There will be another council community forum on Monday 20 September 6:30pm - 8:00pm Crest Hotel, Level 2, 111 Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross for residents of Woolloomooloo, Darlinghurst, East Sydney, Kings Cross, Elizabeth Bay, Rushcutters Bay & Potts Point.
7 comments:
An historical vignette:
[Sydney Observed, Gavin Souter with illustrations by George Molnar pub. Angus and Robertson, Sydney first pub 1965, 1968 pages 68-73]
Kings Cross has forty-two coffee lounges like the Kashmir, twenty-seven restaurants, sixteen frock shops, eleven fruit shops, nine nightclubs and strip shows, and eight florists.
This is the industry that caters for thousands of visitors who swarm the Cross each night; it sings to these innocents, strips for them, feeds them. shocks them, solicits them, laces their coffee with vodka, takes their money, and sends them home to Chatswood or Kingsgrove feeling that they have done something exciting, perhaps even faintly illicit.
I may be an innocent from the suburbs myself, but I am convinced that King's Cross is more then the sum of those commercial parts: at the Cross I will swear there is more emotional electricity in the air, the women are more handsome (if they are women, that is), nerve-ends are more exposed, and other people's conversations are louder and more interesting than anywhere else in Sydney.
------------------------------------------------------------------- How do those dim witted councillors on the City Council propose to bring life back to the Cross? Not even hundreds of visitors in the Cross anymore. The hotels are gone and it follows that so have the tourists.
If the Cross is so fantastic the hotels would still be open be open and the Cross would be everything we want.
You can't get a frock and I don't give a frock.
The Cross is a hole offering nothing to almost everyone.
It is our high street handed over to the money grabbing Uniting Church with their heroin injecting shop ( $10 million from Carr and Co). The Wayside Chapel (ask the residents what a hell hole it is around here) a needle shop near Roslyn St.
And our dumb council will sit in front of us next time like the clowns in Luna Park turning theit heads from side to side waiting for us to stuff a golf ball in their mouths.
Once fabulous the Cross is now an unspeakable tragedy.
With dirty run down little shops from one end to another.
Drug dealers paradise. Drug addicts heaven. And the poor idiots who want to make a decent living, live in hope. And the poor residents who want a few decent shops can wait forever.
Kings Cross is a living monument to the incompetents who run this city and who run this state.
Once fabulous fun it remains a memory to be only written about.
All the members onf the NSW Parliament should hang their heads in shame.
Hotels opened here because what it was. Hotels closed because what it became.
The council does not listen. Why bother.
You may not like the city but Sartor had plenty of funds to do things and he did. Clover Moore is withdrawing funds again from the area. Just like the incompetent South Sydney Councillors did beforehand.
May we rot in peace.
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Can anyone find a reference to the plight and collapse of this former wonderful tourist precinct in the NSW Parliament? I searched Hansard and found nothing . Not one word said by your local member.
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Todays update- now it really is a the sum of its parts.
I have just walked through the Cross and this is the composition of the strip from the halcyon days of the 1960’s. Oh I wish I would be a kid again.
Number Type
2004
17 closed
7 sex shop
7 fast food
7 Accommodation
6 Pub / Bar
6 internet
5 strip joint
4 Money exchange
4 convenience
4 chinese massage
4 Café
3 souvenir
3 photolab
3 chemist
2 Tobacconist
2 newsagent
2 Hairdresser
2 Drug addict facility
2 Bottle Shop
1 Tattoo
1 Tab
1 Phone Shop
1 Library
1 gym
1 Flower
1 Club
1 Brothel
1 Bank
1 Fruit Barrow
100
Clover the clown will be wheeling out the new commander . Does she think that he will be at her beck and call? Wait till Monday. I think she will be in for a big surprise.
Silly isn’t it. We had Darcy and Clover here with the new commander two weeks ago at the PACT meeting. So what does she expect to report this time. All PR and very little substance. No doubt she will report that she cannot be held responsible for the upgrade delays (yawn) as it was the responsibility of the previous council.
I suppose she will say you cannot have the gain without the pain (yawn). Remember that Councillor Clover (1981-1987 version) did absolutely nothing for this area other than allow it to decay.
I see the editor of KCT blames Lucy and Frank. Well at least they did something even if you did not necessarily like it. All councils from 1981 to 2003 did zilch. Why did the Cross die? Ask the local mayors and our only member of parliament. Its ALL their fault.
Oh and another thing, Clover is having a civic reception for Darcy. You would think he had retired. Oh maybe he has.
What I blame Lucy & Frank for is doing the wrong thing -- and it's not just me who doesn't like it. They then refused to respond to community pressure to make changes except in very minor ('non-core') ways. Now this council staff continues Frank's mission, ignoring both councillors and the community. They have no mandate for this. Neither did Frank. Or Lucy.
The original plan breaks every principle of the Jane Jacobs approach to urban renewal -- even though Lucy quoted her in the first Crest meeting -- and espouses every superseded and discredited tenet of modernism. It is a disaster.
A small example -- over thirty submissions generated by KX Times alone objected to the cut-back awnings. They were ignored then and ignored now. Bye bye heritage, hello blandness. Or do you think short awnings are going to solve social and business problems in the Cross? It runs deeper than that!
Another one: I organised a public meeting that attracted nearly 300 people, who clearly voted against the grey granite in favour of a more cobbled, European style. This was ignored as well. If you have any regard for democratic process, you have to get upset about such tripe.
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