- Name
- Central Business District
- Description
-
This walk will help you explore some of the history of the CBD and its immediate surroundings, identifying the few surviving pre-1950s structures and the sites of some of those long gone.
- Points of interest
-
- 67-69 Mount Street
- 51 Mount Street
- MLC Building
- 92-94 Pacific Highway (cnr Mount Street)
- Victoria Cross (cnr Pacific Highway, Miller and Mount Streets)
- 7 Mount Street
- 9-13 Edward Street
- 40 Edward Street
- 2-12 Oak Street
- End of Oak Street (6 Napier Street)
- 1-7 Napier Street
- 120 Pacific Highway
- Site of Dr Ward’s House, Berry Street
- 199 Miller Street
- North West corner of Walker and Berry Street
- 86 Walker Street
- 100 Mount Street
- Location
- Brochure
- History
-
The township of St Leonards was gazetted in 1838. Large land grants had already been made to individuals on the west, east and south side of the present-day CBD, but the land roughly from Blue Street north was sold gradually by the ‘Crown’, or colonial authorities.
Crown land was subdivided with a grid street pattern whereas the streets created on private estates in Wollstonecraft, Neutral Bay and Kirribilli, for instance, tended to reflect the existing topography. The central grid once extended north to Cammeray along Miller, Walker and Alfred Streets, before the latter was obliterated by the Warringah Expressway in the 1960s. The grid became the commercial heart of St Leonards, known as North Sydney from 1890.
Until the 1960s these streets were lined with a series of two-storey shop dwellings intermingled with the occasional residence, hotels and civic buildings. From 1957 through to the 1980s the entire streetscape of North Sydney was transformed into a CBD of office towers, a twin of the city on the south side. The last 19th century Miller Street shop was demolished for the Sydney Metro in 2018.
