Saturday, 13th March 2010 - Kings Cross, Sydney

Kings Cross is an inner-city locality of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is located approximately 2 kilometres east of the Sydney central business district, in the local government area of the City of Sydney. It is bounded by the suburbs of Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay, Rushcutters Bay and Darlinghurst. Kings Cross is colloquially known as The Cross.

The area is known as Sydney's red-light district. Once home to musical halls and grand theatres, it was rapidly transformed after World War II by the influx of troops returning and visiting from the nearby Garden Island naval base. Today, it is still dominated by bars, restaurants, nightclubs, strip clubs and adult bookstores.

History

The intersection of William Street, Darlinghurst Road and Victoria Street at the locality's southernmost limit was named Queens Cross to celebrate Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee in 1897. Confusion with Queens Square in King Street in the city prompted its renaming as Kings Cross, after King Edward VII, in 1905.

Indigenous inhabitants

The traditional owners of the land were the Cadigal clan of the Eora people, who lived in the area for many thousands of years. After European settlement in 1788, the number of indigenous people was decimated by a smallpox outbreak in 1791 and the destruction of traditional food sources on the land and in the water.

European settlement

During the early 19th century the Kings Cross-Potts Point area was one of Sydney's most prestigious suburbs, being far enough to escape the noise and smell of the central city but close enough for easy travel. An additional attraction was the 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 (4 ha). The remnants of these gardens helped give the area its leafy character, and many of the mansions are commemorated in street names, such as Kellett Street.

Most of the grand estates were ultimately subdivided with all but a handful of the great houses demolished. One of the surviving estates is Elizabeth Bay House, a quintessential example of Australian colonial architecture.

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

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 and police corruption was well entrenched in the area—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. Much of this activity can be related with Abe Saffron, commonly known as Mr Sin or "the boss of the Cross". 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.

A positive influence in the area during that time was The Wayside Chapel, run by the late Rev. Ted Noffs. His church was open most of the time, providing a "drop in centre" and counselling services to many of the itinerants who were drawn to the area. A foundation created in his name has been running since 1971.

From the late 1960s, drug-related crime was one of the area's main social problems, leading to the controversial establishment of Australia's first Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (where users of illegal drugs can inject themselves in clean conditions) at a shopfront site near Kings Cross railway station in May, 2001. An example of harm reduction, the injecting room is credited with reducing the occurrence of fatal overdoses in the injecting drug user community, as well as reducing the number of needles left in the street.

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. This has resulted in demographic changes as affluent professionals are increasingly residing in the area and are in turn significantly altering the character of the area.