Stream street, Darlinghurst
Detail, Riley Estate - Woolloomooloo, Darlinghurst and Surry Hills, 1844, City of Sydney Archives
I’m breaking the rules of my own blog today. Today’s story is not about an old house still standing, or the quest to identify previously anonymous figures in an archive. But I made the rules, so I feel quite comfortable giving myself permission to break them in search of a good story.
Stream street in the centre of Sydney has always intrigued me, its shape alluding to its origins. Every time I’ve spied it on the map, I’ve wondered in passing what its story was, so I’ve decided today to find out.
As I suspected, its sinuous lines and name both refer to the fact that Stream street was once part of a natural stream – a watercourse which ran down the hill in eastern Sydney, originating in the slope below the land on which Darlinghurst Gaol would be built, down to the harbour at Farm Cove. The Domain wall built by the Macquaries to delineate the bounds of the Governor’s Domain and lay the groundwork for the Royal Botanic Gardens followed part of its course.
In an 1844 subdivision map of Riley’s Estate the stream still exists, winding its way downhill to a rocky natural outlet. The stream formed part of the view from the boys’ college which would become Sydney Grammar School. After subdivision, the land on which Stream street now stands was owned by one of the Riley clan, James John Riley, however JJ Riley quickly moved on to greener pastures in Glenmore and was eventually elected as an Alderman in Penrith in 1878. In the intervening years, his land was subdivided again and resold to various owners who in turn leased the new terraced properties to individual residents and business owners. Early residents would have had a good view of the public hanging platform above the gate of the newly opened gaol, as did the students at the school directly behind them.
In 1857 the stream was still in existence in the vicinity of Riley lane, and was mentioned in a complaint about drainage in the area. In the area of Yurong street and Riley lane (which appears to have since been renamed Yurong lane) there existed a notorious ‘trap,’ a kind of gully carved out of the road surface by rainwater, the dread of carters and other users of wheeled vehicles and essentially impassable by traffic:
Being natural gutters, wide deep, and irregular, formed by the upper drainage, it is to be expected that under exposure to the wearing of the strong currents periodically accruing from our heavy rains, they will come to be quite impossible, if neglected much longer.
The article goes on to explain that “Riley-lane extends across the creek, and over Riley street to Crown street” and describes it as “the worst conditioned of all the lanes in the neighbourhood.”
The covering of the stream has already begun. At the other end of the block the article describes that the stream has been covered over with considerable quantities of earth, and a brick drain lined with concrete covers the creek so that Stanley lane to the west is now contiguous, where Riley lane still houses a bridge to cross the stream, drawing us a neat little picture of the immediate neighbourhood. The builder of this drainage tunnel, one Charles Simmons, firmly urged the government to continue to fund the work, as the “pestilent vapours said to be so continually fuming up out of the bed of the creek would become positively insufferable.” The article also mentions that at least one ingenious local resident had already begun the work of laying pipes from their private land into the new drain to dispose of their own “refuse liquors,” possibly accounting for some of the already ‘pestilent vapours.’ It cannot have been a pleasant place to live or work.
Detail, City of Sydney & Suburbs, 1887, City of Sydney Archives
By 1887 a later map shows us that the land has been fully subdivided into the terrace lots we’re more familiar with, and the stream entirely covered, giving us the undulating form of Stream lane as we know it today. In 1889 a mystery occurred in the newly laid street when the sometime gardener of photographer Charles Bayliss (of the Holtermann Collection fame) suddenly dropped dead in the street, foaming at the mouth. Although Bayliss had hired the man from time to time to work in his Stanmore garden he did not know the mystery man’s name, although he knew that the man had recently been admitted to Prince Alfred hospital for erysipelas, a serious skin infection that we now know can cause kidney failure. Other witnesses from Yurong and Stream streets did not recognise him. The coroner ruled both identity and cause of death a mystery.
In the 1920s and 30s Stream street stood in the centre of Sydney’s notorious crime hotspot of Darlinghurst (which was known as ‘Razorhurst.’) Newspaper reports from the era paint a bleak picture of the violence which had become commonplace in the neighbourhood. In 1930 one resident of Stream street, Joseph Muscat, presented to hospital with numerous stab wounds to his abdomen and left hand, which he refused to explain to police. In 1935, another resident Manuel Attard died from a stab wound to the throat. Curiously, both were described as a ‘Maltese wharf labourer,’ and I’m wondering if this hints at a local organised crime syndicate similar to the Italian Camorra, who were also very active in Sydney at the same time.
Not all the dangerous residents of Stream street were human: in 1925 there was a buzz in the papers about the residence of a 3.5ft tiger snake on a vacant allotment on Stream street just below the school. It was dispatched by workman Jerry Jordan, who proudly held the remains aloft for a photo op in The Evening News. Other names jump out of the papers over the years: Mrs Mary Woolley, pensioner Andrew Greene, John Cuttriss, Morris Bouvet, Stanley Elliott. Many are victims of crime; some are perpetrators.
Like most of the older parts of colonial Sydney Stream street is certainly full of history, even if none of it remains visible today. It stands out as an oddity that the while the rest of the stream was enclosed and a grid pattern of streets and laneways laid over the top, on this tiny little block the vestigial shape of a pre-colonial waterway remains, built into the landscape which obliterated it from view.
