oxford at taylor square

Oxford St at Taylor Square, 1928. The place is jumping with commerce and merchants. It even had three department stores, long since gone. To do this gorgeous picture justice you really, really have to click on it. There's a couple of strong lads unloading Schweppes soft drinks at left, and ladies in cloche hats waiting at the precarious tram stop in the middle of the road, as vintage cars, trucks and horse drawn carts trundle by.

All the buildings above are still there, bar the one on the furthest left, McIlwains, which burnt down in the fifties. Although both the cupolas, on the Oxford Hotel, left, and the far building in the centre of the picture, were replaced by billboard hoardings mid century. Maybe I should have waited till winter to take this pic, when the deciduous trees don't obscure how relatively intact is the scene architecturally. But it's like most modern views these days, devoid of its former unique character. Now it's just a thoroughfare through a nightclub district, surrounded by apartments mostly full of young professionals who go to work early and get home late. There's no longer much opportunity for the street life and colour, or diversity of merchants, it used to have.