Edith Street and Lane and Mary Street, St Peters on Friday, 8 May 2020
I park in Edith Street below the windows of a studio in Precinct 75 that could have been mine. I looked at studio spaces last year in June and came across this one by searching for Mary Street Studios, as I remember there were artists’ studios by that name in St Peters. My contact was a designer who seems to own a whole section in one building, using one studio for herself and renting out the others. The ambience was very pleasant, and it was warm on a cold winter’s day. There was a communal kitchen and a visitors’ room, but the actual working space was just a subdivided part with no doors and much too expensive for me. I understand now why, as the whole precinct is tailored for so-called creative business. There is a beer brewery, a coffee roaster, a bakery, design studios, and a photo studio for short-term leases. In short, enterprises generating at least some money. A property developer bought it in 2013. I can’t find any trace of times when these buildings were occupied by not-so-well-off artists. I think it was around 2003 when I knew about it. Originally the complex extending from Edith Street across to Mary Street belonged to ‘Taubman’s Paint Factory’ from 1902 which already closed in the early 1960s.
On this sunny Friday, the precinct is quiet. There are some people at work but the café, run by the coffee roaster company, is closed.
The street has a couple of timber houses and shows some more traces from an industrial past. Another smaller factory or warehouse building has been converted into flats and further down towards the end is Edith Lane with an industrial-looking building which is the backside of a Baby supply shop, called Banana Baby. A man is loading something in a car and a young woman with a baby and a toddler steps out from the back door. They are negotiating something. On the other side of Edith Lane is a 50s small block of flats. Laundry drying on a Hills Hoist in the paved courtyard.
Across the road is a not yet finished section of the WestConnex building site. Once there was a row of old shops which I photographed a long time ago.
Princes Highway, near Campbell Street 2004
Another lane with a still operating small factory leads to Mary Street. For a moment the street is very silent, it feels as if I have it to myself. Then a long line of cars files through this narrow street, all coming across from the multi-lane Canal Road. This happens in intervals of the traffic lights. There are more cars on the road again in comparison to the beginning of the lockdown. In the lull between, I realise what’s different in St Peters from before because you don’t miss it when it’s not there: The screaming noise of the planes which normally fly very low over St Peters so that it looks as if they would crash into the buildings.
Number 12 Mary Street has a Banksy-style stencil on its roller door. On closer inspection, it’s not a roller door but wooden boards and a sign that says “Custom Blown Glassware”. The place looks shut, but maybe it always looks shut as there is a phone number to ring.
Later at home, I find a blog about Sydney suburbs covering St Peters. The blogger, ‘travelwithjoanne’, had taken a photo of the same stencil. Then, in 2017, whatever the child dragged behind her was wiped out with grey paint. The boards were of a faded white. Now a part of them is painted sky blue.
I love to read the layers of time like this in the streets.
