On the eastern side of York Street, near Druitt, you are standing in the punishment geography of early Sydney — not a surviving set of timber stocks, but a site. The Monitor of 17 May 1837 recorded that the public stocks had been shifted because work on the new church of St Andrews needed the ground, and that they now stood at the south end of York Street by the police-office wall. The cathedral we know grew from that clearance; the stocks followed the police.
Charles Bertie, Sydney’s municipal librarian-historian, later retold older memories of a pillory in the centre of the old markets — a boyhood glimpse, in one telling, of a prisoner pelted by the mob. That is Berties transmission of colonial memory, not a plaque you can photograph. What you can hold onto is the 1837 newspaper move: markets and cathedral works pushing corporal display south along York toward the police wall.
Walk York between Town Hall and the old market blocks and read the absence. Sydney kept the street names; it did not keep the timber. Pair this stub with Bertie’s plates elsewhere on the blog, and with any Fowles elevations of York Street you already hold — the elevations show the street wall; this page marks what the street once did to people.