disappeared arcades

In a long-gone era, ordering a milkshake at a milk bar was the same as grabbing a coke buddy from the drinks fridge today, only ceremonial; steel container, in went milk, ladle of syrup, ice cream scoop, inserted under the beater, poured into cardboard cup, straw, twenty five cents please. Though that price was in the burbs. In the mid seventies, I was once mortified by the fifty cents charged for one at the Angel Arcade. But you had to expect to pay a premium downtown.

Like most of Sydney's old shopping arcades, - the Imperial, Royal, Piccadilly, Victoria, Crystal Palace, Her Majesty's, - the Angel was eventually levelled, in its case winding up as Sydney's Recital Hall.

I was moved to post this after coming across an image of the original Imperial Arcade in the national archives. It went down in 1965, and all my life I'd never before seen a picture of what it was like. I've had to photoshop these copies to maximise a dearth of detail.

 

Going by its style and size it's late Victorian, no doubt contemporaneous with Sydney's solitary arcade survivor, the Strand; the latter, funnily enough, listed and restored as a heritage building in the same decade that all the others were demolished. Even though further searching turned up few results, I did get one of the original Imperial's interior.

(Edit 2019: Here are two better resolutions I've since found -

 

This was the Pitt Street end, the Hotel Arcadia occupying the upper floors.

end edit)

A magnificent Victorian Romanesque colonnade, timber (typically cedar) and plate glass shopfronts, mosaic tiled floors, iron and glass vaulted roof its full length. Thank goodness modernism came along to replace it, otherwise we could have been left with something like this...

... the aforementioned Strand Arcade, which sits opposite and just a few doors down.

Today's Imperial is that concrete soviet horror below right, doing such a happy job of blending with the streetscape.

As a reference point for what could have been, this is the Strand's exterior today,

Handily, I have a pretty rare 1950 street directory that shows some of the downtown arcades, tramlines, and laneways which no longer exist. The chic coffee shops of Rowe St made way for Sydney's highest office block, Her Majesty's Arcade went for Centrepoint and its even higher needle, and the Royal Arcade ...

... ah, the Royal. Check out this 1890 bounty of classical Victorian. It's as stunning as the QVB.

It even dog-legs. I was bowled over when I first saw this, as I'd only ever heard it referred to in passing as 'the old Royal', like it was no biggie.

The new Royal was a split level maze thrown up, not so figuratively, under the 1972 Hilton erection. Like so,

Seriously, the new Royal's two-level dual aisles, accessed between them only by escalator, is behind those ramps. 70s modernity spat at horror. However, The Hilton underwent major renovation recently, so now we can say, in all truthy gravity, that the Victorian dog-leg beauty you saw above is now no more than - a hotel driveway. Just a driveway.

Those last three photos of the same, central location over a century make an interesting sequence of styles; traditional, modern, and post-modern. They also well reflect social changes in Australia too, from parochial close-knit community, to forward-looking internationalist, to been-there-done-that multi-culti consumerist.

Today, the Strand Arcade is downtown Sydney's only remnant of pre-BTDT consumerism.

Edit 2019: The modern Imperial Arcade was demolished in 2010 for the new Sydney Westfield. I did a video walk-through on the last day it was still open. It was deserted and all the shops closed, a bit eery.  -
 See it here