Fascination House 115-117 Glebe Point Road

By Lyn Collingwood

What’s happening with Fascination House has been fascinating Glebe locals for decades. Why does the landmark building on the corner of Miller Street and Glebe Point Road remain forlornly empty? Facebook followers surmise its private owner has no interest in or need for finding a tenant. While the property’s present state is a mystery, its history is not. The structure, which probably sits on an underground watercourse, has been a grocery, pawnshop, antique store and government offices.

Edward Carr Fortescue

A grocer who sometimes hyphenated his last names, Edward Fortescue was the building’s first occupant. Born in London c. 1834, the son of John Fortescue and Louisa Lucy née Carr, Edward was living in Glebe with his wife Ann by 1858. As a Mitchell Street leaseholder, he was one of the hundreds of locals who petitioned for Glebe to have its own Municipal Council, and he went on to manage property in the Mitchell Street area for Glebe’s first mayor George Wigram Allen. Edward Fortescue’s younger brother George also migrated to Australia, but the pair appear to have been estranged in their adopted country. George Fortescue settled in Arncliffe where he established a business making rabbit-destroying machines.

Faced with bankruptcy in the 1860s, Edward Fortescue had an emergency sale of his shop fittings and grocery stock (his creditors included prominent Glebe wholesaler John Bardsley) but was allowed by the Insolvency Court to keep his furniture. He looked for buyers of his Fortescue’s Patent Smoke-Consuming Furnace, claiming that one was in use locally at Pemell’s Flour Mill, and that Glebe Point Road bakers had installed the anti-polluting apparatus.

In response to an anonymous letter threatening to attack him at night, Fortescue warned in a press notice that he always travelled ‘prepared’. Another local who took precautions was Edmund Blacket. When he returned by boat from the city to the bottom of Ferry Road, the architect was regularly met by four men who escorted him through heavy timber to his house where his wife kept two pistols in readiness.

By 1866 Fortescue had moved the address of his home and grocery from Mitchell Street to the main road. The corner building was numbered 93 Glebe Road until 1898 when the address was fixed at 115. With Edward’s surviving son William, Fortescue & Son sold groceries, colonial wine and tobacco products, the last popular with thieves who regularly took off with pipes and cigars. Edward found himself on the other side of the law when he was given heavy fines for having faulty scales.

At various local elections, Fortescue publicly supported Bishopthorpe Ward candidates who were ‘self-made men’: retail trader and financier Michael Chapman; auctioneer George Wood Tate; and building contractor John Meeks.

Edward Fortescue died at age 76 at 115 Glebe Point Road on 8 May 1910, predeceased by his wife at age 69 on 24 August 1907. Both were buried in Waverley Cemetery. By now, their son William and daughter-in-law Lyle had set up their own grocery at 129 Glebe Point Road. A few doors in the other direction was another food shop run by a family with the same name. Frances Elizabeth, the widow of Henry Anstruther Norman Elrington Fortescue, sold cooked provisions at 109 Glebe Point Road. Shop assistant at ‘Mrs Fortescue’ was the proprietor’s son Frederick Cecil Edwin.

Following Edward Fortescue’s death, number 115 was briefly tenanted by J King & Co grocers.

Schames (Shamus) Morris

A prominent member of the Sydney Jewish community, Shamus Morris was a founder and president of the Hebrew Relief Society which raised funds to help anybody in the community experiencing financial or medical distress. In 1912 he established S Morris & Sons stationers at number 115, replaced by S Morris & Son fancy goods the following year. During their short tenancy, the family lived on the premises.

William Cowen

The next occupiers of number 115 traded in the building for four decades. An English immigrant
who gave his profession as ‘financier’, William Cowen opened his pawnbroking shop there in 1914. Over time, the business changed names: Cohen’s Pawn Office, Mont de Piete, Wentworth Loan Office. Long-term neighbours at number 117 were confectioners and pastrycooks.

In 1917 William Cowen married Rachel Adele Levy in the Great Synagogue. He died aged 52 on 2 July 1928, survived by his widow, sons Harris and Alfred and daughter Rebecca Annie. By this time the family was living at Bondi. Rachel Cowen took over the shop which did brisk business pledging all manner of items from clothing and bed and table linen to watches, cutlery, jewellery, golf clubs, cameras, bicycles, rifles and radios. Her son Harris helped in the shop. She moved the family back to Glebe, to 25 Avenue Road, and was still managing the pawnshop well into the 1950s.

Rachel Cowen had returned to Bondi by the time of her death at age 82 on 24 April 1973. She was buried with her husband in the Jewish section of Rookwood Cemetery.

Fascination House

The building was named Fascination House by the late 1960s when it was occupied by an antique dealer who was also a craftsman carpenter. Other antiquarians operated on Glebe Point Road: Dealatorium at 49; Amity Antiques at 67; Memorabilia at 97; Gladys Hunter at 45. Numbers 115-117 became the headquarters of the Commonwealth Glebe Project in 1976 and, subsequently, a NSW Department of Housing office where tenants paid their rent. The building became the focus of resident action groups protesting against evictions and rent increases. After the site went into private ownership, 35 formal objections were lodged in 1998 in response to a proposal to convert it into a hotel with an underground carpark. The Development Application was refused.

 

Sources: City of Sydney Archives; Glebe Society Bulletin 4/1986, 10/1998, 3/2018; National Archives of Australia; NSW cemetery records; NSW electoral rolls; NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages; Sands Directories; thegristfamily.org; Trove website.