Gerald Veasley - Cross Currents
In our city, the history, one place has provided shelter to such an assortment of Misfits Geraldine O Brien on artists, activists, witches, strippers and drug users that created Kings Cross legend.
In the history of real estate in Sydney no center was faster in processing and rise of King's Cross the values, Darlinghurst, Elizabeth Bay extending exchange properties recorded figures that many disoriented experienced speculators in real estate - 1927 sales brochure for Elizabeth Bay House.
Every generation has its Kings Cross, and each has lamented its inevitable demise for Kings Cross is as much a mindset as a geographical slice of Sydney and chameleonic, absorbed the new and reinvented.
Bohemia survived there by decades of change, but it may now have finally been ousted by speculators in real estate when you walk to Elizabeth Bay House Greenknowe Avenue to Manhattan to find the party faded to white elegant apartment and glass, and , above, the Sebel party for white and glass, and along Macleay Street March 1 luxury apartments, all backed by a government promise to clean the Cross, you are wondering if this time could fall be sure.
At Elizabeth Bay House, the new exhibition, Kings Cross - Sydne y Bohemia, focuses on the period between the years 1920 and 1970 From 1928 to 1935, the great mansion was himself a squat Wallace Thornton artists lived there, and artists such as William Dobell, Donald friend and Adrian Feint lived and painted around the cross, but the curator, Scott Carlin says is an open question as to whether Kings cross can survive as the bohemian 'mind.
With more and more money coming into the region, it is difficult for people to live the bohemian life he was bohemian because it was cheap, there was a nightlife cheap and so many people live so close to each other, he said.
The new apartments are far from what the young journalist Dorothy Drain hired in 1936 The reputation of the cross was bohemian, a bit naughty, just the kind of place to attract young people who come to the big city in those days young could afford to live there to get you a bedsitter for 25 shillings a week if you want a ray of sunshine and some air, you might have to pay 30 shillings as journalist grade D on the sun I earned 6 a week and before long was spending a third of what a small flat bathroom and kitchenette with bedsitter the number 4 Tusculum Street.
Another anonymous contributor to the wonderful memories Kings Cross 1936-1946 published in 1981 by Kings Cross Community Aid, said that the ghosts of the 30s and 40s do not want the new units which then appeared, but bed-sitters would look with gas ring in the corner, shared bathroom, upstairs or down, the water on the floor if you're lucky.
But that was what was bohemian, and that the proximity of writers and painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, figures of the underground crime and striped awnings of shops and plane trees with their mottled trunks throwing a light subdued in the bright streets.
In the 1820s, Woolloomooloo Hill - the name given to all Ridgeline tip Potts Point along what is now Macleay Street, Kings Cross and by Darlinghurst today - was divided by Governor Ralph Darling in allowances for officials who built a series of stunning villas - Tusculum Brougham Lodge, Craigend, House Kellett, Elizabeth Bay House - only a handful that survived into the 21st century.
Later they were joined by Victorian mansions and terrace houses for the middle class but comfortable as bohemian Kings Cross, like a real place and a state of mind, was born, according to Louis Nowra and Mandy Sayer, following World War in their book, in the Gutter watching the stars of a literary adventure through Kings Cross, they write that as a result of the Apocalypse, he became a carnival oasis of randy soldiers, good time girls , parties to slide, drinking alcohol, fornication, and a celebration of the triumph of life over death.
Yet with what was also Peter Christian family life, owner of the pharmacy Macleay, recalled that in the 1930s, families and children were in abundance around the cross, with the school of the Church of St Canice down the path and Saturday matinee movies at the theater on Darlinghurst Road or Minerva in Orwell Street, where the children received a free comic and a lollipop package Even Tilly Devine, the famous Vice-Queen Kings Cross, put some of his ill-gotten gains to a Christmas party for children of the area According gift woman, Devine had a richly decorated tree and a gift for each child.
And the young and hope, living in their rented rooms, cherished their little luxury Lydia Gill recalled the book Nowra-Sayer just before the corner in Macleay Street, there was a ham and beef shop could be left a flat plate or in the morning on the way to work and collect on the way back on the plate would be an inviting salad of tomato, lettuce, spring onion, radish, a piece of cheese and a slice or two eggs hard, all for sixpence in cooler weather left a flat enamel, preferably with a lid, and collected a generous serving of something hot.
Kenneth Slessor, the great poet of the Cross lived on Avenue Billyard wrote of the inhabitants who came flat with apartments built for the purpose of the 1920s and 1930s.
When the stars are illuminated by neon lights where potato fries smoke and the ghost of M. Villon still living single and the sky girls lean more skylights, bumping mops While the gent in his 57 Cooks book mutton chops.
But the best residential years of pre-war buildings were healthier, with memories that recording Cahors on Macleay Street in that time was a bellhop, night watchmen, a restaurant on the 8th floor it was a phone on each floor and an operating reception intercom.
Kingsclere, at the corner of Avenue Greenknowe had its own cinema silent film and a stupid boy to transport residents cocktails to them.
But when the Japanese midget submarines attacked Sydney Harbor, the high end residents high-tailed out, as a newcomer remember standing outside and Regis Macleay with 28 vacant accommodation.
At the end of World War II, however, the fortunes owners changed again bones Cam, who ran a corner shop in Victoria Street, recalled in his memoirs Hit around the cross how the imposing old buildings were divided internally with cheap tips so that sometimes as many as 20 people shared one house to artists, she observed, rents were low and could die of much slower hunger Cross than anywhere else in Sydney.
Moreover, people were generous to artists Dobell, who lived in Darlinghurst Road and taught at East Sydney Tech, painted Walter Magnus, a Jewish refugee from Germany Magnus Hitler, unable to perform his dentist, had set a café in the basement of Claremont in Darlinghurst Road poet Mary Gilmore has lived above and Dobell and other artists were often fed by Magnus free.
The Americanization of the Cross during the war meant nightclubs and strip joints mushroomed along Darlinghurst Road, while the second influx of postwar migrants in the region set up cafes and elegant shops.
I remember a friend Reffo I, a woman said she had got memories of Germany His son was still there, she took a room and soon happens, manufacturing and retrimming hats for ladies social rich who lived primarily in Macleay Street or Elizabeth Bay She didn t never see his son again, he was killed in the war.
In his book on the 1920 Kings Cross, The Sea coast of Bohemia Peter Kirkpatrick observed what was true of the Cross and then, and in the following years Part was the focal anyone could participate ritual that had friends or the means to obtain grog a liberal attitude to life was all that was needed.
Or as Cam Bone said, if variety is the spice of life, the Cross is where to find where the famous and the infamous, classic and crude, self-righteous and the wicked, all live and work side coast, if not in perfect harmony, then fully aware of the rights of others.
Not that bohemian Kings Cross uses straitlaced Sydney When I arrived in Sydney to apply for a job in a department store, a resident recalled in memories, I have three questions Do I belong a union what religion was I Where did I live my first two answers were satisfactory, but did not give me the position until I moved to Kings Cross.
Yet another recalled that actors Peter Finch Styles Edwin, Ron Randall, Dick Bentley, Michael Pate, Wilfred Thomas and Gordon Chater were in and out of stores I remember Isador Goodman brightening our streets, a well-known pianist then flashed the along Darlinghurst Road in his red car.
In the 1950s, coffee Kashmir - with its walls painted by the infamous local witch Rosaleen Norton - became the second Australian to install an espresso machine though, Nowra and Sayer note seriously, a special license had to be obtained from the city Council to run because it was considered a steam engine.
Gallery Terry Clune on Macleay Street had become a magnet for a new generation of artists including Robert Hughes, Robert Klippel and Stan Rapotec He later became famous as the Yellow House, the area of Martin Sharp and his cohorts.
But late 1960, Vietnam and the influx of troops RR - according Nowra and Sayer up to 1,500 of them at one time - brought a harder edge to the Cross and adulteration of its old character's old haunts have become Americanized and renamed Bourbon steak, the tavern of Texas, Arizona Inn.
When the Americans left, the developers moved in, the activities of Frank Theeman urge battles Victoria Street, the disappearance of its low-cost housing and the disappearance of the heir Mark Foy, Juanita Nielsen, who had so bitterly opposed to redevelopment it spelled the end for roomers Victoria Street other disasters that could occur sometimes had crossed their minds, writes Cam bones, break a leg or going blind, but never, in all their fantasies of fear, they imagined that a terrible thing like this could happen to them.
Sayer and Nowra, who live in the Cross, argue that since the 1980s, commercialization booming and redevelopment caused the writers and artists to move to more suburban welcoming as Newtown and Surry Hills while growth spectacular from the very bohemian pressed tourism tourists came to Kings Cross to see.
In the 1990s, multinationals had homogenized the place where the German restaurant on the corner of Springfield Avenue became Hungry Jacks Cosmopolitan Café became the Sunglass Hut Rex Hotel Kings Cross and library were demolished residential high height as the Elan and the horizon began to disfigure the well horizon to the chagrin of the local community.
But still hopeful, they noted artists - especially the filmmakers - began to return, with the creation of Tropfest, Kennedy Miller moving to Metro and Minton House, on the corner of Bayswater and Darlinghurst roads become home to movie-associated groups in another decade, the Cross can tell a different story.
Kings Cross - Sydney Bohemia, Elizabeth Bay House, opens today and until September 21.
Cross Currents, Cross, Kings Cross Bohemian, speculators Real Estate.