special Melbourne architecture: 1848 ->

John Smith's home, Queen St

built late 1840s

Served as Treasury and Gold Office from 1859

Melbourne was founded in 1835 as a commercial venture. Tasmanian settlers, frustrated at diminishing opportunities in their own col­ony, sent an expedition to Victoria to test its viability for farm­ing. Project leader John Batman created a modest colony on the Yarra River and negotiated a land purchase from local ind­igenous men. The first city buildings were wooden, presumably to be rebuilt permanently.

John Smith arrived from Sydney in 1840 and began teaching local In­digenous children at a Melbourne government mission. Then Smith op­ened a grocery and later owned hotels. With this money, he built himself the first really lovely home in Melbourne in 1848, and added a third storey later. Smith was soon elected to the City Council, then elected Lord Mayor, then to the State Legislature for years! The Government used Smith’s renovated premises for different purp­os­es in the C20th eg State Treasury Offices.

Bourke Street looking west, 1858
Lovell Chen

Meanwhile, a row of shops was built in town. A large shop and a residence above went up in Crossley St in 1848-9 by an English migrant butcher, William Crossley. The premises were histor­ic­ally used as a meat-preserving works, with the land behind used as a slaughter yard. It was here that our story began, with the wide shop and residence in Crossley St.

Suddenly life in Melbourne changed forever in 1851; gold was disc­overed in rural Clunes, triggering the Gold Rush. As money and people poured in, the city stretched in every direction, requir­ing rebuilding in a much grander fashion.

The second part of the Crossley Building, the adjoining shop and its residence above, was designed by architect Joseph Burns. The comp­l­et­­­ed building extended from Crossley St (ex-Romeo Lane) and Liv­er­pool St (ex-Juliet Lane). The butchers expanded into the newer shops, over the top of the original cellar. The walls were of blue­stone and the ceilings were brick barrel vaults. The inter­iors sh­ow­ed relics of openings, vents, shelving, enclosures and fix­tures. At ground level, an 1847 cast iron column was visible in a later brick wall, separating the two retail sides.

Later shopkeepers included the famous butcher family Sir William Ang­liss. Since then, shops were us­ed for shoes, drapery, café, gro­cer, fruit­­erer, photographic studio, wine mer­ch­ant, tailor and dry goods.  Eugene von Guerard, a won­d­erful landscape artist in the late colonial era, occupied #56 in 1857-8, just when he was estab­lishing his career. The building had also housed the notorious Bourke St Rats gang.

Job Warehouse, as it was called, was still in a simple Victorian Georgian style. The external render was ruled, there was a simple parapet above, and the corner shop had a splayed cor­n­er. Each of the two storey shops had a residence behind and above them. Externally the building kept much of its original form, except for alterations to the shop windows and the parapet. But the inter­iors retained few original features; even the internal stairs which once led upst­airs were all rem­oved and new stairs were added.

The Job Warehouse was of architectural and historical significance to the State of Victoria, satisfying these 3 criteria for inclusion in the Victorian Heritage Register:

A] The building’s cultural history was among the ol­d­est surviving buildings in Melbourne, forming an important link to pre-Gold Rush Melbourne. The various businesses occupying the shops reflected the residential nature of central Mel­bourne then, and the everyday goods and services local resid­ents needed. It dem­on­strated the old pract­ice of people living close to their businesses.

B] It has rare historical aspects surviving from a pre-Gold Rush commercial building, and of an early shop-row, once common in the city but now almost completely disappeared.

C] It has the architectural characteristics of the austere Georgian style buildings typical of pre-Gold Rush Melbourne. This style was the basis for most architecture in Australia from the time of Eur­o­pean settlement until at least the mid C19th but rarer in Vic­toria because there was no convict settlement here. In any case, gold wealth in Victoria led to the popularity of more ornate styles.

Job Warehouse, Bourke Street

Lovell Chen

These shops were occupied from 1956 by Jacob Zeimer, a post-WW2 European migrant. He later owned the whole building, becoming well-known in Melbourne for fabrics for haberdashers, dressmakers and theatres. Since then the terrace housed many tenants and underwent extensive alter­at­ions. For 56 years Jobs Warehouse remained a magnet for dress­makers, its windows showing a lively business crammed to the ceiling with enormous rolls of cloth.

The people who owned and occupied the row told the story of the evolving city. The terrace at the top of Bourke St, on a site flank­ed by laneways, clearly held special significance for older Mel­b­urn­ians. Own-ed by one family for decades and still the home of the Paperback Bookshop today, the terrace was a rare survivor in the city streetscape. The site’s history and development resembled many early commercial and residential buildings once commonplace in Melb­ourne’s Central Business District-CBD, but not now.

The restoration of this, one of Melbourne’s CBD’s oldest buildings, is urgently needed. Neglected since the shops closed in 2012, the Her­it­age Listed prop­erty in Bourke St will form part of a new hosp­it­ality venture, bec­om­ing a 673-patron bar and restaurant Juliet’s Terrace. This will honour the laneway once home to Mel­b­ourne’s red-light district 160 years ago. The Lord Mayor said the group’s $50 million project would gen­er­ate 500 jobs during const­ruc­t­ion, and 350 hospitality jobs after­. But due to the building’s age, the time needed to restore it will be longer than normal.

George's Collins St, c1890

Facebook

By way of comparison, compare the Georgian architecture with a building designed by architects John Grainger and Charles D'Ebro some decades later (1880) in the grand classical revival style. Brothers William and Alfred George were retailers in the UK. They emigrated to Melbourne in 1877, and soon found work at Robinson’s drapers in Collins St, in the most fashionable retailing area in the city. In 1880, the opportunity came to take over the business as George's Emporium, perhaps the most beautiful commercial building and business in Australia.