Every attempt to fix Sydney’s ugliest building has failed. Might this plan just work?
The Goulburn Street car park is where Sydney’s dreams go to die.
No building in the CBD has been so derided quite like the rundown brown brick structure. Despite being ridiculed as an “abandoned Soviet hospital”, successive ideas to cheer up this dilapidated site never seem to get anywhere.
Turn it into a public high school? That ended up somewhere else. A “green building” covered in plants? Never happened. And a rooftop bar with contemporary dance and live music? The mayor said it would be “incredibly expensive”, and nothing eventuated.
The much-maligned car park’s days could be numbered.Credit: Steven Siewert
In fact, the only thing to actually transform the site was one that wasn’t planned at all: a gang of Fairfax photographers illegally plastered one side of the car park with a “guerilla gallery” of city life photos.
But change is on the horizon. The City of Sydney is considering giving up its lease on the site – which it has until September 2060 – for the state government to build homes for essential workers.
After Labor deputy lord mayor Zann Maxwell moved a motion last month to ask the chief executive to consider offering it to the government on “favourable terms”, the site’s owner, Transport Asset Manager of NSW (which owns the state’s rail assets), and Transport for NSW are now both open to discussing the site’s future.
Labor deputy lord mayor Zann Maxwell is proposing the city sell the rest of its lease back to the government.Credit: Steven Siewert
“The site has the potential to deliver well-located housing and contribute to the NSW government’s housing targets,” a Transport for NSW spokesperson said on Monday, adding that the site had already been included in the 2022 rezoning application for Central Station. That application included proposals for a now-abandoned “super-deck” over station platforms. It is still waiting on determination from the Planning Department.
In 2018, Property and Development NSW offered the City of Sydney $75 million to buy out the council’s lease of the car park, but the council rejected the offer (it makes about $8 million in revenue annually from the car park’s operation).
