Letter: Union square-headed thinking

Your reporter, Mr Fabricatorian, should know better. Claims that Union Square is under threat or that heritage terraces are to be demolished are urban myths (Green ban puts metro on red alert, July 23).

The metro station should be welcomed by all sensible people in Pyrmont. It will be a gold brick from heaven bringing thousands more to the area daily with shopkeepers adding zeros to their bottom lines. However, the proposed site is not in Union Square. It’s one block away: up to 111.5 metres away to be more exact.

Claims about “heritage terraces” are also misinformed. These buildings are not terraces. A terrace house is one with a cantilevered front verandah with rooms below natural ground level. 159–161 Victoria Street, Potts Point, are examples. The beer garden and buildings under threat have no known heritage value: they are not on any local government, state or federal heritage register and are not individually listed by the National Trust of Australia (NSW). They have no professionally recognised architectural, social, technical, archaeological or historical significance: they’re gutted shops, with original facades butchered and/or painted in puce!

Mr Gibbons, President, Pyrmont Ultimo Chamber of Commerce, makes similar claims but is also publisher of this paper. He is obviously double-dipping in his two-hat capacities to spruik a claim to better his members’ financial interests: noble but lacking intellectual rigour.

Locals should be more rightly concerned about the proposed design than any supposed loss of “heritage”. If history is any precedent, this will be a monster, like the five-storey chimney stack in the forecourt of the Holiday Inn, Potts Point, over the Kings Cross railway station. This six-metre wide priapic piece of concrete spews semi-toxic, unfiltered train and brake dust fumes into the faces of locals and the wider environment. It’s an urban blight, probably what Robin Boyd, famous Australian architect, meant when he coined the phrase, “the new ugliness”. It is also environmentally unsustainable.

On this basis alone, the Pyrmont station entrance proposal is out of character with its surroundings – including former 1840s sandstone workers’ cottages opposite – in terms of height, bulk, materials and design, and should go elsewhere.

Andrew Woodhouse, Potts Point