Naked City: Cathedral Street kaleidoscope

Cathedral Street runs nearly the length of Woolloomooloo, one of Sydney’s most economically diverse suburbs. A stroll down the leafy tree-lined thoroughfare soon reveals everything that is good and not so good about the ‘Loo’.

Start your journey at the corner of Riley and Cathedral and the site of the old Pips International night club, now a million dollar private residence of enormous proportions. This is the sector of the street some real estate agents have cheekily dubbed the ‘Paris’ end, with its block-long heritage terrace and boutique apartments. It also houses the somewhat mysterious First Fleet House where descendants of our original boat people gather for tea and scones to ponder their convict ancestry.

Cross over Riley and you’re at the historic East Sydney Hotel, the legendary ‘pub with no pokies’ and one of Wolloomooloo’s true gems with its wonderful old bar, homely atmosphere and long-running Sunday jazz band. Directly opposite with its discreet shrubbery-cloaked entrance is one of the neighbourhood’s thriving brothels, named some years ago in a Four Corners program for its connection to the international sex trade. The clientele is almost exclusively Asian and reaches a libido-charged crescendo around midnight, seven days a week.

A mix of residential and businesses take you down to the horrendous knife thrust of the Eastern distributor which effectively carves the suburb into two. If you survive the pedestrian crossing there’s a popular coffee shop on the next corner and then a section of the street dominated by the Matthew Talbot Hostel and the various welfare services. Originally designed as the community hub for the Loo’s extensive public housing estate, it should have developed into a typical neighbourhood shopping centre along with the rest of Tom Uren’s grand vision. Today it houses only a chemist, a cop shop, a convenience store and a fish and chip takeaway, with most of the area appropriated by the homeless and the welfare organisations that tend to their needs. There is of course nowhere else for the homeless to go and it’s a cruel irony that a suburb that houses some of Sydney’s wealthiest residents, on the ‘Wharf’ and elsewhere, is now a corral for some of its poorest.

This part of Cathedral is also the location of the infamous Walla Mulla Park, directly under the tracks of the Eastern Suburbs railway and home to an ever-changing group of itinerants sleeping rough and talking tough. A few years ago the City Of Sydney Council closed the park for several months and spent thousands on its upgrade. Hours before the official opening of the ‘new community park’ by Clover Moore, city rangers evicted the homeless, disinfected the seats and cleaned the trash away. Hours later and its regular residents had all returned. Surely the thousands squandered on the upgrade could have been better spent on providing proper shelter for the homeless.

Oh well, after a comforting bacon and egg roll at Stan’s Fish & Chips it’s onward up Cathedral, past the ‘Twin Peeks’ men’s club and the welcoming, albeit ramshackle, ambience of the Old Fitzroy Hotel with its regular pavement drinkers and resident raconteurs. Across the road is the graffiti-scrawled epitaph of a homeless man evicted last year by Council rangers from a community garden where he had taken up residence complete with a battery powered TV set.

The City Sightseeing Bus doesn’t run down Cathedral and maybe it should. The Lord Mayor could also make an impromptu drop in at Walla Mulla Park. Both are unlikely to ever happen but for you the reader, Cathedral Street, warts and all, is definitely there to explore!