The General Post Office, Sydney

Sydney took its own clock tower to pieces. In early 1942 the General Post Office's tower was dismantled to make the building less conspicuous from the air, every stone numbered against the original drawings and carted into storage. It was not rebuilt until March 1964. For twenty-two years the busiest corner in the city had a gap where its landmark had been.

The tower had been late arriving too. James Barnet became Colonial Architect in 1862 and got the first half of the building — George Street to the middle of the block — up between 1866 and 1874. The second stage, running the front through to Pitt Street, began in 1879 and was done by 1889. The tower itself was finished in September 1891, and when it was, nothing in Sydney stood higher.

Which left seventeen years in which the GPO was the grandest building in the colony and had nowhere to put a public clock. The answer was to bracket one straight off the parapet — a three-faced clock jutting over the footpath so it could be read from three directions at once, with horse cabs waiting at the kerb beneath it. Charles Bayliss photographed the George Street corner while it was still up, about 1878, with a sign for the Central Railway Office on a roof at the left of frame.

Then 1937, five years out from the dismantling. A press photographer took the corner from street level, a tram signed for George Street North passing in front of it and a Circular Quay bus alongside; someone got high enough that year to look straight across at the belfry, its paired clock faces and cupola level with the lens, chimney smoke drifting between the rooftops. Five years later that stonework was in a storage yard.

The tower standing in those frames is the first one. Everything above the parapet was taken down, stored, and put back by hand.