Memoir…
The Village
It was the late 1960s and I was living in an attic room on Darlinghurst Road and working in the city. New to the big city, mine was an aimless sort of life. Sometimes after work or on weekends I would wander down the switchback stairs from my room and cross Darlinghurst Road to The Village. I used to visit a bookshop that was on the lower level where, on its walls, were the line drawings of Aubrey Beardsley from his Lysistrata series. I don’t think I bought many books in that bookshop, however I did spend time perusing its shelves and I did buy a copy of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. It is about the author’s psychedelic experimentation with mescaline. Psychedelic experience was then a thing, with the arrival of LSD on the scene.
There was something about The Village that, for those who knew the history of the Kings Cross-Potts Point enclave, hinted at the place's bohemian past as the haunt of artistic and literary types. That reached back to the times when many of the adjacent Art Deco era buildings were constructed, to the 1930s. It was still like that in the 1950s, but the impression I got was by the time the 60s rolled around, that cultural milieu was fading. I guess I arrived there as that was happening.
Kings Cross is still the dense residential enclave it always has been. Then, the small businesses lining Darlinghurst Road were a mishmash of cafes, tacky strip clubs and shops serving the everyday needs of local people. There was always people on the streets through the day and into the late evenings. When decades later I came to read Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I realised that Kings Cross was the type of place that, with their small shops and services within walking distance, make cities livable.
Looking back on my time there, my impression is that the area was at the start of its transition to what it is today. Kings Cross and Potts Point formed a continuum occupying a high ridge that was also a wealth divide. On the western side it fell to the low-income valley of old terrace houses that is Woolloomooloo, and on the east to the affluent harbourside suburbs. From the ridge I would look across the dusty grey buildings of Woolloomooloo to the city centre whose high-rise buildings were multiplying by the year.
I liked the ambience of The Village, the feel of this little patch of open space amid the dense cluster of buildings that made up this part of the city. It was a two-level courtyard paved, if I remember correctly, with bricks and edged with two-level buildings wedged on three sides between the surrounding taller apartment and commercial buildings. Think of The Village as a small plaza between Springfield Avenue and Llankelly Place. There was a waxworks there with somewhat gruesome beeswax sculptures of figures famous and infamous. People said it was impressive but I never ventured in. I don’t know why. It just didn’t capture my imagination.
There were restaurants and cafes in The Village, at least one upstairs on the two-level buildings that enclosed the plaza, others outdoors. The enclosed open space of the plaza and the cafes accounted for much of The Village’s appeal as a place where people could linger. Cafe culture, what there was of it, was something for the inhabitants of the inner urban region in those days and it made life there so different to that of the suburbs then sprawling across the Cumberland Plain on the coastal edge of which the city stands. The Village was a microcosm of inner urban culture that was appealing in its contrast to suburban life.
In an article on the ABC in 2017, blogger Vanessa Berry commented on how The Village contributed to the cosmopolitanism of the Kings Cross and adjoining Potts Point area:
You could go to a café there and have a cappuccino sitting outside, which now doesn’t seem like a very revolutionary or exciting thing perhaps, but back then that wasn’t how things worked. It was a place that had a very strong European café cultural centre influence, so that’s one of the reasons people went to Kings Cross.
For most of us, the cities where we live have linger nodes, places where we like to hang out. The Village was that for me. There was some intangible, undefinable vibe about the place. It just felt… what?… it just felt good to be there. It was interesting and being there immersed me in an inner urban culture that was new. I suppose it was an example of how the design of the urban environment influences how we feel and behave.
Change came with the late 1960s. The Village became a drug supermarket. That wasn’t in the time when I would wander down from my attic room. From there, it was downhill as over later years The Village became a tackier place. It was demolished in 2008.
In his Ulysses, Tennyson writes that “Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough… Gleams that untraveled world.” I suppose that, for me, discovering The Village was my discovery of that untravelled world when I was young and wayward and newly arrived in the big city in that summer of ‘67.
