Monday, June 4, 2012

All the News That's Fit to Print ...

The title is the motto of the NY Times, you'll find it printed on the upper left corner of the front page.  If you happened to buy a copy on 14 January 1996 you would've found a great little article on Paddington.  I have actually seen this printed and laminated at a real estate open house on Cambridge street.  Extract below as it relates to Glenmore Rd and Cambridge Street.  Full article here.

"Unlike other Paddo streets, which move haphazardly across the hills, ignoring topography, Glenmore Road follows its natural route down into Paddington's valley, a path originally carved by bullock teams pulling gin from the local distillery up to Oxford Street, then called South Head Road. A right turn from Liverpool onto Glenmore takes the walker past a series of grand terraces (numbers 97 to 109) with huge garden walls molded like waves, their fronts elevated high above the street, as imposing as a row of London townhouses. The street continues below the Royal Hospital for Women, arriving at the crossroads of Five Ways, where, naturally, five roads meet. The intersection is dominated by the high Italianate form of the Royal Hotel (1887), its facade broken by a second-floor iron balcony well above street level, with wooden blinds that roll down to shield diners on sunny days.

GLENMORE Road continues down into the valley known in Georgian times as the Vale of Lacrosia, a popular site for the estates of the Rushcutter gentry, an early Sydney merchant class named for the bay where the land slanting down from Oxford Street flattens out to meet the harbor. Sydney Harbour is visible from a few points in Paddington, usually at the crest of its upper residential streets, but most clearly from the walkway passing through the public school, accessible by gate from the lower Glenmore Road.

Leaving the school grounds (at a gate behind the yellow principal's cottage), one enters steep Cambridge Street at its midsection, slightly above three fanciful, almost Mediterreanean confections with names engraved in the stone: the pistachio-green Frampton (59 Cambridge Street, built in 1889); Langlo (55 Cambridge), cream with pink and ochre trim, and intricate plaster friezes; and Westbury (47 Cambridge), its facade a mustard yellow-brown with gray quoins and ironwork. Each is notable for its front tower, topped by a balustrade and with delicate plaster urns on each corner that form a portico above the doorway.

Cambridge Street's terraces are mostly in good repair, if not quite as colorful as these three freestanding houses; at the top of the road, Cambridge meets Gurner, and across the road is the entry to Norfolk Street, an L-shaped thoroughfare that abruptly ends atop a wall above Cascade Street. Here you will find the broadest view, to the east, across the hollow shared by the suburbs of Paddington and Edgecliff, the latter now wooded parkland containing, among other things, a cricket oval."

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