Kings Cross can be naughty or nice. But not both

Kings Cross has been through a lot in the past few decades. Just a one-kilometre stagger from the CBD, the Cross has survived gang warfare, rampant police corruption, the subsequent arrests of corrupt cops and criminal kingpins, the “coward punch” lockouts, COVID lockdowns, and even its “naughty but nice” blandification.

Formerly the seediest, most salacious – and arguably most fun – area of Sydney, the Cross may finally have met its match with the state government’s accelerated approvals for developments near transport hubs.

In the latest example of gentrification, the Holiday Inn Hotel is to be demolished to make way for a 40-storey apartment block and swish new railway station precinct, complete with retail outlets. It’s not the first hotel-to-apartments redevelopment in the area, but it could be the last straw for the Cross as we knew it.

The whole massive block from the old Bourbon and Beefsteak bar at the El Alamein fountain, all the way to Roslyn Street and the corner where Les Girls drag bar once sat, is now an enormous building site that will eventually yield apartments, bars, restaurants and retail outlets.

The Crescent on Bayswater Road, a former serviced apartment hotel and once home of Hugo’s nightclub, is about to enjoy a major makeover into more luxurious units. The classically styled apartments opposite have also been earmarked for tasteful renovation. There are at least three other low-rent to high-end apartment conversions under way or nearing completion, with more on the cards, all of them with an eye on the lucrative designer dollar.

Kings Cross has always been a place of change, usually motivated by the search for a quick buck. When I arrived there in 1988, Abe Saffron – aka Mr Sin – was the most infamous property developer in Sydney, terrorising home owners into selling out so he could knock down and rebuild.

Local campaigner Juanita Nielsen had then been missing for more than 10 years – reputedly entombed in the foundations of one of Saffron’s buildings – and notorious gangsters Lenny McPherson and George Freeman were still around, if in decline.

Celebrated senior police detective Roger Rogerson had recently been disgraced, sacked from the police force, and two years later would be jailed. These were the days of Blue Murder and brown envelopes full of used notes to help ease the passage of tricky planning approvals.

Darlinghurst Road, had six or seven operating strip clubs along the 100 metres or so from the Coke sign to Springfield Avenue (where the celebrated Manzil Room rock venue was tucked away in a corner). Sex workers, drug dealers and other denizens of the night patrolled that street from nightfall until the wee hours when the last dregs of desperate humanity sought release in whatever sin they favoured and could afford.

Kings Cross has bumped along rock bottom a few times in the last 40 years. There were the “coward punch” killings where, in two separate incidents, young men died after they were hit from behind by gutless thugs. That’s when they brought in the lockout laws that meant you couldn’t enter a pub after midnight, but you could stay and drink if you were already there. Then COVID gave the Cross its own gut-punch. Until recently, there were only two strip clubs left. A third has opened in the past couple of months, but it’s hardly what you’d call the glittery green shoots of recovery.

The physical landscape has also changed since I first hit the Cross. The old ABC studios occupied the spot where Harry Seidler’s massive Horizon building now dominates the Darlinghurst skyline. The exposed concrete roof of the Kings Cross tunnel eventually supported the Elan apartment block which now looks down William Street.

The Sebel Townhouse, the old showbiz hotel on Elizabeth Bay Road, hadn’t yet taken its final curtain to be replaced by the ironically named Encore apartment block. The Gazebo was still a hotel rather than a circular tower of pizza-slice apartments, and the Hyatt Kingsgate would only later acquire clip-on balconies to emerge as the Zenith unit block.

The Hampton Court Hotel, made famous by Nino Culotta in his 1957 novel They’re A Weird Mob, was still a pub with rooms to let. Across the road, the Crest, with the notorious Goldfish Bowl bar at its base, hadn’t been gutted, given a pepper grinder shape and acquired a preponderance of trendy units and fast food outlets.

So the old Holiday Inn is to be flattened and flatted, with the new block branded One Kings Cross. The development will, in fact, be on Victoria Street, just a few metres from Juanita Nielsen’s former home.

The application, recently declared a “state significant development” by the NSW government, is being touted as a “village-style precinct that blends residential, cultural, and commercial uses”.

It’s expected to deliver between 250 and 300 apartments across a range of low, mid and high-rise buildings, with the tallest being between 35 and 40 storeys high. But that’s not all. Just down the hill in Williams Street, the block between Forbes and Dowling streets, currently occupied by an empty office block and the “No Birds” budget rental car garage, is to be turned into a state significant 260-unit upmarket apartment complex.

This gentrification on steroids – which I’ve heard described as a form of demographic ethnic cleansing – and the conversion of hotels to permanent upmarket homes can only mean a massive reduction in both visitors and literally low-rent residents.

Kings Cross will survive because it always does. And the result could be quite nice – but it will certainly be a lot less naughty.

Jimmy Thomson edits the apartment living advice and opinion website flatchat.com.au

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