A City Lost & Found by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-11-05T09:01:23+00:00

1. Fish Market

2. Western Market

3. Eastern Market

4. Old White Hart Hotel

5. Royal Mail Hotel

CHAPTER 10

You Never Know What Might be Under It

Fish Market ~ Western Market ~ Eastern Market ~ Old White Hart Hotel ~ Royal Mail Hotel

Not fifty years ago, ten acres of central Melbourne was occupied by marketplaces. In a city where ground had never been set aside for a public square, its markets had, over the years, sometimes served as the next-best thing. But in post-Olympics Melbourne, their day was done – had been, really, a long time since.

Whelan the Wrecker hung its signs – Is Here and Was Here – on two of the city’s markets during 1959–60, concurrent with the CML demolition. The third they’d knocked down a year earlier. Two of the three had existed for nearly as long as Melbourne, ranking them either as ‘priceless heritage from Colonial days’ or ‘a complete anachronism’ – take your pick. But in the progress-hungry Sputnik years and with the markets inarguably redundant, the city council’s refashioning of its market reserves created ‘an opportunity possessed by few other of the world’s large cities for large-scale down-town development’.

The Fish Market was the last-built and the first to fall. In truth, it had been sinking and cracking for years, owing to the silty ground in which its foundations were sunk. The eccentric pile of buildings collectively known as the Fish Market was constructed in Flinders Street in 1891–92 – the last gasp of the land boom. It stretched all the way from King to Spencer Street and back towards the river, on ground that had formed the apron of the old Cole’s and Raleigh’s wharves and was now (and is still) bisected by the rail viaduct connecting Flinders and Spencer street stations.

The Fish Market was an oddity for Melbourne: a building out of square. In cities like Sydney, which took shape according to their own geometries, buildings were commonly given curved facades to fit the streets on which they stood. Not so in central Melbourne, where buildings conformed to the dead-straight lines of Hoddle’s grid. What made the Fish Market odder was that it wasn’t its front that curved, but its back – the rear of its main building mimicked the bend of the viaduct.

The Fish Market’s front might have been as flat as that of any Melbourne building, but straight it was not. This was a municipal market, remember, selling and storing for export such commonplaces as poultry, rabbits and butter, besides fish. Yet, to a modern eye, its Flinders Street frontage would suggest a far more glamorous, and certainly less noisome, civic function. Two hundred metres long and three red-brick storeys high, the Fish Market was sprigged with basilisk-spired turrets and a Westminsterish clock-tower over its arched main entrance, and was as grand and garish a public building as could be wished for.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.