Kings Cross, New South Wales

From Freepedia

Kings Cross is a former suburb that is now an inner-city locality of Sydney.

It is also the site of an underground railway station on the Eastern Suburbs Line. Sydneysiders often refer to it using the affectionate colloquialism "the Cross".

Kings Cross is located approximately 1.5 kilometres east of the centre of Sydney and consists chiefly of a retail and entertainment precinct extending approximately 100 metres along both sides of Darlinghurst Road. The area is encompassed within the suburbs of Potts Point and Elizabeth Bay, which have both been administered by the Sydney City Council since March, 2004.

During early 19th century the Kings Cross-Potts Point area was one of Sydney's most prestigious suburbs, far enough to escape the noise and smell of the central city but close enough for easy travel, with the additional attraction of commanding harbour views to the east and north and (from some points) views to the west as far as the Blue Mountains.

In the early 1800s the Governor of NSW granted several large estates to favoured subordinates and leading businessmen. They built a series of grandiose mansions with sprawling gardens of up to ten acres (40,000 m²). The remnants of these gardens helped give the area of its leafy character, and many of the mansions are commemorated in street names, such as Kellett Street.

Regrettably, most of the grand estates were eventually subdivided and all but a handful of the great houses were demolished. One of the fortunate survivors is Elizabeth Bay House, one of the finest examples of Australian colonial architecture.

Known as Queen's Cross until the early 20th century, it was renamed King's Cross after Edward VII of the United Kingdom. The "cross" is a reference to the major intersection formed by William Street and Darlinghurst Road, which forms the locality's southernmost limit.

The Kings Cross district was Sydney's bohemian heartland from the early decades of the 20th Century. From the 1960s onwards it also came to serve as both the city's main tourism accommodation and entertainment mecca, as well as its red light district—thereby achieving a high level of notoriety out of all proportion to its limited geographical extent.

One of the Cross's most famous residents in this period was Rosaleen Norton, who lived in Brougham Street. The so-called 'Witch of Kings Cross' was known for her grotesque art and her interest in the occult, sex and erotica. In the early 1950s this brought her into contact with famed composer-conductor Sir Eugène Goossens, who was the ABC director of music, chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and head of the NSW Conservatorium of Music. He secretly shared Norton's interests and they conducted an intense affair and wrote a number of passionate letters, but although Goossens asked Norton to destroy all of them, she kept a bundle hidden behind a sofa.

In March 1956 Goossens was detained at Sydney Airport and found to be in possession of a large amount of what was then considered pornographic material—photographs, prints, books, a spool of film, some rubber masks and sticks of incense.

Although he had not been arrested or charged at Mascot, Gooseens naively agreed to attend a police interview a few days later, where police then confronted him with photographs of Norton's 'ceremonies' and with his letters, which a Sydney Sun reporter called Joe Morris had stolen from Norton's flat after infiltrating her coven. Faced with the evidence of his affair with Norton—which left him open to the very serious charge of "scandalous conduct"—Goossens was forced to plead guilty on the pornography charges. He was fined 100 pounds, but the scandal ruined his reputation and forced him to resign both his positions, after which he returned to England in disgrace.

The area boomed during the late 1960s, with hundreds of American servicemen on R&R leave flocking to the area each week in search of entertainment. Organised crime was well entrenched in the area, as was police corruption—one of Sydney's most notorious illegal casinos operated with impunity for many years, although it was known to all and located only yards from Darlinghurst police station. This inevitably led to a rise in crime, vice and corruption, and a massive increase in the influx and use of heroin, much of which was initially brought in by American servicemen in the pay of drug rings.

During the late 1970s and Eighties, drug-related crime was one of the area's main social problems, and this led to the controversial establishment of Australia's first legal drug injecting room (where users of illegal drugs can inject themselves in clean conditions without harassment) at a shopfront site near Kings Cross railway station in May, 2001. The injecting room is credited with saving the lives of some 1000 injecting drug users who have overdosed at the facility since its inception.

Since the turn of the century Kings Cross has witnessed a large number of real estate developments—both refurbishments of historic apartment buildings, and the construction of new ones—and this has resulted in demographic changes that are significantly altering the character of the area.