Rosebank Street to Forbes Street - The Post, Money Order and Telegraph Office and Commonwealth Savings Bank (Corner)

The Post, Money Order and Telegraph Office and Commonwealth Savings Bank,corner of Rosebank and William Streets. James Barnet, the Colonial Architect from 1865 to 1890 and the architect of this building, was a man who left his very specific mark on the Sydney landscape. He is best known for those splendid urban monuments, The General Post Office in Martin Place, the onion-domed Lands Department building, and the Customs House at Circular Quay. Each indicate how dependent was Barnet upon the architectural themes of the Italian Renaissance. The columns and colonades, the capitals, and arches, speak as much of Roman and Florrentine palazzi as they do of grandiose public buildings in the colony of New South Wales. But an architect is truly tested when it comes to smaller structures, and Barnet designed dozens of more modest public buildings. They again invoke the classical adherence to strength and volume balanced by scale. They also avoid pretension. This post office is a fine example. Form here certainly follows function, yet the building itself is strong, diverse, and visually exciting. Furthermore, it totally rejects the overdone and showy embellishments so common to a number of Sydney's public buildings being built towards the century's close. Note: For his purpose, Barnet certainly chose an image with a narrative, and the narrative here swirls around the woman in white descending the front steps of the Post Office to the footpath. However, these other images were also available courtesy of The City of Sydney Archives.

Also taken on 19 June 1916,this image still has the horse in Rosebank eating from his chaff-bag. It also shows the advertising on the wall for John Hodgens, grocer.

These images identify the post office as 235 William Street, which Max Kelly does not. However, the CoS Archives have them both dated 28 July 1926. This does not seem reasonable, as in the second image the building next door to the post office has been demolished. The building is in a sad state, covered with posters. The second shot shows that the buildings on the OTHER side of Rosebank have already been demolished and rebuilt, as they are set further back. It is a decade since the resumption orders were issued.

Darlinghurst Road to Rosebank Street - Number 223, 221, 219, 217 (Kirketon Rd to Rosebank St)

This late century, block of four was built in the first instance as shops and dwelings, unlike most in William Street which were converted to street-level shops as the century proceded. The building relies for its streetscapoe value upon its monumental pediment, a mixture of "Egyptian" masonry, and "Greek" anthemion detail. By 1916, Isabella Ada O'Connor ownednumbers 223 and 221. Hr tenants included Lucy O'Rourke who ran a catering business behind the Cadbury's Chocolate sign. Next door the Parkers, Stanley and Josiah, ran a chemist shop. Ethel Williams, the owner of the adjoining pair, lived nearby at 20 Roslyn Street, and was, thus, one of the few owners of William Street real-estate to live in the immediate neighbourhood. Mrs Jane Horner, her tenant at 219, ran the Hawkesbury Cafe. Her other tenant at 217, was John Hodgens, grocer. Above his Indian and Chinese teas, cocoa, mustard, and starch, lodged Herbert and Maurice Stanfield. It may be remembered that it was to the Hawkesbury Cafe that Marjorie Archer, a recent arrival in Sydney from Temora, via Bombala and Walgett, came to have supper on 21 December 1915. There she was invited to go to the follies at Coogee. On the way home to her William SAtreet boarding-house, she had been battered and raped. The case against the three men was dismissed.

Note: Kelly included both the above photograps along with his text, on adjoining pages. I have not counted the buildings from Kirketon to Rosebank as a street block, it being so short. But the City of Sydney photographer (a Mr Briggs from the City Engineers, I think) sure did like this double set of terraces, if the number of shots he took is anything to go by. What follows are the photographs I could locate on the City of Sydney Archives for this row of premises.

Oops, slightly different angle. See the imposing pediment that brings the four together.

Two views along Rosebank Avenue. Facades, even in those days, were faces for public consumption. The next double-set of photograps shows the stark reality behind the facade.

The sad reality, behind the facade. It can still be seen in lanes all across the inner-city. The LH image is looking west along Premier Lane. The RH inage is looking north along Kirketon Street. But wait ... what did Max Kelly espy in this final shot? One of his treasured "Faces of the Street". Let me scan it from his book, and include his text, which is on one of his introductory/analysis pages. Here it is on p. 47. together with Kelly;'s text from p. 51-52 The underlife of William Street was a life dictated by the preoccupations of its poorest members, men and women seeking their own kind, people for whom a rootless and impoverished life had become a matter of faith. For every respectable boarding-house in the principal streets of Woolloomooloo and Darlinghurst, there was the shabby doss-house where rooms, and lives, were shared, however fleetingly, and with whatever in mind. In William Street, the drifter and the loner found somewhere to go. No-one has written of William Street as it was as well as did Kenneth Slessor ... his knowledge and empathy for those less privileged was nurtured as he wandered the streets and lanes of Woolloomooloo and Darlinghurst. His care and respect for ordinary Sydney and his sensual yet precise evocation of it, have rarely been equalled. Slessor loved William Street, and wrote of it thus:

Ghosts' trousers, like the dangle of hung men, In pawnshop windows, bumping knee by knee, But none inside to suffer or condemn; You find this ugly, I find it lovely. Smells rich and rasping, smoke and fat and fish And puffs of parrafin that crimp the nose, Or grease that blesses onions with a kiss; You find it ugly, I find it lovely. The dips and molls, with flip and shiny gaze, (Death at their elbows, hunger at their heels) Ranging the pavements of their pasturage; You find it ugly, I find it lovely.

Darlinghurst Road to Rosebank Street - Number 225

William Henry Wigzel makes wigs, whilst around the corner Will Wearwell makes boots and shoes. Both names suggest an acute sense of commercial onomatapoeia. (There was also Mr G. Schark's fish shop across the road at number 128.) Wigzell was, however, almost legitimate, as it was a minor but useful variation of Weigzell, William and Annie's name as recorded by the valuer. They owned this building of eight rooms, and rented one portion to "My Valet", entered around the corner in Kirketon Road, a second portion to the bootmaker, a third to one "George Adams, cake expert", and a fourth to James McGregor, upholsterer. Note: Max Kelly selected the above image for his book, but the next image, not as good, was available from the City of Sydney "Archives", too. Kelly then did something that makes this book more memorable. He choose a figure from the image, enlarged it, and included that as well. Kelly does not assume that the figure is William Wigzell, but he was in shirt-sleeves, standing apart, and standing still. Kelly was telling the story of the PEOPLE who lived and worked on William Street.

Darlinghurst Road to Rosebank Street - Numbers 229 and 227

These two terraced buiuldings together, represent a microcosm of the life of the street. Originally built in the 1870s as residences, they have subsequently been converted to a variety of uses. The doorway to the left of Sinclair's Newsagent and Circulating Library leads to Stanley &and Sedgwick, estate agents. The partly obscured noticeboard reads, "Agents - Flats, Rooms, Board and Residence", a reminderthat the residential population of the area was one of Sydney's most transient. Sinclair's sold papers but, obviously, a lot more besides. In the window there are mirrors, fishing tackle, magazines, clocks, and a sign for a locksmith. This is the kind of shop Kylie Tennant had in mind when writing of Bud's shop in Foveaux, where it is possible to find anything from "foish-hooks to scent ... fireworks, tobacco, chocolate mice, bootlaces, plaster statuettes, ink bottles, novelties, and hairpins, all jumbled together with skipping ropesor tin whistles". Behind Sinclair's is the American Cleaners and Pressers, one of six such establishments in William Street, a concentration which further emphasises its service nature. Upstairs, Joseph V. Collier, who has the head-lease on the whole building runs a boarding house. Council records show that in 1916 Ada Aspinall, Emily Tyrell,John Laughlin, and Neil Herbert were lodging there. Number 227 is a much more formal affair, having been converted by the English, Scottish and Australian Bank to look as a bank was supposed to be - conservative, secure, serious. Upstais, behind lattice screen and woodn Venetian blinds, lived H. Hewlwtt, the bank's manager, with his family. The pair of houses are of brick with slate roofs. The brick is rendered and the details - the mouldings, cornice, and windows - are painted in contrasting colours. They belong to the estate of the late John Maloney and, according to the Council's valuer, could expect to be rented for about £6 per week each. The young man with newspaper stands in a pose characteristic of many "men about town" in this period. As we pass down the street we will notice a number of others of similar stance, hands held high in pockets, hat worn forward, a stance not quite larrikin but certainly not middle-class - the sort of young Sydneysider recently emancipated from "the push", the corner larrikin on his way to "settling down", the young man so frequently evpoked in Lewis Stone's memorable novel Jonah published in 1911.

Darlinghurst Road to Rosebank Street - Numbers 233 and 231

Numbers 233 and 231 Higgs' Corner, a good place to meet. Albert Arthur Higgs, shoe and boot maker, lived in the newly developing suburb of Waverley and commuted to this eight-roomed building owned by Flora Mann, one of the sixteen women owning property on this southern side of William Street. This photograph was taken on 19th June. The William Street resumption had been announced on 1st June. Already Higgs was advertising a "No Profit Resumption Sale" in his Darlinghurst Road window around the corner. On his William Street frontage the signs are a reminder that the world is at war. The afternoon winter sun allows us to see his merchandise, manufactured upstairs, and now selling for 16/- and 10/6 a pair. The building is all that a building on an important corner should be, noticeable and functional. In reality it is a simple two-storied structure of 8 rooms, but in visual terms its abundance of lush curvilinear detail ensures notie - something which, as the small capitalists of William Street realised, was half the battle. Higgs' neighbours, at 231, work from an 1860s building owned by Edwin P. Gostelow, a tobacconist nd one of the two JPs of the street. Gostelow's own business was directly across the road, a connection uncommon in William Street since property owners normally lived lives distant from that of the street. The tenant upstairs is George P. Fifedentist, whose clients enter by the door alongside the building's other tenant, Mis Mary O'Shannesy's street-level millinery shop. Poet, Mary Gilmore, knew such a shop. Her poem, The Bonnet Shop, was written at this time and invokes the "carriage trade" upon which William Street partly relied. In it she brilliantly invokes the 1916 reality of the shop girl, "slimmed to a pose became a need" and who must typically be "obsequious, compelled to please".

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This was not the only photograph that Max Kelly had to choose from to illustrate the first building at the top of William Street. Not only did the City of Sydney Archives have other shots of the William Street frontage for 233, but there were photographs showing how Higgs' Boot Shop fitted into the Darlinghurst Road street-scape.

From left No 53-55 Darlinghurst Road, Government Savings Bank of NSW, No. 51A left Stadler Hairdresser and Tobacconist, No. 51 P Kirby and Sons Undertaker. Higgs Boot Importer on cnr of William Street on the right. This photograph was taken 19th June 1916.

Three storey buildings along Darlinghurst Road occupied by at No. 53 the NSW Government Savings Bank,at No.51 Darlinghurst Rd, Mrs Kirby & Son, Undertakers, L.Stadler, Hairdresser and Tobacconist. Two storey corner shop A.A.Higgs Boot and Shoe maker, holding a no profit sale with extraordinary reductions and Irresistible bargains as building being resumed. This photograph was also taken on 19th June 1916.

View looking south along Darlinghurst Road with three men in uniform at the corner. The three shops are No 233 A.A. Higgs, Customs Boot and shoe maker. No 231 George P Fife, Consulting Tooth Specialist offering gold fillings and painless extractions. No 229 Elite Cleaning and Pressing, also Sinclairs stationery and toys. There is a bicycle at the kerb. The corner building has a plaster decoration of the horn of plenty. The photograph was taken 19th June, 1916.

Commercial buildings of two and three storeys. Corner shop has ornate facade and a large sign 'A. A. Higgs, Shoe Architect, Surgical Work a Speciality, Repairs by craftsmen skilled in the art'. Nextdoor (right) is Surgeon Dentist George P Fife, and further right is Sinclair's Stationers. A well-dressed lady stands at the corner kerb near a family of three and other pedestrian shoppers. This photograph was not taken until 23 March 1918.