Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 155
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[Page 155]
77
A new diversion in entertainment and sport, was the opening of the Glaciarium, at Railway Square, by the Sydney Cold Stores Ltd, on the site of the old Diarama. It was a area of artificially created ice, more than half the size of a football field, and sheltered in a huge barn of a building. There were rows of seats for spectators behind a low enclosure, and skates could be hired for the morning or evening for about two shillings. It was open only in the Winter, and senior boys of "Scots" were permitted to patronise it on a few Saturday mornings. It was the first experience of ice skating for many people, myself included, and it was much more pleasant to be gliding quietly along on the ice, than on the very noisy dusty roller-skating wooden floor, as in the past. Sometimes the arena was cleared to enable the playing of a fast fierce ice-hockey match, lasting about an hour.
Tennis was now becoming a common game, but was regarded as being rather a "cissy" sport for young "he-men".
During the last few years of the peaceful prosperous decade, immediately preceding the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the then very progressive City Council carried out some badly needed street-widening projects in a most businesslike way.
Lower George St, leading to Circular Quay, in the oldest part of the city, was incredibly narrow and was lined with old ramshackle buildings. The Council resumed all the property on the western side, demolished it, widened the street to nearly three times its old average width, and erected substantial brick shops on the new building line. Right from the beginning the rents which the City received from this new property, represented a good return on the capital cost of the improvement. Next, a similar widening scheme on the south side of Park St was completed expeditiously. Then followed the widening of Campbell St along the north side of Belmore Park, the building of the badly needed Hotel Sydney on one corner of the resumed land and the erection of the new big Tivoli Theatre on the next one; and finally the considerable widening of William St on the south side. During my first years at "Scots" William St was so narrow that one could reach out from a passing tram and almost touch the shop verandah posts.