By 1926 the building of the Harbour Bridge was eating into The Rocks, and Princes Street was one of the streets doomed to go. In this Sydney Mail feature, a writer calling himself “Spartacus Smith” went looking for the little architectural details of the old houses before the “cranes of the bridge-builders” reached them.
The photographs pick out things you'd walk straight past: iron balconettes, worn stone steps, fluted pillars, and a wall topped with broken bottles to keep out intruders. The full headline in the paper is “Disappearing Architectural Relics of Old Sydney”. Princes Street was demolished soon afterwards, around 1927, to make way for the Bridge's southern approach, so these pictures are some of the last looks we have at it.
Related posts on this blog: The Rocks – Sydney · Dawes Point – Tar-ra – The Rocks
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Image: Powerhouse Museum collection – via Wikimedia Commons (no known copyright restrictions). Source
Disappearing Architectural Relics Of Old Sydney
Sydney Mail – Wednesday 1st September 1926 – Page 10
DISAPPEARING ARCHITECTURAL RELICS OF OLD SYDNEY
By Spartacus Smith
Houses are being pulled down, whole sides of streets swept away, to make room for the rapidly-increasing traffic. One entire street is doomed, Princes-street, in the quarter formerly known as The Rocks, where are traces of the architecture of a century or more ago—queer relics that make it a museum of old-time quaintness.
[Photograph] The end of the street and the end of an era. The bridge crane is close up, and the demolishers will commence shortly.
ONE of the sad things about the growth of a great city is the loss of beauty. Beauty can be replaced by beauty, you say? Ah, well; let the ghosts of the past walk the streets of Sydney and view the modern structures and their sighs will nearly loosen the false fronts put on the concrete in modern buildings as the modern girl puts on her complexion.
This is not written by an architect or by an economist. If it were it would expatiate on the grandeur of the new Sydney and the magnificence that is to come. Modern architecture is superb and scientific to a degree in meeting the wants of present-day life, but its iconoclasm is devastating to the soul that sees the world more as a thing of beauty than one of utility. Progress cannot be stopped or hampered, but why must our idols fall before its relentless march?
Sydney is "going ahead." Every city is "going ahead," but when that going is fast it soon becomes furious. Great cities are being rebuilt, but the rebuilding is directed towards crowding more and more people within restricted areas, and there is consequently no room for Greek temples. If any such are left in the massive conglomerations of bricks, stone, and concrete they have a strange, sad, look of bewilderment and an exotic air as of a Bohemian in an iron foundry. When Haussmann re-formed Paris he removed masses of houses and replaced many narrow and crooked streets by a few broad ones. He built for beauty, and the city was transformed in manner unparalleled. The example is never likely to be repeated on this earth unless some great cataclysm in our social and business methods of transportation takes place and a town like Sydney is able to use the lands that lie untouched all around it. Our span on earth is but brief, and in the ages to come there may be a city that will spread out its loveliness far into the miles of bush instead of the people huddling in narrow concrete canyons and herding in dense proximity. These thoughts make one contemplate the Capital City of the Commonwealth and think what an opportunity unequalled is there in the building of a beautiful city.
BUT digress for a moment and take a walk with one of the Ghosts of the Past through Sydney's streets. We go with him to the waterside and show him how we are making a giant bridge across the harbour. We show him where the great pillars stand and the line of the elevated bridge road where it cuts into the houses. He views the desolation of beauty. "We walked up this road, bravely dressed, of an evening when the houses that stood here looked beautiful in the moonlight in their fragrant gardens. Where yon rascal leans negligently upon his spade were the iron gates between two massive pillars through which we entered 'neath the palms overhanging the carriage drive, and therein fair ladies——."
He turns—alas, poor ghost!—and surveys the huge piles of timber and the great excavations for the most modern engineering work, and sighs damply as though from the grave of aesthetic tastes.
WE move towards Wynyard-square. "Ah, Dr. Lang's church," he says as it comes into view; "but, zounds! They have never completed the tower." St. Philip's is on the right, musty and black with age, but still with its old beauty, over which are reaching uncouth structures of high buildings blotting the skyline.
"But what's this?" he cries in amazement.
Wynyard-square is no more. Its lovely verdure, its graceful palms, its high iron fence are gone. A palisade surrounds it, and the ghosts of the past lounging on the balconies of the once-fashionable boarding-houses are startled by the panting and chugging of strange and monstrous machines that are disembowelling the once-green and shady spot whereon youth and beauty were wont to sit under the palms and listen to the music of the band.
He vanished from my side, leaving a musty odour mingled with lavender where he had stood. I went in pursuit. Soon we were together again, and as we flitted along, St. James' Church with its tall, green spire came into view. "So they have left it alone?" said he, halting and gazing in delight at its refined beauty. We walked under the portico, and he exuded satisfaction blended with an antique eloquence that was either half a century or a century old. I could not tell which. He almost shouted with joy as he caught sight of the old Macquarie building on Queen's-square that was once the Convict Barracks.
"Ah, ha!" he shouted. "They dared not pull them down."
"All going," I said.
"What!"
"Yes; new buildings likely to go up there."
"But the Rum Hospital still stands?"
"It may become a cathedral soon."
He sighed, and his breath, which had been of lavender and musk, seemed to turn to the odour of wine. I found we were in front of Colne House.
Colne House is not known by that name now. It stands up on the hill off George-street.
The Ghost of the Past at my side chuckled softly and somewhat hiccoughly.
"Wilson lived there," he said. "The old boy used to accommodate us very comfortably, you know, when we had been playing up a bit. Gay days! Gay days! You will remember how old Wilson—I beg his pardon—Colonel Henry Croisdale Wilson—how he brought out that four-in-hand coach and there were no horses to draw it from the wharf; so he harnessed a team of his police to take it up to the station. Ha, ha! Gay days! Gay days! Good fellow, Wilson, you know. When we had had too much wine at dinner—four-and-twenty bumpers at a sitting, mind ye—and no heel taps—the old town became lively in the early hours of the morning. When we fell to a sally of the Watch and were marched to the prison in George-street we would send word up to Wilson. The prison, you know, was a small, stuffy affair, into which they would crowd us all together. My faith! Many hours have I sweated in it until I could raise the cash with which to fee Wilson up the hill. Then he would see us in comfortable quarters in Colne House. Quite a business the old boy did in boarding out his nettings when the wine had been of the best and the Watch over-alert."
[Photograph] Iron balconyettes were popular in the early days. One house has all its windows thus furnished.
[Photograph] This old mansion stands across the ena [sic] of Princes-street. Cranes of the bridge-builders are behind it.
[Photograph] Steps sometimes came down on to the sidewalk in the days when land was not so valuable as it is now.
[Photograph] Steps worn by the feet of generations, and an ancient style that was favoured by the early colonists.
FROM there take a walk down Princes-street—home of a multitude of ghosts of earliest colonists. It should be seen before its disappearance.
Princes-street is a quaint old place. Almost in the heart of Sydney, it is without shops. There are no telephones in Princes-street. It is doomed. It will be wiped off the face of the earth to become a veritable Princes Highway—the main thoroughfare from one end of the continent to the other. Over 250 houses will be pulled down. The harbour bridge is reaching out its tentacles towards it; giant cranes almost hang over the end of it. Railroads will run along the sides of it, and Princes-street will be no more. An old mansion stands at the end—in sad decay—but a tattered and battered shred of its old gentility left in the portico. A whiff of its glory comes to one at the sight of two pillars near by, with carved spherical tops, which I imagine must at one time have been the entrance gates of a fine garden. Nobody knows who lived there, but I should conjure up a picture in which it stood once in a large area of lawns and flower beds long before the shipping plutocrats made that quarter theirs, so as to be near their wharves. From the balconies at the back a splendid view, where fair women in quaint costumes of a century ago dallied with officers or walked along the gravel walks. It is now abandoned to the rats, doomed and awaiting the executioner. It looks tired and inexpressibly sad, exuding the memories of its past grandeur.
[Photograph] The broken bottles on the wall were once fashionable. The residents of earlier times fortified themselves in this way.
"I lived there for a while," said a voice, and the Ghost of the Past materialised at my elbow. "We came up a track into the garden that wound through the rocks and the carriage drive faced on the road. Old Joe Moore lived near here, you know. He came out in the 'twenties, did Capt'n Joe Moore. We used to call it "Jack the Miller's Point" hereabouts in those times. He sold Bobbie Towns the house he built in the 'forties and then moved into Victoria Cottage. Eh, many's the night I've rolled home down Princes-street with a few jolly fellows. Up in yon balconies there would be night-capped heads peeping under the blind occasionally, for I tell you we never believed in denying people the pleasure of seeing us and hearing our songs. Gay times, lad! Gay times! See yon door-knocker grinning at us over there? Well, I remember swinging on it, bent upon adding it to my collection, but some knave of a convict had screwed it on too securely."
I WENT down the street looking right and left. Surely no such array of quaint door knockers is to be found anywhere in Sydney. They are of all kinds and shapes. Some are of iron, some have been wont a half-century or more ago to glitter dazzlingly in their polished brassiness. If there is a penchant for door knockers among the collectors of antiques Princes-street offers a fruitful field for exploration. Almost every door has one, except that here and there they have been replaced by bell pulls or have been taken off. I could see in fancy my roistering Ghost wrenching on some of the doors that bore signs of violence. When Princes-street is demolished quite a heap of knockers will be one of the purchases of the junk dealers.
There is romance in a door knocker. On some of those houses that are old, beside several with dates carved on their fronts, showing that they were built in the early 'fifties, fancy can see dainty figures, coarse figures, bearded ruffians—sandal-wood getters of the South Sea Islands—foppish military men, crinolined women raising a hand to knock. What summonses they have echoed through the old houses—bailiffs, bearers of tidings good and bad, warrants of arrest, love messages. The ancient door knockers saw them all and heard the messages given, the simpering, the laughter, the hot words, the torrent of abuse, the lamentations that followed their delivery. Look at them now and the strange aspect of this street, and you may say "Tush" to such imaginings; but there are houses there that in all probability were among the first of those that were built upon "The Rocks" when it was the principal residence quarter favoured by the settlers.
"I stood in that very door—behind it, egad!—when a certain fair damsel opened it to the knock of a fellow who came to tell her her husband was hanged. She swooned, and I shut the door and gave her a kiss as she lay in my arms," said the Ghost of the Past, with a wicked laugh.
"Come, let us look for the inns in which we revelled," said the Ghost. But all are gone. Some of them may have been in Princes-street, some were in Cambridge-street. There was the "Ocean Wave." It was in Gloucester-street. There was the "Whaler's Arms"—several of them somewhere about Jack the Miller's Point, where many a wonderful yarn was spun while the sailormen ashore after a six months at sea—or perhaps a whole year—told of their adventures as they caroused. "Sometimes we would go to the 'Black Dog,'" said my Ghostly guide. "Well, I remember coming ashore after a blackbirding trip, when we had a night in the 'Sheer Hulk' close by. Mine host served strong liquor fit for sailormen, made up of rum and tobacco with a dash of vitriol. It would burn a man's shirt, but we wanted it with a bite, and we got it. Real fighting stuff, and many the fight would we take part in before the nights were over. Odd's fish! but some of the lads hardly dared light their pipes for fear of their breaths catching afire."
[Photograph] Fluted pillars give a graceful decorative touch to some of the old houses.
PRINCES-STREET would be the main dwelling-place for the gentry when they lived over on The Rocks. Some of the houses that stood there have probably been regarded as old fifty years ago, and have seen half a century with newer ones. One could almost wish that it could be preserved as a curiosity, but soon the Brisbane express will roar through on its way to Albury, and endless strings of motors will hoot and rattle their way along. Artists and photographers with their pictures have preserved all that will be saved. Decay and dilapidation have painted it picturesquely, and it is now an almost dead spot that will break out strangely in a reincarnation, and the ghosts of ancient days will be gone for ever.
[Photograph] A house (the small one) that may have been one of the earliest built in Sydney.