Sydney CBD in the 1880s
The decade opens with the city's biggest building gone in a single morning. The Garden Palace, thrown up in eight months for the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition, burned to the ground on 22 September 1882, government records inside destroyed with it.
What went up in its place, in spirit if not on the same ground, was built to last. James Barnet's Colonial Secretary's Office rose on the corner of Macquarie and Bridge Streets through these same years — arcaded loggias, statuary niches, allegorical figures of Wisdom, Mercy, Science and Justice over a pedimented front — grand enough to be photographed twice for this record, years apart. Not every corner got the same budget: on Castlereagh Street a timber shopfront with a conical sheet-metal roof still traded as "Pottie / Veterinary Surgeon," pots and vases filling its window behind a paling fence.
On the harbour side, a sandstone bench carved from the rock at Mrs Macquarie's Point in 1810 still faces the water; the inscription behind it, cut when the road above it was finished on 13 June 1816, gives the road's exact length — three miles and 377 yards. And one photograph here isn't of the city at all: a multi-masted schooner under full sail, no land in sight, filed among these because it came from a marine insurer's own record, not because it shows Sydney.
