Today's SMH apparently says this:
'The Deputy Lord Mayor John McInerney says 'Kings Cross is working well. It's the first real emerging village. We've got to do that in Newtown and Erskineville and all other centres as well.' (Tim Dick, 'City wants its village people to picture a vision for the future', p. 3)
This is typical of the shallow spin that always seems to get published about the Cross. If you keep lying, there are always some fools who will believe it. One can only hope this is from Tim Dick's interviews last week, before Monday night's meeting showed pretty much that McInerney doesn't have the faintest idea about urban villages and how to grow them, for all his talk. Mistaking a village in the final stages of destruction for an emerging village beggars belief. And I get called 'insulting'!
I note that Tim Dick had been given my number last week and was told he could get a knowledgeable and different view on local politics. He didn't phone, but has obviously had a cosy time with the spin-merchants. His five paragraphs of free plug for Dancer's cabaret was particularly incisive. Meet the new boss -- same as the old boss.
The local who sent the above snippett commented: 'Glory be -- if this is the village solution, move over Putin!.
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At the crossroads
September 18, 2004
The Cross was once a cosmopolitan hub or an island of sleaze, depending on your view. But now, as the expensive apartments and designer homewares move in, it's just another trendy suburb, writes Tim Dick.
At any time of day, men walking down Darlinghurst Road are still asked if they fancy a lady, while women are ignored by everyone except those begging for a bus fare home.
There are still drugs, there's still crime and there's still a lot of alcohol in Kings Cross. There's still the scoundrels and actors, prostitutes and priests, drug dealers and doctors, strippers and hoteliers.
The Cross is still over-stimulated, over-populated and over-hyped. It's where being "cosmopolitan" allows a sex shop next to the public library and where prim concerns at public meetings are met with retorts of "it's the Cross, for God's sake".
It remains Bohemia Australis, Sydney's direct and total answer to Greenwich Village, Soho and Montmartre. But Bohemia is no longer as we knew it. Changed by two waves of wartime service personnel and a flood of tourists, it's now the turn of residents again.
A new age of suburbanisation is dawning. Two thousand tourist hotel rooms have gone, replaced by half as many expensive new apartment homes. Beginning to fill them is a new wave of wealthy residents, increasing what is already regarded as Australia's most densely populated area.
The backpacker hostels that dot the area are also under pressure, with competition from beachside suburbs and a recent weak tourist market.
The Kings Cross Partnership, an association representing local businesses, estimates as many as eight backpacker hostels are for sale, and some of those may fall into the hands of apartment developers.
The City of Sydney's roadworks along the strip, the part-sex, part-backpacker dirty heart of the Cross, will eventually turn the ravaged mess the works have created into a much "enhanced" promenade. The Cross is rejecting its recent tourist past for a resident-focused future as another inner-city suburb, which, before Queens Cross changed its name, it once was.
While on Darlinghust Road many shopfronts are occupied only by "for lease" signs and most of the banks have left, you'll find them around the corner, down from the El Alamein fountain on Macleay Street. This is where Kings Cross suburbia has already moved in.
You can now shop in a store selling paper and pens and nothing else, albeit very nice paper and extremely nice calligraphic pens, or the homewares store that charges $395 for a 30-centimetre-high stainless steel vase and $220 for a beach towel. A few doors along, where a tourist shop once sold cuddly koalas and cheap boomerangs, a boutique flower shop, Poho, sells expensive flowers or small, potted trees for residents' balconies for $800.
Owner Tim Baber doesn't think his store, open for barely eight weeks, would work in many other Sydney suburbs, but says "we're building up a regular customer base, so obviously there's a need for it". "That traditional revenue and commercial heart of the area has gone," he says, "and what's coming in its place are amenities to service the residents."
They include those paying $645,000 for a one-bedroom designer box in the new apartment building down the street, or renting one for $520 a week ($1800 a week for a four-bedroom unit). Many here now weren't there for the 2001 census, reflecting its transient nature. People here are twice as likely as the Sydney average to have moved within the past year. That census counted 20,018 people packed into 1.4 square kilometres, almost all over 15 and under 65. Compared with the Sydney average, they were more likely to earn more than $1000 a week, have a degree and live alone. Nearly 90 per cent lived in units (there were just 29 separate houses in the area), most people rented and much fewer were religious or owned a car.
Two years ago, the state member for Bligh, and now Sydney's Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, declared Kings Cross full, but there is little doubt by the time of the next population count, the area will have ignored that decree and gathered in even more rich locals.
The new Crossites will find that Sydney's sex capital has been dethroned. The Kings Cross Partnership claims it lost that crown some time ago. It says while there are about 80 sex-related businesses in nearby Bondi Junction, only about 30 have survived in the Cross, including 12 sex shops, 15 brothels, six unlicensed strip clubs and one liquor-licensed "table-top club".
That venue is Dancers Cabaret, more swanky nightclub than seamy strip joint, although the object of the enterprise remains for attractive and scantily clad female dancers to be ogled by men. It costs $20 to get in (although some nights, patrons receive 10 "dancer dollars" to slip under garters) and $17 for two stubbies of beer.
It sits beneath the posh noshery Hugo's Lounge, its pizza spin-off and a new cafe, about 100 metres from its former home down Bayswater Road, itself slated for a new bar.
"It was down and dirty, it was a bit raw," says Guy Robberts, who manages the club's dancers, "but the new club represents where Kings Cross is going. It's tapping into the Hugo's market, the more trendy crowd. People are shying away from the in-your-face dirty sex."
The new Dancers, he says, is a mix of nightclub and strip club, a place to "to go in there and dance with your girlfriend". And couples do just that. On one recent weekday night there were two couples inside, although they didn't stay as long as the other six or so men, all outnumbered by the dancers, one of whom is always gyrating around a pole.
If Dancers indicates a trend, then sex in the Cross is being corporatised, with little but volume to rival what is now available across Sydney and within cyberspace.
Except for the street sex workers. The removal of rich, bored international visitors may have robbed them of a significant client base, according to Maria McMahon, of Sex Workers Outreach Project. "I think the nature of the gentrification makes the area less attractive for clients," she says. "The bustling crowds that used to go up and down Darlinghurst Road have diminished. It makes it more difficult for individual men to approach sex workers."
While some sex workers have moved to other parts of Sydney, others get by with regular customers and mobile phones. With sex comes drugs, that other industry which, since the 1960s, has put Kings Cross on more news bulletins than most other Sydney suburbs. Marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines and, most notably, heroin have all made their mark. But since the heroin drought and the controversial arrival of the medically supervised injecting centre on Darlinghurst Road, the number of discarded syringes in the area has dropped, as have the incidents of people seeing drug users inject in public.
But the centre could become isolated, if Anthony Trueman-Farrell is right. The real estate agent believes "there's not going to be anything on that strip except a boutique retail strip".
The injecting centre's existence is defended as staunchly as it is attacked, although the evaluation of its trial period found 78 per cent of residents supported it.
Dr Ingrid van Beek,
who runs the centre, doubts whether changes in the Cross will do much to change the presence of drugs. "In 30-plus years, the police service certainly has been successful in containing supply, but certainly has not been successful eliminating [it]," she says. "The only way it could possibly result in less drug users is if there was pressure by new residents in the area to adopt what's called a zero-tolerance approach. From a public health point of view, for marginalised people it is very counter-productive."
Like drugs, alcohol is still there, although its type and setting are changing. The Kings Cross Hotel sits at the junction of William Street, Darlinghurst Road and Victoria Street. It is a five-and-a-bit-storey, dilapidated hotel, mainly patronised by backpackers and goths. Two years after paying $8.5 million for it, Brian Perry is about to close it for a serious overhaul, creating a swanky bar, restaurant and nightclub to cater for the new Cross that he predicts will be almost complete in a year's time.
"I can't perceive of Kings Cross ever being a Double Bay," he says. "It's always going to be a little bit naughty, but I can see Kings Cross being a cosmopolitan, user-friendly area, a little like Greenwich Village. New people are going to feel much more safe in this area."
They already should, according to the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. Between 2002 and last year, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts dropped dramatically, while assaults and robberies were slightly down. Over the past five years, assaults increased slightly and the number of sexual assaults has remained stable, but there are now fewer robberies and burglaries.
Trouble doesn't happen very often at Baron's, a 26-year-old local institution, which does not cater to "your football, rugby or league-type people," according to owner Michael Cherote. "They're more arty-farty type of people," he says.
The "fresh blood" new residents have a "strange kind of outlook on the place," according to Louise Dickson, owner of the Vinyl Lounge Cafe. "They don't really have the sensitivity for the people who have been in the area for years."
They may be unintentionally pushing out some of the artists who have created the very bohemian mystique the Cross is known for. Glenn Terry, director of the Darlinghurst Theatre, which is - confusingly - on the Elizabeth Bay side of the Cross, says the arts scene has become much stronger over the past few years, particularly with three edgy theatres.
"It's now becoming too expensive for artists to live here, and it already is for your poorer artists," he says. "The ones that get straight out of NIDA can't afford to live around here." Some of them are choosing Newtown or Erskineville, which have been arty suburbs for years, but places that remain comparatively affordable.
While some artists are going, the sex is declining and the tourists have gone, the suburbanisation of the Cross may just be another stage in its colourful life.
Or as author Kenneth Slessor put it many years ago: "Kings Cross will always be a tract apart from the rest of Sydney, still contemptuous of the rules, still defiantly unlike any other part of any other city in Australia. And, although its skyline keeps on changing in an unpredictable and bewildering way, its essence of individuality does not change, its flavour, noises, sights and smells remain the same immutably."
The above story was by Tim Dick -- the guy who was urged to ring me before writing his story, but didn't. Read the Kenneth Slessor at the end. There is actually some good between-the-lines stuff in the story -- $800 balcony plants and corporatised sex are self-refuting.
What annoys me is Dick's repetition of the spin-merchants' line that all this is inevitable, the battle's over, the old Cross is dead, just accept it. No reportage of a widespread and tenacious movement of locals fighting its imposed transformation into a yuppie ghetto. As Jane Jacobs said, 'when enough rich people move into an area it eventually gets so boring that they move out again'.
It's all about helping developers sell more apartments.
But the story of the Cross is far from over!
A vision takes place. For all of you who treasure the Kings Cross of old, Can I recommend all the fancy new eateries in Bayswater Rd ? There are three up market Pizza restaurants , two wonderful a la Carte restaurants, a fantasmo café and two great pubs.
In the good old days in the Cross there were many up market restaurants ( not one survivor ) . The Cross became famous not for cheap eats but the other end of the spectrum in the quality end of the food chain. If you are looking for cheap and easy there are about 4000 to choose from in Sydney. If you want fine casual and elegant dining forget the city (its all but closed in the evenings and especially weekends)
Last Friday evening there were literally dozens of young and elegant women eating and drinking in the most fabulous locations along Bayswater Rd. So what if the cocktails cost $15 each, there was not a yuppie or a dreg in sight.
Viva la Cross!
Personally I would rather ignore the occasional dreg than go broke buying $15 cocktails. This is the marketing con too much of Sydney has fallen for -- the only cool that's worth having is defined by money and expensiveness.
That's not cool -- it's yuppiedom. You can't purchase cool, just as money can't buy you love. And spending the average after-tax wage on a single night out is ridiculous.
What we need in the Cross is both ends of the market to maintain vigorous diversity. Admit it, all you types who love to hate the 'dregs' would be bored if they suddenly disappeared!
And the best things in life are... free!
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