Sydney gets its own Central Park

It already has a Hyde Park, to match its namesake in London. Now, Sydney is seemingly turning to New York for inspiration, with the new public space approved this week for part of the former Carlton and United Breweries site on Broadway provisionally given the name ‘Central Park’.

The 6,500m2 park was announced at a press conference on Monday by NSW Premier Kristina Keneally, herself keen to point out that any notions of ‘Americanising’ Sydney were purely coincidental. “This site represents significant urban renewal for Sydney, and it represents significant investment into our city and our state. This site is a 5.8 hectare site, and when completed, will support some 6,000 ongoing jobs; during its construction, it will be supporting some 12,000 construction jobs,” she said. “This park is a $6 million investment by Frasers. It’s a major injection of open space into the inner city and in fact is returning space to the city that they have been cut off from for 150 years.”

Once the park is finished – a process expected to be complete within 12 months – ownership will transfer to the City of Sydney.

The park sits in the centre of the so-called ‘Central Park precinct’, immediately north of O’Conner Street in Chippendale. It will also feature three additional street frontages to new public roads which have yet to be named.

Frasers said the park would include a “prominent water feature” dividing the park in two, as well as “substantial” public artwork, pedestrian footways and a cycle route.

“Here in this development, the infrastructure comes first. Often with development, it’s the other way around – things like parks and sporting fields only arrive after, or at the same time as the developer has actually completed,” said NSW Planning Minister Tony Kelly.

He added Frasers had five further projects, representing the balance of the concept site, currently before the Department of Planning awaiting approval.

Although the Broadway site does not contain any property formally earmarked for affordable housing, Mrs Keneally said Frasers was making a “quite significant” contribution of over $30 million to affordable housing in Redfern-Waterloo.

Completion of the overall redevelopment is expected to take between 8-10 years, according to Frasers Property COO Nicholas Wolff.

Frasers CEO Dr Stanley Quek said he hoped the entire Central Park site would eventually be shorthand for a Sydney city hub. “A key feature of the Central Park project will be the connectivity that it will bring to Broadway and Chippendale, linking major commercial nodes, local businesses, transport, retail centres, schools and universities to the southern end of Sydney’s CBD,” he said. “I hope very soon… Central Park will become one of the Sydney CBD’s iconic meeting places [like] Circular Quay, Pitt Street Mall, Chinatown or Hyde Park, where people will one day be saying ‘Meet you at Central Park’.”