“The Ritz” - Cremorne Point - Lower North Shore - Sydney

“The Ritz” on Cremorne Point started as a landmark private hotel on the harbour peninsula — the sort of white six-storey pile honeymooners spotted from the ferry before they’d even stepped onto Milson Road. When it opened to the public in 1913 it was sold as one of Sydney’s finest private hotels: scores of rooms and suites, sun lounges, billiards, tennis courts, electric light and a lift, aimed at holidaymakers riding the lower north shore boats.

Mid-century ownership shuffled and the building’s luck ran down. After World War II it was refurbished as a hotel again; by the 1960s–70s it had slipped into boarding-house / bedsit lodging for low-income tenants. Cremorne Point itself is Cammeraygal Country — later granted and subdivided, with pleasure gardens from the 1850s and housing from 1903 — and local heritage studies still treat the peninsula as a distinctive Federation-to-Interwar pocket.

In the mid-1980s developer Simon Symond bought the rundown boarding house. After long resident protest and council argument — heritage worries tangled with the loss of cheap rooms — the site was redeveloped in the mid-1990s into a handful of luxury waterfront apartments that kept the “Ritz” name.

Further reading: The Ritz – Cremorne Point North Shore

“The Towers” - Lavender Bay - The Holtermann Gold Nugget

You won’t find “The Towers” on a North Sydney street walk anymore — Shore School sits on the ridge above Lavender Bay where Bernhardt (Bernard) Otto Holtermann’s mansion once punched the skyline. The money came fast: in October 1872 the Star of Hope mine at Hill End threw up the Holtermann gold specimen — the famous “nugget,” really a huge gold-in-quartz mass — and suddenly the German-born miner could build like a prince.

Around 1874–75 he put up an extraordinary house with a tall central tower that gave the place its nickname. That tower wasn’t just showing off. With photographer Charles Bayliss he turned it into a camera platform and shot vast harbour panoramas — plates exhibited internationally (including Philadelphia) and still among the sharpest records of 1870s Sydney and the north shore. Holtermann died in 1885. The house passed via Thomas Dibbs of neighbouring Graythwaite to the new Sydney Church of England Grammar School.

By the mid-1930s — roughly fifty years after it rose — Shore encased mansion and tower in modern brickwork and effectively demolished them as the campus grew. What’s left for the rest of us is the Holtermann photographic collection: the viewpoint survived as glass plates long after the tower came down.

Bernhardt Holtermann with the Star of Hope gold specimen — the fortune that paid for The Towers above Lavender Bay. (Holtermann Collection / State Library of NSW)

Sydney Harbour from Holtermann’s tower, 1875. (Holtermann Collection / SLNSW)

North Sydney and Sydney Harbour, 1875 — Charles Bayliss / B.O. Holtermann. (Holtermann Collection)

NSW BLUE PLAQUES - Lower North Shore - October 2022

Sydney got its first NSW Blue Plaques in the second week of October 2022, and the Lower North Shore took all three of them in a morning: May Gibbs at Nutcote, Brett Whiteley on Walker Street, and Sir Edward Hallstrom at the gates of Taronga. They are the State's London-style discs — Heritage NSW, not the City's street signs and not the RAHS green plaques from the 1980s — bolted onto the actual house, studio or workplace so you can stand where the work happened.

Nutcote, 5 Wallaringa Avenue, Neutral Bay, is the compact harbourside cottage B. J. Waterhouse designed for Gibbs and her husband in 1924-25. She lived and drew there for more than forty years. The gumnut babies were already famous when she moved in; the house is now a museum, and the plaque is on the building that made the garden look like a picture book. A few bays west, 1 Walker Street, Lavender Bay, is where Whiteley and Wendy made a studio out of a run-down flat from 1969, bought the whole house in 1974, and painted the harbour until 1988. The Archibald-winning Self-portrait in the studio (1976) is a Lavender Bay picture.

Hallstrom is the odd one out, and the most Mosman. Self-made refrigeration man, zoo trustee from 1941, chairman through the 1950s, honorary director after that, and one of Taronga's largest private benefactors. The disc is at the Bradleys Head Road entrance, not a house. Spell Mosman. These three were Sydney's first Blue Plaques; Caroline Chisholm in East Maitland and Nancy Bird Walton at Kew went earlier in the State. The scheme has grown since. This post is the October 2022 Lower North Shore wave, not a catalogue of every disc in NSW.

Sydney's First Blue Plaques Installed On Lower North Shore - Mosman Collective - October 2022

Blue Plaques - NSW