Lost Sydney: Clyde Street
Location: Millers Point, SydneyIn a planned city, built on a level plain, perhaps the streets you start off with might remain for many years. But Sydney was not planned. From the beginning of European settlement Sydney s streets have been altered as hills were carved down, cliff faces chopped into, levels altered, bays and estuaries filled in. Resumptions of streets and precincts have resulted in new alignments and street patterns. Many streets have ended up some where different from where they started out; others have disappeared altogether. Such was the fate of Clyde Street in the inner suburb of Millers Point.
Built in the 1830s, Clyde Street ran down the hill from Millers Street, another street that no longer exists. Millers Street ran from Argyle Place near the corner of Windmill Street, to Kent Street, meeting it opposite No. 30. The top of Clyde Street, where it met Millers Street, was at a point on today s High Lane just above where Argyle Lane does a 90 degree turn. Clyde Street ran south-west down to the shores of Darling Harbour. All traces of both streets have been obliterated. The earliest enduring ship building yard in the area was established by James Munn located at the foot of Wentworth (now Munn Street) and Clyde Streets in the mid to late 1820s. On Clyde Street, leading down to the docks, the whitewashed front steps were a sign of respectability in the 1850s. Four decades later, still predominantly residential, Clyde Street had become part of a densely populated neighbourhood of Sydney, in which even dilapidated houses were in great demand due to their proximity to the Darling Harbour wharves and goods yards. That all began to change in 1900, with the outbreak of bubonic plague in The Rocks and Millers Point. The streets of Millers Point were selected for cleansing operations in 1901.
The first reported death from the bubonic plague was Arthur Payne of Ferry Lane - a small, narrow thoroughfare leading down the the wharves of what is now Walsh Bay on 25th January 1900. Like hundreds around him, Payne lived in squalid conditions in The Rocks where the dreaded disease quickly spread among residents and waterside workers. The Darling Harbour area was quarantined and residents forbidden to move out of the area. Many opted to be quarantined at North Head. As many residents worked outside the quarantined area, they were paid six shillings a week as survival money while the crisis lasted. The plague became the excuse to reclaim large areas of real estate around the wharves. Medical opinion at the time urged the government to take over the areas that were deemed most unhygienic and place them under the authority of the Darling Harbour Resumption Advisory Board, chaired by Robert Hickson. Work was begun in March 1900 to repair houses or, in the worst cases, have them demolished. Architect and engineer George McCredie was put in charge of this operation. Work on the wharves ceased while homes were cleaned, whitewashed, disinfected or demolished.
1901 resumptions map
Demolition came when residents could not afford to pay for the repairs. Many regarded this authoritarian approach as excessive. In August 1900, the Darling Harbour Resumption Advisory Board carried out their first demolitions but no new buildings were erected. It is also clear that the wharves were in urgent need of upgrading, expanding and modernising. In 1901, the New South Wales government constituted the Sydney Harbour Trust (originally the Sydney Harbour Improvement Trust, but revised when the unfortunate acronym became apparent). Its primary task was to provide for future shipping and commercial needs , and to achieve that, it set about rebuilding the Port of Sydney. The Trust was given the power to demolish any buildings that it controlled to facilitate wharf construction. Hickson Street became a reality; a product of quarrying the steep slope that ran down to Walsh Bay. Numerous streets were earmarked to disappear, making way for new wharves and facilities. Among them was Clyde Street.
By the end of 1901, the Harbour Trust controlled 152 properties that lay immediately behind the wharves. The Trust then acquired another 401 houses, 82 shops, 23 hotels, 70 bond stores and 45 factories from the original resumption, among them was every property in Clyde Street. Further acquisition meant that, in total, the Trust was now responsible for 803 properties. Seventy-one of the worst properties were demolished and the rest rented out but no new housing was built. In 1909, Clyde Street had disappeared and the extensive excavation and the construction of Hickson Road began. Darling Harbour was given priority in the early years with new wharves built by 1912. Special wharf and shed accommodation was provided at Pyrmont for the handling of wheat exports.
Clyde Street is believed to have been named by Rev. Dr. John Dunmore Lang, after the property he built here to house a group of Scottish stonemasons he brought out from Glasgow, Scotland in 1831. The property was named after the Scottish river around which many of Lang s stonemasons were from. For that reason, Clyde Street was also known colloquially as Scotch Row .
