelivingnews.com.au

Compiled as a companion reference to the history of Elizabeth Bay House, Potts Point.

Kings Cross Theatre – Junction of Darlinghurst Road & Victoria Street – Darlinghurst – New South Wales

The corner where Darlinghurst Road meets Victoria Street is the real Kings Cross, the actual "cross" that gave the place its name. From April 1916 to the early 1960s that corner belonged to Frank Waddington's Kings Cross Theatre. It was a picture palace that pulled Sydney up William Street to the movies, then had a wild second life as Surf City, the beat-music hall where Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs made their name. It came down in the mid-1960s for the Crest Hotel and the railway, and the building on the corner today is the Omnia apartment tower. My original notes and photos come first, followed by the full story.

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If you know “the Cross,” you know the junction of Darlinghurst Road and Victoria Street — and for nearly fifty years the building that owned that corner was the Kings Cross Theatre. It opened 14 April 1916 on Frank Waddington’s picture-house circuit: a lavish suburban cinema seating about 1,600 (some accounts say over 2,000), with orchestra and (from 1928) a Wurlitzer organ. For half a century it was the landmark entertainment address at the top of William Street / Darlinghurst Road.

The cinema closed in 1963. After a brief nightclub turn (the Birdcage), John Harrigan’s Surf City beat venue occupied the stripped auditorium from 1963 to 1966 — short-lived, but a famous chapter in Australian popular music. The theatre came down in 1966 for the Scandinavian-style Crest Hotel (opened 1967). The Crest was partly demolished in 2016 and remodelled as the multipurpose Omnia apartment and retail complex, completed in 2018. Kings Cross railway station, which opened beneath the corner on 23 June 1979, also remade the underground and streetscape around it.

Photographs here recall the theatre corner and its hotel-era replacements. The building is gone

Kings Cross Theatre - At The Junction Of Darlinghurst Road & Victoria Street

 

What A Wonderful Place This Would’ve Been. Way Before I Was Born. I’ve Stood There And Tried To Visualise How It Would’ve Been. So Sad. 

The Kings Cross Theatre sat on the corner of Darlinghurst Rd and Victoria St and opened in 1916. Part of Frank Waddington's chain of picture houses, the cinema seated about 1,600 (some accounts say over 2,000) and was described as 'particularly lavish'.

A 'junior' nightclub called the Birdcage, run by radio compere Peter Bergin was open briefly in the venue in 1963 after the theatre closed, and was soon replaced by John Harrigan's Surf City, that occupied the building from 1963 until 1966 when the building was demolished, to be replaced by the Crest Hotel.

The Crest Hotel was a Scandinavian style 14 storey hotel (council papers say 17 storeys) and it had the famous "Goldfish" bar at street level. The building was partially demolished in 2016 and remodelled as the multipurpose apartment building Omnia, completed in 2018, which houses 132 apartments (it was approved for 131 in 2015), a new commercial offering at ground and first floor, including a supermarket and associated parking within the existing building basement.

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The Full Story of the Kings Cross Theatre

Before the Theatre: A Hilltop of Villas and Windmills

Long before there were neon signs, this ridge was Woolloomooloo Hill. Mark Dunn's Kings Cross history in the Dictionary of Sydney tells how Governor Darling handed out villa grants along the ridge from the late 1820s, and six of those estates fell inside what we now call Kings Cross. They were James Dowling's Brougham Lodge, Alexander Baxter's Springfield Lodge, Augustus Perry's Buona Vista, Thomas Macquoid's Goderich Lodge, Thomas Barker's Roslyn Hall estate with its windmills, and Edward Hallen's grant, which he never built on.

Brougham Lodge is the one closest to our corner. The Dictionary of Sydney says it was built in 1831 on Dowling's 1828 grant "near the crossroads that were to become Kings Cross", and its map pin sits only a few dozen metres from the theatre site.

The crossroads itself came about through a fight among the neighbours. Surveyor-General Thomas Mitchell wanted William Street to climb the hill on the easiest grade, but that line would have cut across the land of the miller Thomas Barker and close to Colonial Secretary Alexander Macleay. While Mitchell was away surveying, Macleay had the road pushed straight up the steepest, shortest line from Park Street to meet Victoria Street and Darlinghurst Road at the top. The Dictionary of Sydney calls the junction one of the worst traffic bottlenecks in the city for the next 140 years, until the Kings Cross tunnel opened in December 1975. Still, it did make a cross, and that cross gave the area its name.

Through the late 1800s the big estates were cut up into terraces, shops and boarding houses. The Dictionary of Sydney counts 17 boarding houses in the Kings Cross area in 1890, 55 by 1905 and 165 by 1915, most of them run by women. So by the time the theatre went up, the top of William Street was a busy, crowded spot full of renters, which is exactly the crowd a picture show needs.

Auction plan for a Bayswater Road subdivision, 1916, the year the theatre opened just around the corner. Richardson and Wrench; Raine and Horne, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Sale plan for Alberto Terrace, 1923, covering the streets around the Cross, including Darlinghurst Road, Victoria Street and William Street. Richardson and Wrench; Hardie and Gorman, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Queens Cross Becomes Kings Cross

The name is younger than the theatre's neighbours. According to the Dictionary of Sydney, in 1897 the junction of Victoria Street, Darlinghurst Road, William Street and Upper William Street was named Queens Cross for Queen Victoria's jubilee. It only lasted eight years. In 1905 the City Council changed it to Kings Cross, partly to avoid mix-ups with Queens Place (now Queens Square) near Hyde Park and partly because there was a new king on the throne. Not everyone caught on straight away. The undertaker Charles Kinsela was still advertising from "the top of William Street, Queens Cross" in November 1906.

Even in 1916 the newspapers weren't sure what to call the place. The paper that announced the new theatre put it "at the top of William-street, Darlinghurst". Today's planning papers file the same block under Potts Point. Wherever you draw the lines, it's the same corner.

Opening Night: 14 April 1916

On 2 April 1916 a Sydney paper (page 16, digitised on Trove) told readers that "the latest Waddington Picture Palace is the King's Cross Theatre, at the top of William-street, Darlinghurst". It said the theatre seated "over 2000 patrons", that "special attention has been paid to comfortable seating arrangements and decorations, the stage settings being particularly lavish", and that it would "open to the public on Friday week, April 14". The Dictionary of Sydney gives the same opening date, 14 April 1916.

It seems to have caught on fast. By 30 April the same page was reporting that "at one bound Waddington's King's Cross Theatre has leaped into public favor", praising the seating, the ventilation, the staff and the "select pictures". That week's program was a Mary Pickford drama, A Girl of Yesterday, from Monday to Wednesday, then the film of the novel David Harum. Shows ran every evening at 8, with matinees on Saturdays and holidays at 2.15 pm.

Frank Waddington ran a chain of picture houses, and the Dictionary of Sydney describes the Kings Cross Theatre as part of that chain. 1916 was a big year at the Cross. The same history notes that six o'clock closing for pubs came in that year, so a night at the pictures had a lot less competition.

Inside the Picture Palace

Cinema Treasures lists the theatre's style as Neo-Classical. For a sense of the inside, the best pictures we have are a pair Sam Hood took in July 1940, now held by the State Library of NSW. They show a grand foyer with a sweeping staircase and a comfortable ground-floor lounge, built to make a night at the pictures feel like a night out at the theatre.

Entrance foyer and staircase of the Kings Cross Theatre, photographed by Sam Hood in July 1940. Sam Hood, State Library of New South Wales, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The ground-floor lounge of the Kings Cross Theatre, July 1940. Sam Hood, State Library of New South Wales, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Wurlitzer and the 1937 Makeover

Picture palaces of the 1920s were judged on their organs as much as their films. Cinema Treasures records that on 11 August 1928 the American organist Joseph Wayne opened a newly installed Wurlitzer organ (two manuals, ten ranks) at the Kings Cross Theatre. Stanley Cummins and Denis Palmistra also played it in later years.

Cinema Treasures also says the theatre was remodelled in 1937, and that the organ was moved to the Savoy Theatre at Hurstville. It doesn't say exactly when the organ went.

The Hub of the Cross

The Dictionary of Sydney credits the theatre with starting the area's life as an entertainment strip. It says the 1916 opening "marked the start of the area as an entertainment precinct", with cafés and restaurants soon opening to cash in on the crowds. By 1925 there was the Paris Café and John Psaltis's fish and oyster saloon in Darlinghurst Road, and in Victoria Street there were Samuel Lever's Refreshment Rooms, HS Gilkes's wine saloon and Mrs Payton's dining rooms. The same history says billiard rooms, oyster saloons and cafés were all trading within a few doors of the theatre.

By 1924 Ciro's cabaret at the top of William Street and Maxim's in Darlinghurst Road had joined in. Then in 1939 came the Minerva Theatre in Orwell Street, an Art Deco live theatre that MGM later turned into the Metro cinema. Through the 1930s and 40s, then, the Kings Cross Theatre was one of two big screens at the Cross, at the busiest crossroads in Sydney. From 1937 thousands of people also packed the junction every New Year's Eve.

Kings Cross around 1930, the busy junction the theatre looked over. Royal Australian Historical Society (Osborne Collection), no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

Another view of Kings Cross from the same collection, about 1930. Royal Australian Historical Society (Osborne Collection), no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

"Kings Cross – A Bleak Winter Day", about 1930. Royal Australian Historical Society (Osborne Collection), no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

"Kings Cross 2", about 1930. Royal Australian Historical Society (Osborne Collection), no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

"Paris in the South", a 1930s photo that sums up how Sydney liked to see the Cross. Royal Australian Historical Society (Osborne Collection), no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

Bayswater Road, Kings Cross, in 1929. Bayswater Road runs into the junction beside the theatre corner. Unknown photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Looking along Darlinghurst Road from the Kings Cross Hotel, about 1933–34, with the trams working the crossroads. Sam Hood, State Library of New South Wales, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The first official trip of a double-decker trolleybus through Kings Cross, 22 January 1934. Unknown photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Kings Cross, Darlinghurst, about 1940. Royal Australian Historical Society (Osborne Collection), no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

The Minerva Theatre in Orwell Street, the Cross's other big theatre, photographed by Max Dupain in June 1947. Max Dupain, State Library of New South Wales, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The old Minerva/Metro building still stands in Orwell Street. The Kings Cross Theatre wasn't so lucky. Nick-D, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A "Greetings from Kings Cross" postcard, about 1950, with trams and traffic crowding the crossroads. Unknown photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The same crossroads in colour, about 1950. Unknown photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Last Picture Show and the Birdcage

Trams stopped running through the Cross on 10 July 1960, and the Eastern Suburbs Railway was back in the planners' sights. The theatre itself shut as a cinema in 1963, according to both the Dictionary of Sydney and Cinema Treasures. The Dictionary of Sydney says a "junior" nightclub called the Birdcage, run by radio compere Peter Bergin, opened in the building for a short time after that.

Surf City: 1963 to 1966

Then came the chapter most people remember. Jake Ollett's 2020 history of Surf City in the Dictionary of Sydney gives its address as 111–127 Darlinghurst Road. Music promoter John Harrigan took over the old theatre, and the conversion was simple: they "simply tore out" the seats to make room for a dance floor. The club was officially licensed in December 1963, but it had been running for months before that. Its own posters called it "Australia's finest teenage cabaret".

At first it was surf bands, The Atlantics, The Vibratones and The Nocturnes among them, all playing to kids doing the stomp. Then beat music took over. Billy Thorpe teamed up with the Aztecs, Harrigan became their manager and they became the house band, playing up to seven or eight sets a week. Ollett says that in June 1964, the week the Beatles arrived in Sydney, the Aztecs' "Poison Ivy" was at the top of the Sydney charts. Ray Brown and the Whispers and The Missing Links were regulars too, and the Dictionary of Sydney's Kings Cross entry adds The Easybeats.

The crowds were enormous. Ollett gives the venue a capacity of 5,000 and, quoting Thorpe, says 15,000 to 20,000 people would come through between Friday night and Sunday evening by December 1963. The papers weren't impressed. Surf City was accused of "breeding delinquents", and in August 1965 Alderman LE McDermott complained the place was "badly lit and the band plays extraordinarily loud" after a girl's jaw was broken in a brawl. Thorpe saw it differently. He remembered it as "neutral territory", where rockers and surfies who'd fight anywhere else shared the dance floor.

The last night was Sunday 6 March 1966, with most of the bands that had made their names there. Today three bronze plaques in the footpath near 127 Darlinghurst Road, laid by the City of Sydney in 2004–05, mark the spot. They read: "Surf City & Billy Thorpe. Everyone did the stomp to big stars and hopeless one-hit wonders".

Demolition, the Crest Hotel and the Railway

The Dictionary of Sydney says the building was demolished in 1966 to make way for the Crest Hotel, and that the old theatre site was also needed for the underground railway station. It describes the Crest as a "Scandinavian style 14 storey hotel", built in 1966–67, which opened on 27 September 1967. Kings Cross station, on the Eastern Suburbs line, didn't open until 23 June 1979, and the Kings Cross road tunnel opened on 15 December 1975.

Billy Thorpe never forgave the place. In a 1998 quote posted on Cinema Treasures he said the underground station "sits directly beneath where Surf City stood" and called the hotel above it one of the ugliest buildings ever put up in Sydney.

Kings Cross in the 1960s, the decade the old theatre came down. Ihatewabbits, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Kings Cross in July 1968, a year after the Crest opened. Wilford Peloquin, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Kings Cross, September 1968. Wilford Peloquin, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Kings Cross in 1970. Wilford Peloquin, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The same Kings Cross view in 1970 and decades later. Wilford Peloquin, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Kings Cross around 1981. Sardaka, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

From the Crest to Omnia

The Crest had a long run as a hotel. Then in September 2015 the City of Sydney's planning committee approved turning it into apartments, shops and a supermarket. The council's papers describe it as a 17-storey building at 111–139 Darlinghurst Road and 224–226 Victoria Street, Potts Point, on a site of about 1,629 square metres. The Dictionary of Sydney says the building was partly demolished in 2016 and reworked as Omnia.

Durbach Block Jaggers, the architects, describe Omnia as an adaptive re-use of the Crest Hotel: an hourglass-shaped tower on a tiled podium, which they call "a pale green version of the Coca-Cola sign" across the road. Their figures put it at 132 apartments, with a communal garden between the podium and the tower. It was finished in 2018. So when you stand on the corner today, the bones of the 1967 Crest are still in there, sitting where the 1916 picture palace stood, with the railway station underneath.

Omnia, the reworked Crest Hotel, on the old theatre corner in 2020. Sardaka, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The crossroads in 2012. The tower on the left is the Zenith, which used to be the Kingsgate Hotel. Sardaka, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross, 2012. Sardaka, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A Kings Cross station entrance on Darlinghurst Road. The station sits under the old theatre corner. Nick-D, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Kings Cross station, opened on 23 June 1979. Sardaka, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Neighbours: Coke Sign, Kings Cross Hotel and the Fountain

The Dictionary of Sydney calls the Coca-Cola sign at the top of William Street one of the last survivors of the neon that used to light up the junction. The heritage-listed Kings Cross Hotel stands "diagonally opposite the old Surf City site", and the Dictionary of Sydney notes that live music carries on there.

A short walk down Darlinghurst Road, in Fitzroy Gardens, is the El Alamein Memorial Fountain. Its NSW State Heritage Register listing (quoted on Wikipedia) says it was designed by Robert Woodward with Phill Taranto, built in 1959–61 and turned on by Lord Mayor Harry Jensen on 18 November 1961. It honours the 9th Division at the battles of El Alamein. The listing says that in the 1960s and 70s it rivalled the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House in tourist pictures of Sydney. It went on the State Heritage Register on 14 January 2011.

William Street and the Coke sign at night, 2008. 200ok, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Coca-Cola sign at night, 2023. Shkuru Afshar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Kings Cross Hotel, diagonally across from the old theatre site. Sardaka, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The El Alamein Fountain in 1970. Wilford Peloquin, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The fountain lit up at night, around 1987. Sardaka, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The El Alamein Memorial Fountain, Fitzroy Gardens, 2008. Angus Fraser, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Timeline

• 1828 – James Dowling granted land on Woolloomooloo Hill. Brougham Lodge built there in 1831.
• Early 1830s – William Street pushed up the hill to meet Victoria Street and Darlinghurst Road, forming the cross.
• 1897 – The junction is named Queens Cross for Queen Victoria's jubilee.
• 1905 – City Council renames it Kings Cross.
• 2 April 1916 – The papers announce Waddington's new King's Cross Theatre, with "over 2000" seats.
• 14 April 1916 – Kings Cross Theatre opens.
• 11 August 1928 – Joseph Wayne opens the theatre's new Wurlitzer organ.
• 1937 – Theatre remodelled. The organ later goes to the Savoy, Hurstville.
• July 1940 – Sam Hood photographs the foyer and lounge.
• 10 July 1960 – The last tram runs through Kings Cross.
• 18 November 1961 – El Alamein Fountain turned on in Fitzroy Gardens.
• 1963 – Theatre closes as a cinema. The Birdcage runs briefly, then Surf City opens (licensed December 1963).
• June 1964 – Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs top the Sydney charts with "Poison Ivy".
• 6 March 1966 – Surf City's last night.
• 1966 – Building demolished (Dictionary of Sydney; Cinema Treasures says 1969).
• 27 September 1967 – The Crest Hotel opens on the site.
• 15 December 1975 – Kings Cross road tunnel opens.
• 23 June 1979 – Kings Cross railway station opens.
• 2004–05 – Surf City plaques laid in the Darlinghurst Road footpath.
• 10 September 2015 – Approval given to turn the Crest into apartments.
• 2016–2018 – Crest partly demolished and rebuilt as Omnia.

Where the Sources Disagree

• How many seats? The April 1916 paper and the Dictionary of Sydney say "over 2000". Cinema Treasures lists 1,609, which may be the count after the 1937 remodel. That's my guess, and no source says so. As Surf City, with the seats gone, the Dictionary of Sydney gives a capacity of 5,000.
• When was it demolished? The Dictionary of Sydney says 1966. Cinema Treasures says 1969. Ollett's Surf City history only says it came down "in the following years" after March 1966. With the Crest opening in September 1967, 1966 fits best.
• When did Surf City close? The Dictionary of Sydney gives the last night as 6 March 1966. A commenter on Cinema Treasures says it ran until 1965.
• What replaced it? The Dictionary of Sydney says the Crest Hotel. Cinema Treasures says "the high-rise Chifley Hotel", and Billy Thorpe called it "the Crest Hotel, now the Capital". These may be later names for the same building, but I haven't found a source that confirms it.
• How tall was the Crest? The Dictionary of Sydney says 14 storeys. The City of Sydney planning papers call it 17 storeys.
• How many apartments in Omnia? The 2015 consent allowed 131, a later change raised it to 134, the architects say 132, and a real-estate news site says 135.
• Which suburb? In 1916 the papers called it Darlinghurst. Most histories say Kings Cross. The council's planning papers say Potts Point.

My Earlier Posts

• The Windmills of Darlinghurst Road and Roslyn Street
• The Widening Of William Street - East Sydney & Kings Cross
• Original Villas Of Woolloomooloo Hill, Potts Point & Elizabeth Bay
• Brougham Lodge – Darlinghurst Road / Victoria Street
• Roslyn Hall – Roslyn Street / Darlinghurst Road – Potts Point
• Goderich Lodge – Bayswater Road / Penny's Lane
• Springfield Lodge - Potts Point
• Kellett House (formerly Bona Vista)
• Craigend - Darlinghurst
• The Battle of Blood Alley – Eaton Avenue – Kings Cross – 7 May 1929
• Kate Leigh & Tilly Devine – Sydney's Razor Gang Queens
• Juanita Nielsen – Kings Cross Publisher and Victoria Street Green Ban Campaigner
• Arthur Stace – Mr Eternity
• Maramanah – 64 Macleay Street – Potts Point
• The State Theatre - Market Street - Sydney
• Demolished Sydney

Sources

1. "Waddington's New Theatre", 2 April 1916, p. 16, via Trove: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/121342588
2. "King's Cross Theatre", 30 April 1916, p. 16, via Trove: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/121345731
3. Dictionary of Sydney, "Kings Cross Theatre": https://dictionaryofsydney.org/building/kings_cross_theatre
4. Mark Dunn, "Kings Cross", Dictionary of Sydney, 2011: https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/kings_cross
5. Jake Ollett, "Breeding delinquents: Surf City 1963–1966", Dictionary of Sydney, 2020: https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/breeding_delinquents_surf_city_1963_1966
6. Dictionary of Sydney, "Crest Hotel": https://dictionaryofsydney.org/building/crest_hotel
7. Dictionary of Sydney, "Brougham Lodge": https://dictionaryofsydney.org/building/brougham_lodge
8. Cinema Treasures, "King's Cross Theatre" (Ken Roe), with comments: https://www.cinematreasures.org/theaters/35318
9. City of Sydney, planning reports for 111–139 Darlinghurst Road (D/2015/331 and modifications; Statement of Environmental Effects, 25 June 2018), via eplanning.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au
10. Durbach Block Jaggers, "Omnia": https://durbachblockjaggers.com/projects/residential/omnia
11. Apartments.com.au, "From hotel to high-end apartments: the transformation of the Kings Cross Crest Hotel into Omnia": apartments.com.au
12. Wikipedia, "El Alamein Fountain" (incorporating NSW State Heritage Register listing H01847): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Alamein_Fountain
13. City of Sydney Archives, "Plenty of fun, lots of young people, but no vice. Surf City...", newscutting, 22 September 1963: https://archives.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/nodes/view/900526
14. Images: Wikimedia Commons (State Library of NSW, Royal Australian Historical Society and individual photographers as credited under each picture).