This is one of Old Chum's rambling “Old Sydney” columns from the Truth – No. 235 – and it starts with two old houses in Pitt Street and one in George Street that were being pulled down in 1912. From there he's off and away, the way the old-timers always were.
The best of it for me is the early story of the Deaf and Dumb Institution. He tells how it was founded on 1 October 1861 with seven pupils, worked out of houses in Castlereagh Street and then Pitt Street, and in 1868 moved into Ormonde House at Paddington – the mansion distiller Robert Cooper had built and named Juniper Hall. A department for the blind was added there, and in 1872 the Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind moved out to the Newtown road.
Along the way you get the pioneer pubs – the Sportsman's Arms, the Red Lion, the Rum Puncheon and the Blue Anchor – plus James Oatley, M.L.A. and Mayor, the champion sculler Richard Green, and where Isaac Nichols lived. The same clipping also turns up in my bigger Old Chum post, linked below.
Related posts on this blog: Old Sydney – “Old Chum” – The Truth Newspapers · Juniper Hall – Paddington
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Image: G. W. Wilson & Co. – via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). Source
Old Sydney Demolished – The Truth – Saturday 20th April 1912 – Page 10
(By “Old Chum” – No. 235)
