Odeon Theatre/Pacific Gym/Lifestyle Fitness Australia – Carlton, NSW
Doing its best to hide its 70s facade behind 21st century bleating that ‘it’s all about YOU’ is Carlton’s Lifestyle Fitness Centre. Sometime around the turn of the last decade, public consciousness as a whole decided that going to a ‘gym’ was suddenly either retro or gay, but attending a ‘lifestyle fitness centre’ was the new yoga.
The Pacific Gym (formerly the Odeon and later, DeLuxe, Theatre from 1925-1964), not wanting to be branded retro or gay, caved to the peer pressure and started catering to lunch-break athletes and muscle-monkeys from all over the St. George district. That said, I could be completely wrong, and they just have that Pacific Gym roof mural on a standard escape-proof gym membership plan.
UPDATE: The Pacific through the ages. Here it is in 1939…
Carlton Theatre, 1939. Image courtesy Barry Sharp/Ken Taylor.
1959…
Carlton Odeon, 1959. Image courtesy Barry Sharp/Ken Taylor.
…and finally, 1970.
That colour’s jolting all of a sudden, isn’t it? Pacific Photo Lab, 1970. Image courtesy Kogarah Library.
Really makes you realise just how ugly that gym is.
Windsor Theatre/Mytilenian House – Canterbury, NSW
Canterbury's Windsor Theatre, 1981. Courtesy Barry Sharp and City of Canterbury Local History Photograph Collection.
Since 1938, this theatre has sat on the bank of the Cooks River, Canterbury. Originally called the Windsor Theatre, its proximity to the water made it prone to flooding and also, apparently, prone to thievery. The theatre suffered two safecrackings in the 1940s alone, a problem that doesn’t seem to have been experienced by its current tenants. The Windsor closed in 1981…
Mytilenian House, 2012.
…and was converted in 1982 into Mytilenian House, a meeting place for the Mytilenian Brotherhood, which itself was established in 1925. They’ve kept the screen area relatively intact:
I’m guessing they upgraded the safe, especially if the security around the back is anything to go by:
Past/Lives of the Near Future 
