By Virginia Simpson-Young, Bulletin 2/2025, April

Two mystery photos this month …

Photo #1

Where are we?  And roughly when was this picture taken? (Answer below the photo)

And now for the answer … from Bulletin 4/2025 (June)

Wayne Carveth, Tony Gardiner, Caroline Lipovsky and John Lagerlow identified the photo as Wigram Lane taken from adjacent to Paddy Gray Reserve. On the left is the Woolworths bulk store warehouse, and beyond is the Harold Park Hotel. To the right of the Harold Park, the Cliff Terraces can be seen on the horizon.

Caroline’s photo (Figure 5) shows the scene today – Cliff Terrace is now partly obscured by vegetation and and Harold Park apartments on the corner of Wigram Road and Minogue Crescent.

Based mainly on the changes to the Harold Park hotel (visible on the corner of Wigram Road and Ross Street) respondents estimated the mystery photo to have been taken in the early to mid-1950s. The mystery photo was taken in 1952 and is in the City of Sydney Archives.

Figure 6 shows the Harold Park Hotel (now ‘The Harold’) in 1949, a few years before the mystery photo was taken.

The hotel has gone through multiple name changes since its establishment as the Centennial Hotel when built in 1888. As John Lagerlow indicated, it was known as the ‘The Harold Park Hotel’ at the time the mystery photo was taken (and the 1949 photo). John also wrote that the hotel ‘was known as the Lillie Bridge Hotel earlier in the century’. That’s correct, but the licencing court approved the name change in 1890 (not in 1903, as is often written). The hotel had at least one informal name; Mary Jane Hogan remembered that the Harold Park Hotel was nicknamed ‘The Holler’ – because it was ‘built in a hollow’.

On the left in the mystery photo is the large Woolworths Warehouse/s or ‘bulk store’ with the street address of 57 Hereford Street. As seen in Figure 7 and Figure 8, the warehouse was bounded by Hereford Street, Wigram Lane, Ross Street and what is now Paddy Gray Reserve.

Before the warehouses were built, the land was part of the Glenwood estate (Figure 9); Glenwood was built for John Wood in about 1837.2 When the Glenwood estate was broken up, the lower portion became the yard for Thomas Coady’s carrier business (Figure 10). Ann Tinman who grew up in the area, said in a 2015 Bulletin interview that ‘the biggest changes in Hereford St’ were when Coady’s Yard was sold to Woolworths for, she thought, 1,000 pounds. She goes on: ‘They built a warehouse there, and that was their delivery centre for all of NSW. A lot of Glebe people worked there, including my father, sister and me.’

Figure 11 shows the Woolworths bulk store in 1956. It underwent many modifications in it lifetime including the addition of a meat packing facility and bakery.

Woolworths moved its operations elsewhere and the warehouses were used by other businesses, although not with the intensity of Woolworths’. These businesses included temporary retail (eg Figure 12). Anne Tinman recalls that ‘Sussans opened up their warehouse and office’ and Tony Gardiner and Anne Tinman recall an auction house being located there.

The Cyberspace Galleries were also located there. In 1993, Tharunka’s editors encouraged their UNSW student readers to bring ‘a placard and some tomatoes’ to the Cyberpace Gallery at 57 Hereford Street to protest an exhibition of ‘poetry and artwork compiled in the offices of Tharunka by Tim [Lawrence] and his accomplices’.3

In 1997, the Glebe Gardens development (Figure 13, Figure 14) replaced the disused warehouse buildings.4

Notes: 1. https://glebesociety.org.au/mystery-photo-oct-2022/; 2. Glebe Society 50th anniversary site. 3. ‘News Bit’ (1993, October 26). Tharunka, p. 9. 4. City of Sydney (2014). Industrial and warehouse buildings heritage study: final report. City of Sydney. 

 

Photo #2

And here’s a bonus Mystery Photo for this month. It’s a tough one! What does it show? Email your answers to editor@glebesociety.org.au (Answers below the image)

And the answer … from Bulletin 4/2025 (June)

This mystery photo is taken from the Sunday Times newspaper of 1 August 1909.

Kudos to John Lagerlow for having a crack at this one: ‘The bonus photo has been touched up and seems to be a detail from a larger photo, so my guess is the residence of some famous person. Edmund Barton’s first dwelling perhaps?’

Figure 14. ‘Glebe: The old and the new; fifty years of municipal life’ (1909, 24 July, The Star p.5.)

Well, no, but I think the identity of the cottage is even more interesting than Edmund Barton’s birthplace (which is above Baker’s Delight, isn’t it??). It is an image of Glebe Municipality’s first Council Chambers. This image or a similar one (Figure 14) appeared in multiple Sydney newspapers in 1909, Glebe’s Jubilee year.

Figure 15 shows the first Council Chambers in more detail. It is a detail from an invitation to various dignitaries to attend Glebe Council’s Jubilee celebrations on 2 August 1909. The full invitation, on the City of Sydney Archives website, includes colour illustrations of civic landmarks, the Glebe Town Hall, Post Office and the Jubilee Fountain at the start of Glebe Point Road, which was opened on the occasion. Interestingly, the invitation also has a photo of the Grace Bros Building, labelled ‘Entrance to the Glebe’.

According to Max Solling’s ‘Grandeur and Grit: a history of Glebe’,1 Glebe became a municipality on 1 August 1859. The first Council elections were held almost a month later, 29 August 1859. For the two decades before Glebe Town Hall opened, Council meetings were held in various locations, including for many years a cottage on Glebe Point Road rented from Robert Thrift.2

Thrift’s Cottage seems to have been located between Mitchell and Cowper Streets on the northern side of the Glebe Road (see Figure 16).

Notes: 1. Max Solling (2007). Grandeur and grit: a history of Glebe. Halstead Press, p. 154; 2. Advertising (1889, June 17). The Sydney Morning Herald, p. 11. from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13737020