“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