Toys R Us/Gro Urban Oasis – Miranda, NSW
We spend our lives mourning our childhoods.
Our values and expectations are shaped throughout our younger years, sometimes subconsciously. Once we learn that, say, an ice cream dropped on the hot sand during a day at the beach won’t be replaced, the ice cream becomes a little part of us, a part we can’t get back. As adults we can buy another ice cream, but it’s not the same one. It’s just a band-aid over our initial carelessness, and $5 out of our retirement funds. We still feel the loss.
Every tantrum or outburst we have, every moment of joy, whenever the waterworks spring a leak…that’s a moment when the situation we’ve found adult selves in has touched a nerve from an earlier time. It’s a unique brand of pain we aren’t equipped to handle.
From the 1970s onwards, childhoods became increasingly materialistic. My own was peppered with trips to toy shops and Christmases spent unwrapping action figure after action figure. I never broke an arm climbing trees with Huck and Tom because I was inside on the PlayStation. I never knew that pain and the associated loss of innocence.
But when that PlayStation controller broke, you better believe I felt that.
The values that make the younger generation weep into adulthood are different to the ones who came before (you know, the ones who made it impossible to buy a house). When a brand that played a large part in that childhood dies, it’s a personal attack, even if we hadn’t supported or even thought about that brand for years.
At the (mostly) newly refurbished Westfield Miranda, there’s something new to mourn.
Imagine looking into those gentle brown eyes and telling that face it’s over – he’s insolvent. Imagine being the one to cause that perpetual smile to end. It’d be like pulling the moon from the night sky: the nocturnal world would hate you.
Toys R Us has gone, and there’s an entire generation full of rage at its passing. How could this happen? Don’t toy shops last forever? Where will we take our children when they come of age?
We were there at the beginning, when the American giant arrived on our shores and slew the usurper. When we were invited to meet Barbie, Sonic and Geoffrey, to come in and “have a ball”, to be seduced by wares previously unfathomable to our young eyes.
And we drank deeply.
Never mind that we hadn’t gone in there in years, that we peered inside occasionally and merely wondered why there were so many baby items. Never mind that when we wanted a new board game for game night, we hit up Amazon and their incredible range rather than hiking out to one of many inconvenient locations embedded in mouldy old shopping centres. Never mind that our own children asked for iPads and Xboxes over Barbies and Transformers, and we willingly obliged, even as Hurstville’s double-storey Toys R Us lost an entire floor to Aldi.
We took Geoffrey and his magic factory for granted, and this is the price we paid. We dropped the ice cream, and we’ve done our dash.
Rebel Sport remains – a glimpse into a past when big name retailers could team up and it meant something – but the toy story is over at Miranda. The threshold that saw so many delighted kids quivering with anticipation, birthday money firmly – but not too firmly – clutched in tiny digits, has been sealed up and replaced with an ad for a shop elsewhere in the centre.
Imagine the scene behind this wall. A big empty space that, once upon a time, someone saw so much promise in. “This place could make kids happy,” they thought. And it could, until it couldn’t. Today, that possibility has been restored.
Downstairs, just a bit away from the escalator that once elevated us to a place where we didn’t have to grow up, is this sign overlooked by Westfield’s image consultants.
The quotations around the R sometimes appear in official Toys R Us signage, and sometimes they don’t. Here they seem to be a disclaimer, as though whoever crafted the sign didn’t quite believe the claim behind the name: that “toys were them”.
It’s certainly true today.
Intencity/Target – Hurstville, NSW
As World War II drew to a close, manufacturers that had concentrated on building for the war machine were able to turn their attention back to their original areas of expertise. The coin-operated machine industry, and amusement machines in particular, exploded during this time, with pinball experiencing a golden age it hadn’t known since the early 1930s. Advances in technology could finally be directed toward these seemingly frivolous amusements, with efforts explained away by a need to boost morale and joy in the post-war years.
I’m guessing she’s a two-hander. The machine, I mean.
It worked; by the 1970s, pinball was huge. The game had spilled out of the milk bars and the bowling alleys and into dedicated pinball parlours. These were massive halls, the kind that had once been filled with ballroom dances and Friday night formals, outfitted with a shitload of power points and crammed with the wide variety of pinball machines made to satisfy an ever-growing audience. Some players were casual, throwing a coin or two in while waiting for something even more exciting (like such a thing exists), while others were hardcore. To the uninitiated, these parlours were dark, smoky, forbidding, sleazy dens full of suspicious characters, illicit substances, wild music and an air of general unpleasantness. To true pinheads, they were heaven.
And then, in 1978, a thunderbolt.
These new “video” games were took up less floorspace, required less maintenance, and ate coins at a much faster rate. At that time, the problem with pinball was that pinball wizards could make a single coin last a very, very long time, and that meant less money for operators because a. dudes weren’t putting in lots of coins and b. they were hogging the machines so no one else could either. Space Invaders’ novel touch was that the difficulty increased as the game went on, and soon even the most elite defender of Earth couldn’t keep up. Coin boxes overflowed, and suddenly pinball tables were looking quite dusty. The release of Pac-Man in 1980 – and the runaway success that followed – was the nail in the coffin. Video games burst into mainstream public consciousness, and “video arcades” rapidly replaced the pinball parlours of the past.
But of the many innovations of these video games, one proved crucial…and ultimately fatal to the industry: two-player games were nothing new, having been around since the original Pong in 1972, but advances in graphics and concepts meant that two player games could be competitive in a wider variety of arenas. 1984 saw the release of Karate Champ, the first one-on-one fighting game. Suddenly, you weren’t just trying to beat your friend at a lame approximation of tennis; you were trying to beat the pulp out of their virtual, and very human looking, avatar. If you won, you played on and awaited further challenges. If you lost, you’d better have some more coins if you wanted to try again. It rained money in these arcades.
In 1987, the concept of the fighting game was turned on its head with the release of Double Dragon, a game in which you team up with a friend to beat other hoodlums down. Who wouldn’t want to form a gang and take down all comers on the streets? It was this mentality that, in the eyes of concerned authority figures, started to bleed into the culture of these arcades. By the end of the 80s, the biggest threat for a kid walking into one of these places wasn’t that some creepy boiled lolly man would try and lure you to his house with the promise of coins…it was that you’d get bashed for real. Sydney’s Oxford Street banned arcades from its gay and lesbian areas due to the perception that they attracted young men prone to homophobic violence and petty crime.
At the dawn of the 1990s, the amusement industry fought back against this public image disaster by consolidating their efforts. Out were the independent parlours and arcades of the early years: Fonzies, Spacetacular, Westworld etc. In were group efforts by arcade operators and Australia’s biggest supplier and manufacturer of the machines themselves, Leisure and Allied Industries.
My family.
LAI had been around since the late 1950s, and promoted themselves as pioneers of the “Family Entertainment Concept™”. This near-monopoly had begun with the establishment in 1978 of their first Timezone family amusement centre, and as the public’s discomfort with the dodgy nature of video arcades grew, LAI stepped up and began selling the concept big time. Surely nothing would happen to you at a family amusement centre! You might get rolled walking into Spin Out or one of the independents, but Timezone had uniforms for staff! Bright colours! A brand to protect, an image to uphold! In an era of massive innovation, I think this move might have been the smartest. Pity it couldn’t last.
As the arcades tried to clean up, the video game developers themselves were doing their best to keep things dirty. In 1991, Japanese developer Capcom released Street Fighter II, a one-on-one fighter featuring eight hardcases beating the stuffing out of each other all over the world. The game is still counted among the most popular video games of all time, and it was an absolute sensation at the time. Every milk bar and corner shop had one, because all they seemed to do was generate insane profits from a minimal investment. Players were going nuts for a chance to prove their skills against each other, and since each round of fighting only lasted minutes, a large roll of coins was necessary to compete. Practice made perfect, which required even more money. As king of the arcades (and with many more machines on the premises), Timezone held local tournaments…then statewide ones. Then nationals. Street Fighter II was unstoppable.
Competitors rose in its wake, but none were more controversial than 1992’s Mortal Kombat. Yet another fighting game, this one had (for the time) photorealistic graphics that featured actors filmed and digitised into the game, providing a level of visual realism the cartoony SFII couldn’t match. It also featured perhaps the most controversial aspect of the entire arcade era.
At the end of a match in Street Fighter II, the loser was knocked unconscious, points were awarded, and you progressed to the next fight. In Mortal Kombat, victory was interrupted by a gleefully sadistic voice commanding you to “finish him”. Players were initially confused; “I beat him…didn’t I just finish him?” But they soon discovered that it was a prompt for a secret button input that would make your character brutally murder your helpless opponent. Once the media found out that kids were able to tear each others’ hearts out in these family amusement centres, calls for greater regulation and safety at these places reached a crescendo loud enough to drown out a thousand “finish him”s.
Mortal Kombat’s violence proved irresistible to impressionable teens and knife-wielding maniacs. Tips & Tricks Mortal Kombat 4 Special Edition, 1997
As for the players, they went mad for it. The game reeked of the arcade culture, and the money came thick and fast. Think about that situation though: “These places are creepy and violent, bad things happen there, bad people hang out there, we need to close them down,” versus “Hey, these places are our refuge from a society that thinks it knows what’s best for us! Nothing bad happens here, it’s just a place where we can hang out!” It’s easy to see both sides, and while bad things could and did happen at these arcades, the truth is that for many of the “rough” kids, home was an even worse place to be.
But oddly enough the financial pinnacle of this era of blood and thunder came in 1993, with the release of two…sports games?! The first was a basketball game released in 1992, NBA Jam. A simple, two-on-two basketball game featuring the biggest NBA players of the era…only with no fouls, plenty of shoving and a healthy dose of smack talking. More than any other, this game reflected the culture that had grown in the petrie dishes that were the arcades. At no time was basketball bigger than the early 1990s, and this game was in the right place at the right time. According to just about every source you can find, NBA Jam made more money than Jurassic Park, generating over $1b in quarters in the USA alone.
The other big success story was Daytona USA, a racing simulator by Sega. You still see (and definitely hear) DAY-TO-NAAAAAAAAAA setups in bowling alleys and cinemas all over the country, a testament to either the game’s staying and earning power or the weight of the machine. Both of these games made an insane amount of money, and when something like that happens, big money starts to take notice.
Pictured: big money taking notice.
Kerry Packer was a man who never seemed to miss an opportunity to say “I can do it better,” and then back that up with some serious splurging. No other decade had taken splurging to the X-TREEEME like the 1990s. Nothing was as X-TREEEME as video arcades. It was…the perfect storm.
SMH, 19 July 1994
I think that last paragraph is the most revealing: “the company hoped to take advantage” of consumers. As the article says, Packer and Village’s unholy union resulted in Village Nine Leisure, a concept so insanely commercial it could only have existed in the 90s. In Packer’s signature extravagant style, VNL wasn’t just going to run some ratty arcades with Daryl Somers cutting the ribbon – these were going to be suburban indoor theme parks. As VNL managing director Gary Berman puts it,
We’re banking on the fact that people … are becoming more discerning about what they’re doing with their leisure time. What we’re doing is … creating a critical mass of entertainment that we think people will embrace.
A critical mass of entertainment. Gee, if Spacetacular had thought of that one, they might still have been around in 1999.
It’s clear from the language of the article that VNL didn’t care about what the public actually wanted – they were going to tell them what they wanted. They were going to make a place so hi-tech, so cutting edge, so…X-TREEEME that the public couldn’t help but turn up and empty their pockets.
Timezone weren’t exactly shaking in their boots, however. Despite the impending competition, Timezone felt pretty comfortable that they’d remain a place for “core” arcade gamers to go, an attitude that seems completely at odds with the family image they’d been bending over backwards in the years leading up to 1994. But they had three things going for them: the brand recognition, that Timezone was where you went to play the latest arcade games; the edgy “street” image of regular arcades they secretly revelled in, knowing that the kids coming in to play the violent games were the ones spending a lot of money; and finally they were owned by LAI, who would have to supply the VNL initiative with machines. In the 90s, there were no losers.
Oh, except these guys.
By 1994, Norman Ross was essentially done. A pioneer of Australian appliance retail, they’d gone into liquidation in 1992 after spending a decade under the ownership of Alan Bond. Insert your own obvious joke here.
The departure of Norman Ross (centre real estate previously occupied by Nock and Kirby’s) had left Hurstville’s Westfield with an abundance of free space. As we’ve previously learned, Westfield Hurstville was a trailblazer in many ways, and consciously or not, VNL’s decision to make Hurstville the site of their first indoor leisure park maintained that reputation.
The VNL crew spent the next year (and $150m!) behind closed doors at Hurstville, meticulously sculpting what was being hyped as the evolution of the arcade. In fact, the absence of the word “arcade” from any promotional material felt like a conscious effort. Just as video arcades had taken pinball parlours one step beyond, so too would Packer’s entertainment venue venture into the next millennium.
Intencity. A name so 90s it puts World 4 Kids to shame. A name so 90s it might as well be wearing a Hypercolor shirt and Oakleys. A name so 90s it took spellcheck three times to get it right. Millennials, am I right?
Step into my parlour…
To get a sense of just how epic this place was, we’ve gotta take the full tour, and to do that we’ll need some help. When PBL and Village joined forces, they each threw into the mix every arm of their respective conglomerates. This meant that much of the non-virtual entertainment would be provided by Packer’s Channel 9 or Village’s Triple M radio station, and it also meant an advertising blitz spanning the same gamut of entertainment outlets. If you weren’t hearing commercials for the place during ad breaks on Village’s Triple M, you were seeing the TV ads on Packer’s Channel 9 programming like What’s Up Doc. In the weeks leading up to the April 5, 1995 grand opening, the public was treated to a vague, cool, edgy marketing blitz, punctuated by ads like this:
Packer even got his ACP magazine publishing company in on the act. By 1994, video games had reached such cultural prominence that a handful of magazines dedicated to the industry had popped up, the most prominent being the multi-platform Hyper. But “I can do it better,” so Packer introduced Gamestar, a shameless knockoff that hoped to beat Hyper at its own game by adding the advertising muscle of ACP, expensive freebies…and in the June 1995 issue, an exclusive preview of Intencity.
So just what was Intencity? The name gives almost nothing away. What happened there? If it was just another arcade, why all the hoopla? Let’s hear from Gamestar’s David Smiedt as he took the tour just prior to its opening:
Eight individual zones, each packed with the latest games, rides or virtual experiences. These are the Wide World of Sports Centre, The Chameleon, DiMMMensions, Virtual World, Wizards, The Lost City, Vocal Recall and Hide & Seek. Best of all, because there is no entry fee, you only choose to spend your cash on what grabs you. You can visit every zone or just hang in one or two.
In case you actually have time to think about stuffing your face, there are also three food areas where they whip up some seriously humungous pizzas, shakes and fries. There’s also the groovy Instyle shop, where you can pick up a street-hot Intencity cap or sweatshirt, the latest CDs or even a few computer games to take home.
Finish him.
Smiedt describes the Wide World of Sports (very subtle, Kerry) zone as being full of virtual sport games, most of which are featured in the above TV commercial. You get a sense that it wouldn’t have taken long for the “undesirables” to wear the place down, and sure enough, I have vivid memories of playing an arm wrestling machine that had long since lost its lustre due to five or six dudes at a time piling onto it. You spoiled it for everyone, fellas.
It blends in, disappears…
The Chameleon was a fully immersive pod-based ride which, according to Smiedt, combined “the speed and spills of a show ground ride and the best 3D video graphics you have ever seen on any game”. Once you’d chosen your scenario (high speed car racing or futuristic exploration) the pod would rumble and jostle you around as the game played out. Interactive…to a point.
Nothing’s free in a virtual world.
Virtual World seemed to be the same thing: you’d choose one of two scenarios (Red Planet or Battletech) and embark on another virtual journey of immersion, sound and fury. “You’ve never seen presentation, interactive brilliance and a games challenge that comes close.” gushed Gamestar. Except for, gee, I dunno…the Chameleon, perhaps?
I don’t know about you, but so far I’m not all that buzzed about going there. Next…
Wizards, as should be obvious, was a pinball parlour, featuring 17 machines from the past and the present. It’s interesting that they’d bother incorporating such a large pinball zone into the place, seeing as the games were so far removed from the futuristic angle they were going for. Gamestar reflects Intencity’s disinterest by relegating only one unenthusiastic sentence of the five page article to describing it as a “pinball paradise”. In fact, so boring was Wizards to Gamestar that they neglected to take a picture. Gee whiz.
Oh, but this is much more interesting.
If you were looking for “a get-me-some-dollar-coins-NOW collection of the latest, greatest slot games you’re likely to see in one Australian venue”, you’d be heading to DiMMMensions, sponsored by the good folks at Triple M. I seem to recall their standard arcade being named NRG, so maybe Triple M withdrew early. Says Gamestar, “There are X-Men and Tekken terminals everywhere and the whole place is kept pumpin’ by huge video screens blasting out Pearl Jam, Diesel and a host of other faves from Triple M.” Imagine if it were still around – it’d be nothing but Pink and Nickelback.
Speaking of terrible music, Vocal Recall (a diabolical pun, and that’s from someone who knows) was a private recording booth capable of letting you record one of 900 songs onto a cassette tape. Somewhere out there, someone’s got one of those tapes. Get in touch.
Found it.
The article ends with the usual “AND SO MUCH MORE” pronouncement describing Intake (the restaurant), The Lost City (a prize game section) and Hide & Seek (for little kids, and designed by the guy who created McDonald’s playgrounds). It’s sad that today’s arcades are pretty much all Lost Cities (in every sense of the term), but that’s where the money is. Everyone wants something for their investment, and cassette tapes just don’t cut it anymore.
Intencity has it all. Unreal virtual worlds, hot video games, old favourites and a whole lot of stuff you’ve just never seen before. For the foreseeable future, this type of interactive entertainment is sure to be the IN thing.
Interesting that Smiedt should end the article on such an uncertain note. Perhaps even he could see the ‘city limits?
By all reports, Intencity was an instant success. “200,000 people through the gates in the first weeks of operation,” screamed TechTonic. “In four weeks, Andrew Brown, 24, has spent almost $1000 at Intencity,” gaped the Sun Herald. The marketing worked (it certainly worked on me), with the image of all-ages-yet-slightly-adult-skewing interactive entertainment hitting the zeitgeist on some subconscious level…at first.
According to a June 1995 Sun Herald article, Intencity had found its audience relatively quickly:
There was one guy we were particularly watching. He had been sitting in the seat of a racing car game for more than two hours.
Later we found out his name was Scott Tinge, and he was 15. He had spent more money than he’d ever dare mention, yet he didn’t consider it until he saw that he had beaten last week’s score.
We asked Scott if he cared about the money he spent weekly on these machines. He replied: “I work at Kentucky. I got the jeans I want, I saw Pearl Jam when they came out, and I love playing the games. They’re fun. Sometimes I think about the money, like it could have been saved but I don’t care to think about it too much.
“I reckon I’m entitled to spend my time here when I’m not at school. It’s my money, and I choose what I want to do with it.”
Besides the regular hangers, like Scott, there is another type of people who visit Intencity, and they are the observers, like girlfriends, fathers and those who like to have a go but aren’t sure what they’re doing, because the concept of all the gadgets and joysticks is too advanced for their prehistoric brain – that’s us.
As you can see, not everyone was as impressed by the glitz as Scott “Mr. 90s” Tinge. In an article in RealTime magazine’s June-July 1995 issue, writer Leigh Raymond suggests there were greater forces at work:
Intencity’s location in a shopping mall and the involvement of the developer Westfield in its operation is significant because the design and management of Intencity enables some forms of social control. It’s like McDonald’s meets the video arcade.
While some of Intencity’s games can offer the same kind of subjectivity that old video arcade games did, the environment in which they’re placed is far more tightly regulated, and the ‘guests’ or users who might go to a video arcade might not find the Intencity experience that attractive. It’s safe, sterile, (if brightly coloured and shiny), family oriented and heavily staffed, unlike a video arcade.
The games are designed for an environment which is safe and sterile. Both the games themselves, and their physical and simulated environment, have many of the characteristics that George Ritzer argues, in The McDonaldization of Society, are being built into a fast food world: rationality, efficiency, calculability, standardisation and predictability.
Wherever possible, he argues, this McDonaldization removes the human. Staff become integrators, a role which is at least partly scripted and for which they are trained.
When integrators and actors step outside their roles, things become more engaging. Wandering around the corridors of games we meet up again with the young man who introduced us to the Chameleon. He asks what my score was and I say it’s so pathetically low I couldn’t possibly tell him, he’d just laugh. He laughs anyway.
Did I like it? he asks, and because he wants me to like it because he identifies so strongly with it, I say yes, sure, it was cool. But I’m not used to it. It made me feel, well it made me feel sick, I tell him.
He says he’s had hundreds of goes on it and you get better the more you do it. I want to say that like any reality, it probably looks better after a drink, but then I remember the vomit button in the cockpit pod and I start feeling clammy and nauseous again.
Likewise, the SMH’s Sacha Molitorisz had something to say about Intencity’s gender politics in September of 1995. It seems that despite all their efforts, Intencity didn’t have the kind of unisex appeal its creators were aiming for:
The gender gap yawns open at an early age. Look at how teenagers spend their pocket money. While boys pay to pound each other in video games such as Mortal Kombat and Streetfighter, girls tend to seek out less violent pastimes such as shopping or the cinema.
“I think it’s because boys are lazier than girls,” smiles Samantha Brincat, 15.
Damian Marshall, a 16-year-old from Haberfield, is not lazy, but he does like video games. He has about $60 a week to spend, most of which he earns by refereeing basketball games. He admits he and most of the boys at his school spend a lot of their time and money on video games. The girls he knows do not.
Whenever he comes into town to visit the movies, he stops at a video arcade. And he would regularly visit Intencity, Village Nine Leisure’s arcade at Hurstville, if it was not so far from where he lives.
If he did go, he’d have no trouble spending a lot of money. From traditional games such as air hockey and pinball machines, Intencity has virtual reality rides that cost up to $10.
Here flashing lights assault the eyes and pop music clashes with the aggressive sound from dozens of games competing for your attention.
Although Samantha Brincat has about $100 to spend each week, she has never been to Intencity. “I’m not really interested in (video games). Most of my girlfriends aren’t either, but most of the guys are. We usually go out shopping instead while they stay home and play their Sega.”
At least in this case the stereotypes weren’t being dictated by Intencity.
As 1995 became 1996, VNL followed through with their promises to open more Intencities. Parramatta, Tuggerah and Broadway followed suit, with the Parramatta Intencity in particular taking up a whopping two storeys. Despite the undercurrent of naysayers inevitably attached to any Australian initiative of this scope, Intencity’s mix of old arcades, futuristic virtual reality, processed food and cross-market entertainment seemed like a hit.
Certainly enough of a hit to put the fear into Timezone, which responded to Intencity’s big plans to open outlets in Malaysia by threatening to open a chain of its own arcades in Indonesia. How’d that work out, guys? Oh.
But by the end of 1996, the sheen was starting to wear off. While it’s easy to point the finger at the Hurstfield effect, there’s a much clearer explanation for the sharp decline in Intencity’s fortunes.
You may have seen it as self-indulgent wankery, but the reason for the extremely long winded history lesson about video games at the beginning of the article was to give you context on the changing face of the fledgeling industry, something Intencity’s planners could have benefitted from. If they’d known, perhaps they would have picked up on a very significant growing trend: home consoles. Since the mid 1970s, video game consoles were available for homes with enough money. From Atari to Nintendo to Sega, these consoles offered watered down versions of the games you’d find in the arcades with only a one time fee attached. However, the relatively weak hardware meant that the games weren’t 100% facsimiles of their arcade cousins, forcing players to seek out the real deal…until 1995.
Murderer.
In September of that year, Sony launched the Playstation, a system that was widely seen as the first finally powerful enough to accurately emulate the arcade experience. Suddenly, kids didn’t need to go to Timezone or Fun n Games to play the latest Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat; they could play them in their bedrooms. This had the knock-on effect of the developers slowing production of arcade games and focusing on these home systems. No new arcade games means no new reasons to visit places like Intencity, the rides at which could only hold their novelty for so long. In fact, the most forward thinking part of the Intencity initiative was making the rides the backbone of the enterprise. Unlike Timezone, they somewhat tried to avoid the arcade games being their bread and butter. But obviously, since it’s appearing on this blog, it wasn’t enough. The rides had to be long enough to justify the price, and the longer the ride, the less sessions you could hold. It was pinball all over again, but this time the stakes for the operators were much higher. Of course, no one felt this sting worse than Sega…but that’s another story.
With attendance (read: revenue) dropping faster than a dollar coin down a slot, the bean counters at VNL started to sweat, while the bean counters at Westfield started to tighten the noose. With the ever-shifting face of the retail game bearing down, and the red finally swallowing the black, time was up for Intencity, and that hefty amount of real estate made it an extremely easy…well…
You can bet Target didn’t spent $150m on this.
There’s little to say about Target and the homogenised shopping experience it offers (uh…the floor out the front’s still the same? Aaand so’s that ceiling sprinkler?), so let’s turn our attention to a post-mortem of Intencity. With that logo, that attitude and well, that entire concept, it was a foregone conclusion that it would never reach the new millennium. Once Hurstville closed in 1997, PBL’s enthusiasm began to wane. Parramatta soon followed, and in 1999 PBL sold its stake entirely, leaving Village holding the bag.
According to a November 1998 SMH article, it wasn’t until that year that Intencity finally turned a profit – after four years of operation. Not good. In that year alone, coin-op machine revenue had fallen 30% from 1997. Ouch. VNL chief exec John Anderson told the SMH that:
“Intencity became very fragile because it relied on virtual-reality attractions to bring people to the centres and it became apparent the formula was wrong given the Australian marketplace and the games that had been selected,” Mr Anderson said.
“Virtual reality will come . . . but it will be a minimum of five to 10 years until you see it in a format that drives people into entertainment centres,” he said.
Mr Anderson attributed the decline in revenue from coin-operated machines to the emergence of the high-technology computer games for the home and increased use of the Internet – a situation which has also affected VNL’s 50 per cent-owned machine-distribution business.
You don’t say?
In the years since, arcades have essentially become a thing of the past. Anderson’s prediction of virtual reality entertainment centres by 2008 did not come to pass, to say the least. Where George Street was once peppered with video arcades of every size, only one remains today – Timezone. Perhaps by soldiering ahead with the same business plan they’ve had since 1978, they were able to weather the storm that decimated the industry. It’s not what it was, despite what their website would have you believe. Today, Intencity claims to have 14 “family entertainment centres” across eastern Australia, but if you’ve ever been to one, you’ll know they’re traitors to the name, having become the very thing they tried so hard to push the industry beyond so many years ago. If nothing else, the failure of Intencity is a testament to a lack of forward thinking by both the suits behind it and the public they hoped to take advantage of.
Game over (ugh), Intencity. The 90s were never 90ier.
Hurstfield – Act III: Nemesis (1988-2013)
I began to lose control…
What, you mean it didn’t before?
By 1988, the decade-old Westfield Shoppingtown at Hurstville was outgrowing its baby clothes. The centre had been crafted as the perfect milkshake to bring the boys to Hurstville’s yard, but it had worked too well. The public’s insatiable hunger for more shops, more variety, more ways to waste their money had grown, while the centre itself had remained essentially the same.
St George Express, June 27 1989
What had met the “international standard” just ten years earlier no longer cut the mustard in the decade of decadence. Of course, this standard was set by Westfield itself, which had opened six centres in the USA since 1980 in its quest to become an international presence. Oh but don’t worry all you xenophobes, they’re still as dinky-di true-blue fair-dinkum mate as a dead dingo’s donger:
Like a weed.
Despite suffering heavy losses in the 1987 stock market crash – bad enough to force the sale of star asset Network Ten (!) in 1989 – the Westfield Group was keen to apply what it had learned in the international market to its legacy outlets.
And let’s face facts: they don’t get much more legacy than Hurstville.
I say we nuke the site from orbit.
Dated 1987, Westfield’s plan for aggressive expansion looks very bold on paper. The centre’s extension was to take up an entire block neighbouring the existing site, a proposal that no doubt delighted Hurstville Council. I know what you’re saying, “It’s lucky they had a spare block of land bereft of residents on hand in order to allow Westfield to expand!”
Well, about that…
When we thought we were moving closer to the shops, this wasn’t what we had in mind.
Just left of the complex in that picture are houses, trees, all that good stuff. But as the caption says, FULL STEAM AHEAD.
Come on, those houses had parking for three cars at best.
For so fewer people.
Back in their original 1975 proposal, Westfield had been very careful to minimise the impact the centre would have on the community, all in the service of buttering up the Hurstville Council. The pinnacle of this effort was the Snowy Hill Park atop the centre, a nature reserve where people could come and relax away from the hustle and bustle of the retail juggernaut below. In 1988, it was the first to go, razed to make way for a carpark. It says a lot about how the balance of power in the suburb had changed in ten years that this was able to happen. As it stands, this blog entry is now the most public memorial to Snowy. Ouch.
Leader, December 5 1989
All this talk of growth was all well and good, but what exactly was growing? Sure, Westfield’s profits were hulking out, and Hurstville Council’s take-home wouldn’t have been anything to sneeze at, but was Hurstville itself doing much growing? Let’s see…
Leader, March 12 1991
Leader, 1989
Leader, January 15 1991
So, no.
1990. It was time. The grand opening everyone had been foaming at the mouth for, that people had sacrificed their homes for – that Snowy Hill had been swept under the rug for – was at hand. Did Westfield spare any expense bringing out the big guns for such an occasion?
Maggie T wasn’t good enough for you?
Well, okay. Uh…
Isn’t he that guy from The Zone?
Hm. So, no.
The biggest jewel in Westfield’s new crown was the addition of Sydney department store mainstay Grace Bros. With Waltons, Westfield had backed the wrong horse, and were determined to make sure that didn’t happen again. The new Grace Bros. also served to steal even more of the floundering Roselands’ thunder, as GB had been that centre’s pride and joy for years at this point. Also new to Hurstville were K-Mart, 125 new specialty shops, as well as some of the biggest and most resilient names in retail:
BIG
HUGE
MASSIVE
OOH!
DAMN!
Take a moment to catch your breath and let’s take a look at the whole lineup:
La WHAT’S World of Coffee?! 1990
My award for the best business name ever goes to the hairdresser known as BOSS HAIR TEAM. Untouchable.
Armed with all these new shops and bearing the International Standard ™, Westfield was primed to take the new decade by storm, and for a time it worked. High profile acquisitions and additions peppered the 1990s, but none as exciting as when dying god Venture made way for American toy giant Toys R Us in 1993.
As my contemporaries would concur, the concept of a two storey toy shop was mind-blowing at the time. Compare this to the mere one storey of Bankstown’s World 4 Kids (itself a countermeasure against Toys R Us) and there’s just no competition. Never mind that the bottom level was mainly baby stuff and outdoor junk, that’s not the point. TWO STOREYS.
Whoever rated Another 48HRS as a ‘top’ film should be shot.
On the entertainment front, Westfield had topped off its retail sundae with the cherry that was Greater Union. An eight-screen cinema (considered huge at the time, believe me), GU blew away local competition like the Hurstville Savoy, the Kogarah Mecca and the Beverly Hills Cinema. How could those small fry hope to compete with eight screens?
For me though, the high point of Westfield’s desire to innovate during the 1990s was Intencity. Pre-empted by a cool, mysterious ad campaign (below), it seemed as if Intencity was the natural evolution of video game arcades of the past such as Spacetacular and Fun & Games….but that’s another story.
By 1995, the future looked very bright indeed:
No more Boss Hair Team. 1995.
But all the glitz and dazzle was blinding Hurstvillians from what was really going on in the area. For every Toys R Us, there was a story like this. For every K-Mart, there was one of these. And for every Grace Bros., there was a Barter’s.
Rhyming years with years is pretty lazy, Barter’s.
Remember Barter’s (see part one if you don’t)? Living proof that bigger isn’t always better, the three-storey Barter’s had begun its slow decline with the advent of the Westfield itself back in the late ’70s. In January 1985, Barter’s held its last ever sale, and everything had to go:
Barter’s Fire Sale, January 1985. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Just take it. Barter’s Fire Sale, January 1985. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Scabs from all over Hurstville picked the place clean. What had once been the example of retail elegance in Hurstville was now…well:
Should have had such a sale every day. Barter’s Fire Sale, January 1985. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
They were even giving the Norms away. Barter’s on the slab, July 1985. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
The oft-ignored side effect of the Westfield was the damage it caused to the Forest Road shopping strip. Although it had originally been intended to complement those shops, Westfield had done everything so much bigger and better that the little guys outside didn’t stand a chance. Throughout the ’90s and ’00s, stories like this were common:
Leader, November 14 1996
Leader, July 20 1995
Leader, November 8 2004
Leader, October 5 2000
Not helping matters for local retailers was the debacle that was Forest Road Mall. Proposed in 1988 by council and intended to celebrate Hurstville becoming a city that year, the plan would have seen the two-way Forest Road closed off to private traffic and transformed into a pedestrian mall, ‘Hurstville Boulevard’. It was believed that this mall would combat Westfield’s dominance of the area, although how council thought they could do this and not appear two-faced is beyond me. Needless to say, it wasn’t very popular with retailers:
Leader, January 18 1989
Leader, November 3 1992
Leader, November 10 1992
It may shock you to learn that Hurstville Council went ahead with this plan in 1991, going so far as to hold an opening celebration…
Leader, August 6 1991
…that featured perhaps one of the least appropriate double-billings in entertainment history:
Gimme shred, baby. Leader, August 1 1991
The madness ended in late 1991, as the recession, coupled with increasingly fierce opposition, caused council to rethink their plans. As so much of the construction work to turn Forest Road into the car-free Hurstville Boulevard had been completed, a compromise was met: Forest Road became a one-way street.
Leader, April 3 1991
You can imagine the big cheeses at Westfield sitting around laughing at this mayhem, which only served to strengthen their position in Hurstville.
But by 1998, Westfield’s gloss was starting to wear off. Another ten years had passed, and in that time international standards had increased again, Westfield Miranda had expanded to become even bigger again, Westfield Burwood was slated for demolition to be replaced by a more modern centre, and many of the heavy hitters of the mid ’90s were winding down. The ever-shifting plates of retail had unsettled giants like Brashs, Toys R Us and *sniff* Intencity, which was replaced by Target in 1997.
Even the cinema was starting to lose its sheen, seen by locals as a hangout for thugs and hoodlums, as was the neighbouring food court. Suddenly, it didn’t feel so good to shop at Hurstville.
Leader, April 14 1992
Leader, April 18 1992
Leader, April 7 1992
The social climate of Hurstville was something that neither council nor Westfield stopped to consider at any time, especially when they were bulldozing houses to expand the shopping centre. That Hurstville was becoming increasingly multicultural didn’t seem to occur to either entity also, only becoming apparent when it was too late to repackage and restructure the complex to suit the suburb’s new needs. I wonder if Westfield ever stopped to wonder why it was suddenly filled with cheap $2 junk shops and mobile phone accessory outlets?
Today, it’s a far cry from the glory days. This year marks Westfield Hurstville’s 35th anniversary, and you can’t half tell. Let’s take a quick tour.
Ugh.
‘Shoppingtown’ no more. Yeah, that was the most dated part of the whole thing, Westfield.
The snow has melted…
Here are the steps that once took those of us craving fresh air and nature up to Snowy Hill Park. Now it’s a place to smoke while you’re waiting for your kid to emerge from the daycare centre. See those bushes to the left? That’s all you’re getting.
Snowy Hill Park in better days, 1978.
Mediocrity and unpleasantness all under one roof.
I don’t understand how only some of the floor tiles are stained. How does that happen?
Not really all that jolly, is it?
Jolley’s Arcade lives on today with this dated entrance to a dungeon filled with a pretty dire selection of shops, with the fashionably incongruous Fevercast a notable exception. I wonder if they still pay less rent?
Is that guy in the trackies taking a selfie?
When even Westfield became too depressing, the threatening youth moved outside to hang around. Not quite the pedestrian mall council envisioned, I’m guessing.
Not pictured: Sul Ponte’s clown mascot. Hey, it worked for the last tenant…
What was once a dedicated McDonalds restaurant was cut in half with the 1990 extension, and today it’s Sul Ponte cafe. McDonalds’ original seating arrangements remain inside, but the burgers themselves have moved up to the food court outside K-Mart.
Don’t put a target on the side of your building, it’ll only encourage them.
Park Road was built over in 1990 to create this shopping overpass. On the left is the original Westfield, although the carpark on top was added in 1990.
A rose by any other dead end…
This is all that remains of Rose Street today. That music lessons shop looks ancient enough to remember when it was a full street.
In the scheme of things, Westfield seems to have moved on and forgotten about Hurstville. They don’t even bother to charge for parking. The corporation has realised that the true profits are to be had in places like Bondi Junction and Pitt Street Mall, and it’s safe to say that ‘Hurstfield’ will not be receiving further extensions.
What was once hailed as Hurstville’s saviour undoubtedly proved its greatest nemesis and ultimately, its assassin. The damage is done, the parasite has sucked the city dry, and the glory days are long behind it. Visiting today is a depressing, colourless experience heightened by the assorted mental patients who frequent the centre. It hasn’t just become a part of the Hurstville experience, it has become Hurstville. Without the centre, the suburb would become nothing.
And given the state of the centre, I’m not so sure that hasn’t already come to pass.
I’d like to wrap this saga up by sharing a letter that I feel is wonderfully succinct, poignant and devastating all at once. This was published in the Leader, November 1 1990, and shows astounding foresight/cynicism. The writer must be dead by now, so RIP Frank, and RIP Hurstville.
Hurstfield – Act II: Hubris (1975-1988)
…and my heart was beating fast.
Lowy and Saunders, the Butch and Sundance of retail. Image courtesy Westfield
Frank Lowy and John Saunders had arrived in Australia in the early 1950s, both Jewish immigrants who had been scarred by the horrors of fascism in Europe. Australia offered them opportunities, hope, a new start. In 1953, Saunders owned and operated a Blacktown delicatessen he’d bought after years of working as a packer, while Lowy was running a smallgoods delivery business. Saunders was impressed by Lowy’s punctuality and work ethic, and the two hit it off.
Ground Zero, 1953. Image courtesy Westfield
The pair went into business together, with Saunders shrewdly choosing to focus on the growing suburbs on Sydney, out west in particular, rather than the inner city. Soon their delicatessen was joined by a continental coffee lounge as the area’s efficient railway network delivered a steady influx of customers.
But Saunders had been keeping an eye on American developments in the small business arena. The newest trend there was a strip mall with a roof. In Australia, shops were strictly on the streets, never indoors. The duo saw an opportunity.
Failure on rails, 1986. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
1975. Hurstville’s legacy as the place to shop in St George was in tatters. Long gone were the suburb’s retail pillars Diments and Jolley’s, and dying a slow death was Barter’s. Coles Variety and Woolworths Arcade came off as second best, imitators rather than the innovators their predecessors had been. It was a sorry state of affairs, but at least they had plenty of parking.
Frisco Furniture’s days are numbered, although it doesn’t know it yet. 1976. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
There was also the ill-conceived Super Centre, which strangled the train line, but the Hurstville Council’s hope that it would become another shopping success had long gone. For the first time since its inception, Hurstville lacked an identity.
Starting with Hornsby in 1961, Westfield had opened shopping centres all over Sydney. Burwood opened in 1966, and Miranda Fair was swallowed up by the Westfield Group in 1969. Roselands had remained beyond their grasp, however, and the group was looking to fill the shopping void in the southwest.
Wishful thinking.
In November 1975, Westfield put forward a proposal to Hurstville Council: a shopping complex that would contain a department store, a large supermarket and various small shops, spread out over three floors. A town park, office space and extensive car parking only helped to sweeten the deal, with the park especially taking steps towards complying with Hurstville Council’s plan for the area. If you’re shocked to learn that Hurstville Council had a plan for the area at this point in time, join the club.
More wishful thinking.
“The Scheme” sounds very Bond Villain, doesn’t it?
Westfield’s choice of words were kind to say the least in its description of Hurstville’s current state. The new centre would ‘reinforce’ Hurstville’s ‘existing trading character’. Well, that’s one way of putting it.
Don’t wear sunglasses inside, you look like a tool.
Rose Street is an unfortunate victim of progress.
Considering it was to be placed between the current commercial area and residential housing, the centre’s design was very careful to adhere to Hurstville Council’s then-provisos that the visual bulk of the building be minimised.
What happened to the offices?
A unique aspect of the building’s layout was its system of ramps. It was possible to traverse the entire centre without ever encountering a set of stairs, presumably so one could take their time browsing and purchasing, or to make it harder to escape.
Yeah, right.
What’s particularly interesting about this initial plan is the town park. This breezy artist’s conception makes it look like a kind of leafy paradise, but it’s harder to imagine in practice. How long until all the trees would have names carved into them, until all the benches were covered in gum and graffiti? Would Westfield even go ahead with the park, which by their own veiled admission was a wheel greaser? More importantly, had the wheel been greased enough? Would Council submit to this corporate shaming at the cost of their pride? The Super Centre wound was still fresh, but if it scabbed over in time it could still be a viable shopping outlet…couldn’t it?
Of course, we know how this story ends.
SMH, June 24 1977
Cross St Car Park in happier times, 1976. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
In order for this beast to be constructed, something had to go, and since the new centre would provide parking unlimited for St Georgians, the then-new yet deeply unpopular council car park got the axe.
We hardly knew ye. Crofts Ave car park, 1976. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Construction began in May 1977, and they didn’t waste any time. Half of Rose Street was obliterated:
Rose St razed, 1977. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
…while the new-old car park was levelled:
Humphreys Lane enjoys the last sunlight it will ever see, 1977. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Crossing Cross St, 1978. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Carving it up, 1977. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Keeping the sign around was a sick touch, 1978. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
The existing retailers looked on with trepidation, worried for their future and rightfully so.
Obsolescence in motion, 1977. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Westfield takes shape, 1977. Image courtesy Hurstville Library
Finally, on October 9, 1978, it was ready. Premier Neville Wran was on hand to usher in the birth of a new age for Hurstville.
As you can probably tell by the plans above, the centre was much smaller when it opened than it is now. 1978 was a simpler time when people didn’t need as much junk. But what junk did they need, exactly? What did this behemoth of retail extravagance boast that Forest Road’s usual suspects couldn’t? Let’s take a look at 1978’s centre directory to get a better understanding of just what Westfield had brought to Hurstville’s threadbare table.
“Sound Advice”? Ugh.
Waltons! Backing winners as always, guys. We can laugh now, but Waltons was one of the biggest drawcards of the new centre, a department store that would hark back to the glory days of Jolley’s (or would it?). The rest of the shops on display are (mostly) before my time, so take your time and reminisce.
Snowy Hill Park, 1978. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Of special note is the much-ballyhooed town park. True to their word, they actually went ahead and built it, even going the extra mile of suck-uppery by naming it after former Hurstville mayor and enthusiastic supporter of the Super Centre, Gordon “Snowy” Hill, who had died in 1978. From one Hill 2 anotha…
I wonder where this sign is today? 1978. Image courtesy Hurstville Library
The entrance to Snowy Hill Park was located at the junction of Cross and Crofts Streets, or just opposite where you’d emerge from Jolley’s Arcade.
McDonalds was a full-on restaurant at the top of the ramp, 1980. Image courtesy Hurstville Library
Or just behind that car.
The stairs led up to the park which included tennis courts, amenities, an area for exhibitions and this statue:
A cornucopia of ‘plenty’. I’m still laughing. 1979 Image courtesy Hurstville Library
The statue is holding a cornucopia, supposedly a symbol of the “plenty” available to all in the Westfield. There’s something oddly creepy about that. Or creepily odd, your choice.
By the way, if you’ve gotten this far and are not happy with those image watermarks, take it up with Hurstville Council, who see fit to charge $20 per photo for a decent quality digital copy. Yeah, right, let me reach into my wallet for you, HC, since I am a millionaire. Has anyone ever paid that fee? Do the Hurstville Councillors believe they’re sitting on a goldmine of photographs once people start craving digital copies of old photos of a shopping centre? Then again, I’ve just written two articles about said shopping centre, and you’ve read them, so the joke’s on us I guess.
Exciting stuff.
It goes without saying that the Westfield opening was a huge success, and galvanised shopping in the St George area. Suddenly, Roselands was looking a little long in the tooth, and Miranda was just too far away, whereas Hurstville, with its new cache of ‘plenty’, was once again the convenient option. Profits soared, retailers and customers alike flocked to the suburb, and any sourpusses in the old commercial area of Forest Road had their complaints to council fall on deaf ears.
Westfield from Cross St, 1983. Image Courtesy Hurstville Library
Five years later, that momentum hadn’t slowed. Let’s take a look at a few choice pages from the December 1983 catalogue, shall we?
Of giving…money to Westfield?
Of course, it’s always about you.
Jaffles. How…exotic.
That’s $13.90 per tape.
Even these clowns charge less than Hurstville Council for one old photo.
You forget sometimes that Esky is a brand name.
They’re all the same shirt.
HELP OVERLOAD
I’ll put more up on the Past/Lives Facebook page. If you haven’t liked it yet, go and do it! Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Best of all, the catalogue contained 1983’s centre directory. What’s changed?
Selling fruit and veggies is no way for an ex-president to make ends meet.
Not much. Brash’s is there now, so yet another success story to look forward to.
St George Express, May 7 1986
It seemed as if Westfield could do no wrong in the 1980s – the greed decade. Hurstville in particular was outgrowing its allotment by 1986, just over ten years since the initial application. In an even more powerful position this time, Westfield approached council with plans to expand. Do you think council was going to say no?
Hurstfield – Act I: Genesis (1875-1975)
Yes, we’ve been on a bit of a Hurstville bender recently, but it’s all been leading up to this. This is arguably the defining story of a suburb intrinsically linked to its biggest resident. The story of Hurstville cannot be told without Westfield, and vice versa. It’s a long story spanning 150 years and a lot of parking spaces. Get comfy – it’s one of those ones. And away we go…
I was dreaming of the past…
The view from above, 1986. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Our story begins in the 1870s, at which time the St George area was home to a grand total of 2038 happy people. Suburbs such as Lugarno, Oatley, Bexley and Kingsgrove had been growing steadily for a few decades. In the midst of all this action was a large, heavily timbered area scandalously known as Lord’s Bush (after its longtime owner, Simeon Lord).
Michael Gannon, artist’s impression.
Purchased by a Michael Gannon in 1850, the area was renamed Gannon’s Forest, and the road running through the forest from Lugarno to Tempe was renamed Gannon’s Forest Road. See where this is going? The area got its first frothy taste of the commercial life in the early 1850s when – wait for this – a PUB was built. Turns out pubs and the seedy goings-on within attract people, and soon the people came. By 1864 a post office had arisen beside the Blue Post Inn, and was later joined by another pub (the Currency Lass, later the Free and Easy), a bakery (but not that bakery), and some other exciting retail outlets. A growing population means breeding, and that means kids, and kids means education (most of the time), so in 1876 a decision was made to erect a school for dem kidz wat cudnt spel ore reed no gud. A forward thinking inspector suggested the school be named Hurstville, and because it’s undeniably catchy, it stuck. Soon the post office was renamed thusly, and the population continued to grow.
Blue Post Hotel, 1880s. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Until the mid-1880s, the development of the town had centred around that original pub, the Blue Post Inn, which had become an unofficial meeting place for town development discussions and the like. It was during one of those meetings that a railway station was proposed, and if those walls could talk, I feel certain they would have uttered “Well, shit.”
Hurstville Station, 1910. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Hurstville Station was built in 1884, one kilometre away from the pub. Businesses changed tack accordingly, and suddenly no one cared about the Blue Post. Perhaps it would have preferred being instantly euthanised like the Free and Easy, which was resumed to make way for the train station. Instead, the Blue Post had its licence transferred to the nearby White Horse Hotel – the greatest dishonour a pub can experience. More like the White Flag Inn, right?
The advent of the public transport hub was like the shot from a starting gun. Hurstville just couldn’t, wouldn’t, be stopped. It became a municipality in 1887, a local newspaper started up (the St George Observer, NOT The Leader, although you could be forgiven for thinking it had been around that long), those big expensive looking mansions were being built all over the place. Even a bank crash/mini depression in 1893 was made less severe by the commercial area that had prospered in the area surrounding the train station.
The land opposite Hurstville Station was swampy marsh named ‘Frog Hollow’. Originally one of the sources of Bardwell Creek, it had been further softened by runoff from both the station and the increasingly busy Forest Road. But Hurstville’s insatiable need for retail saw the swamps drained in 1907 to make suitable foundations for an all new concept in shopping – Croft’s, a two-storey building with four shops within. Why…that means I could get FOUR times the shopping done AT ONCE!
Smile! Croft’s, 1908. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
One of these shops was occupied by a mercer named Bert Jolley, who would later describe himself as “a young man with more confidence than money”. Success wasn’t instant; three months after opening, Jolley’s ledger recorded this lacklustre return: ‘Total Customers, 1; Total Sales, 1’, despite being open from 7am to 8pm.
Meow?
The story goes that Jolley, despondent and faced with bankruptcy, found himself moping around the city looking for a cup of coffee. He ended up at the Black Cat Cafe beneath Her Majesty’s Theatre, and as he drank his black coffee he was transfixed by the walls of the cafe, which were plastered in pictures of black cats. In his crazed desperation, Jolley became convinced the black cat was his spirit animal and good luck charm, and immediately devised a ‘Lucky Black Cat Sale’ for his store. Amazingly, the gamble paid off: by 1910 he’d bought the whole building, leaving both he and his variety-starved customers very jolly indeed.
Jolley 1.0, 1910. Image courtesy B Jolley’s
Jolley’s success as a suburban department store inspired plenty of copycats (heh); in 1917 local trader Diments, a hardware and produce store, expanded in size to rival Jolley, while 1921 saw the advent of Barter’s, a rival department store.
Cash only, 1962. Image courtesy Barter’s
In a tale so similar to Jolley’s that these days copyright lawyers would be involved, Charles Barter bought a single-storey shop at the approximate location of the former ANZ Bank on Forest Road. Before long it wasn’t enough, so Barter very shrewdly bought a piece of land beside the entrance to the railway station with the intention of building the greatest department store the suburbs had ever known.
Can I just interrupt the narrative for a moment to ask where Hurstvillians were getting all this money to spend with these guys? Like maybe you wouldn’t have had to live on a swamp filled with frogs if you’d invested in making your town nice instead of buying hats and black armbands or whatever it was they bought back in those days.
Oh no, please let me walk up three storeys under my own power.
Anyway, during excavation for his wonderful new three-storey building, Barter unearthed an old horseshoe, which he hung in his office for luck. Yes, Barter was such a plagiarist he even swiped Jolley’s good luck charm concept. But Barter would get a taste of his own medicine in 1922 when the Allen brothers opened their own department store (with an emphasis on menswear) further up Forest Road.
Now, do you think that’s enough department stores? Let’s review – at this point, there’s Barter’s, Diments, Jolley’s and Allen Bros., all on Forest Road, all creepily surrounding the station like vultures. Spoiled for choice much, Hurstville? Wouldn’t it be more convenient if, oh, I dunno, they were able to combine many stores and even department stores into one giant superstore?
Jolley’s, Mk. II, 1927. Image courtesy B Jolley’s
Jolley was somehow able to stave off these attacks, maintaining a healthy profit throughout. Healthy enough to – you guessed it – expand yet again in 1933. Jolley had grown tired of paying council rates for his ever-expanding shop frontage on Forest Road, so in an ingenious move, he dug out an arcade of shops beneath his existing building, allowing for several new businesses without having to pay any excess rates. The move opened Hurstville’s eyes to the idea of an even greater shopping experience at the expense of cutting into the heart of Hurstville itself. But you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs, right?
Suck it, council. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Jolley’s clever tactic paid off so well that he was able to retire in 1937, selling his 24-shop building and arcade to Woolworths. While at the time it was seen as a ‘local boy done good’ success story, today it’s easier to see the development as the beginning of a pattern; local businesses nurtured by the community being taken over by the big boys and allowed to rot. And oh, how the big boys were beginning to sit up and take notice of Hurstville successes.
Stepping out at Ashleys, 1954. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Ashleys, a big city clothing store, swallowed its pride and expanded to the sticks of Hurstville in 1940 (the 1926 electrification of the Hurstville train line meant it was easier than ever to get to the retail paradise from the city should Mark Foy not satisfy your desires). When eponymous owner Ashley Buckingham died in 1962, Woolworths were there to buy up his stores. Uh-oh.
C. Diment Store, undated. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Diments had done its dash by 1961, and the 40-year-old business was liquidated that year. The empty store, on the corner of Forest Road and what is now Diments Way, was bought by Coles. Double uh-oh.
Perhaps the biggest boy to observe what was happening in Hurstville was Grace Bros., which was arguably the biggest department store chain in Sydney at that time. In a show of true spite, and indicative of just how worried they were by this commercial boom they weren’t getting a piece of, Grace Bros. schemed to sap Hurstville’s custom by buying up a disused golf course in a nearby suburb. It was far enough away to appear innocuous, but the intent was clear.
The three Bs. Leader, October 6 1965
When Roselands Shopping Centre opened on the site in October 1965, it was only the biggest shopping centre in the southern hemisphere. To top things off, the beating heart of this beast was – yep – a giant Grace Bros. department store. You hear that, Hurstville? Oh, does Barter’s have a rain-themed water feature? Does Jolley’s Arcade have a cinema? I didn’t think so. Roselands has parking space for 3500 cars, what have you got?
Council Car Park, Crofts Ave & Cross Street, 1976. Image courtesy Hurstville Council.
Ooh, I’m shaking!
Hurstville’s commercial sector was starting to feel the heat. No, Roselands didn’t have a train station nearby, but who cared when it had that much parking space? Could Barter’s three storeys really compare to the 30 acres occupied by Roselands’ 80 stores? No. No, they couldn’t. With Miranda Fair having opened the year before, Hurstville found itself besieged on two fronts, and immediately began taking stock of its assets and liabilities. Coles Variety and Woolworths just weren’t cutting the mustard. The train station was no longer pulling its weight…weight…wait a minute…
In 1956, a cake shop owner at Wynyard Station lodged an unusual application with Hurstville Council. Inspired by the way shops sat above Wynyard’s train line, he proposed an five-storey development above Hurstville Station. Flush with cash from years of financial prosperity, council approved the plan. The Railways Department approved the plan. Kogarah Council, which had jurisdiction over the Ormonde Parade side of the train station, approved the plan. With all this approval, what could go wrong?
More like Blows. Image courtesy Hurstville Council
Construction of the Bowes Supercentre began in 1957 by Bowes Corporation, but was pipped at the post by that year’s opening of the Top Ryde Shopping Centre, the first American-style retail hub to open in Sydney. Plans for the Super Centre, already changed from five storeys to eight storeys during development, were altered again, with final plans blowing up to ten storeys. And parking? You’d better believe it:
Leader, August 26 1959
But Bowes was more adept at making increasingly outlandish promises (‘LUXURY HOTEL TO STRADDLE RAIL LINES’ read one headline) than he was at construction, which ground to a halt in 1959, the same year two former delicatessen owners opened a small shopping centre, ‘Westfield Place’, at Blacktown.
No shit. Express, August 30 1961
In 1961, the project, now known as the Hurstville Super Centre, was taken over by W H Duffy, who projected a completion date of late 1962. The Supercentre became the object of special interest of both Hurstville Mayor G W “Snowy” Hill and the Federal Transport Minister John McMahon, even as setback after setback stalled construction.
Ominous, isn’t it? Image courtesy Hurstville Council.
I hope not. Leader, September 15 1963
By the time of the Hurstville Super Centre’s grand opening in September 1965, only the first stage had been completed and Roselands was only a month from opening. Even worse, attendees who could get a park then had to endure an appearance by Premier Robert “Don’t call me Robin” Askin among others:
Oh…goody.
In the same year, Transport Minister McMahon lost his position following election defeat, and was criticised by the Opposition for a “lack of vision in providing transport infrastructure”. Even Snowy Hill was no longer mayor by the time it opened. Am I calling the Super Centre a total failure that stained the character and reputation of all involved? Yes.
Interest still dead. Leader, May 27 1970
Throughout the late 60s and early 70s, empty promises were made to finish the Centre and bring it up to speed with the original vision, as if anyone was hanging out for that to happen. It was the modern age, no one relied on trains anymore. Department stores and giant shopping centres were a thing of the past in the city, and Roselands and Miranda (purchased by Westfield in 1969) were only quick drives away.
Away…from Hurstville. It seemed that despite that initial promise, no one had the vision to truly exploit Hurstville to the full extent of its commercial potential. Of the giants of the 20s, only Barter’s was still around (I guess that horseshoe worked), and even it had been overshadowed (literally) by the disastrous Super Centre. With no money coming in, council was sweating. Retailers were coasting on fumes. The swamp suddenly seemed thicker than ever.
Past/Lives of the Near Future 