Sydney CBD in the 1950s
This is Sydney in its last low decade. The 150-foot height limit that had shaped the city since 1912 was lifted in 1957, and what you see here depends on it — the even sandstone parapets, the rooftop views that actually reach the Harbour Bridge, the way St Mary's still rises above its neighbours — depends on it. Within fifteen years of these frames the same streets would be unrecognisable from above.
At street level it is a city of arcades. The Strand, built in 1891 and the only one of the five Victorian arcades to survive in its original form, appears here from its upper galleries; so does the Royal Arcade, Thomas Rowe's 1881 run from George Street through to Pitt, with its photographic supply kiosks and its Joules Knitters sign. The Royal would be demolished in 1969 and the Hilton built over it, which makes these ordinary shopping photographs the only way most people will ever see the inside of it.
Elsewhere the city is getting its ease back. Surveyors' tripods stand in the middle of wide, nearly empty streets. Office workers eat lunch on park lawns beside bronze statues. The crowds are on the beaches again rather than in Martin Place, and Martin Place itself — photographed from Phillip Street and from Castlereagh in 1951 — is still a street with traffic on it, two decades before it became a plaza.
