BYGONE BOHEMIAN
A pocket of COSMOPOLITAN BOHEMIA once flourished in a Sydney laneway. IMOGEN EVESON takes a stroll down ROWE STREET.
IMAGINE A NARROW laneway in the heart of a city crammed full of all things cosmopolitan and countercultural: from artists’ studios, shoe box theatres and record stores to Italian coffee houses and shops selling Parisian fashions or Scandinavianinspired furniture. A meeting point for like-minded people interested in art and culture and life beyond their horizons. A slice of Montmartre? Of Melbourne, perhaps? More surprising would be to imagine it tucked in the middle of Sydney’s CBD: cutting a straight line between the now-modern thoroughfares of Castlereagh and Pitt Streets, and parallel to Martin Place. But for almost a century until the 1970s, Rowe Street thrived here: a meeting ground for Sydney’s bohemians, and the odd famous visitor – with the iconic Hotel Australia at one end and the Theatre Royal nearby. The strip’s heyday was experienced in the ’50s and ’60s when, following the Second World War, an influx of European immigrants opened shops, galleries and cafes and brought in their wake new cultural experiences. “A new perspective on how to dress, furnish your home or what to read,” says Dr Nicola Teffer. Nicola is the curator of Demolished Sydney, an exhibition at the Museum of Sydney that explores the histories of buildings past. Rowe Street is one of 13 sites featured and Nicola remembers first finding out about it while curating an exhibition on Sydney’s coffee drinking history: “I discovered that, for a few years in the late 1940s, Rowe Street was the home of the Lincoln Inn, a basement coffee lounge where art students, musicians and bohemians gathered to chain smoke and drink dreadful coffee,” she says. “It was known as the Stinkin’ Lincoln, and must have been quite an extraordinary place in conservative post-war Sydney.” Rowe Street was, says Nicola, “a place where Sydneysiders could have a kind of European experience in an otherwise very British city.” It was demolished, along with Hotel Australia and the Theatre Royal, in the early ’70s to make way for the MLC Centre and plaza: “A beautiful and purely modernist skyscraper and pedestrian precinct that set Sydney on its way to becoming the global skyscraper city it is today,” says Nicola. “Rowe Street was one of Sydney’s many charming precincts sacrificed for a modern future.” A short stretch of Rowe Street still exists today; but its larger-than-life past lives on anecdotally and in the Powerhouse Museum’s dedicated archive: a collection of artefacts and oral histories. Many colourful tales persist: like that of artist Carl Plate, who ran the Notanda Gallery in Rowe Street for almost 40 years. “He was considered to be highly unconventional because, not only did he wear green shirts, he had a beard!” says Nicola. “He seemed to have been excused these shocking sartorial transgressions because he was an artist. It gave me a very clear idea of just how conservative Australia was at the time, and how much it needed places like Rowe Street to shake it up.” Demolished Sydney runs at the Museum of Sydney until17April; sydneylivingmuseums.com.au