THE NAKED CITY: BEHIND THE STEEL DOOR

It was early September in 1939 and a large and angry crowd had gathered outside the German Consulate in the Cliveden Building at 4 Bridge Street in the heart of Sydney. A large swastika flag had flown from the Consulate’s office for years beforehand, dominating the top end of Bridge Street as an ominous and menacing presence. Only the large steel doors of the building kept the crowd from storming the previous Nazi stronghold.

Today, few of the residents and commercial office holders who reside in the Cliveden would be aware of its sinister past. In 2023 it’s very much an upmarket location with many of the older apartments renovated and prized as prime CBD real estate. The large ornate steel door, which now has a heritage listing, remains – but has a key card access.

The solid twelve story concrete structure, formerly known as the Birts Building and De la Salle House was completed in 1914 and originally housed a number of commercial offices. Refurbished in 1985, many of the offices were converted to residential and the current building houses a mix of both. In its early days, 4 Bridge Street was the Sydney HQ of the Red Cross and many years later was home to Icon Films and the Bolivian consulate. Today a one bedroom apartment will set you back around $800 a week but it wasn’t always like that.

Back in the 1990s the same apartment, albeit slightly shabby, could be rented for around $250 a week. The building housed a somewhat eccentric mixture of foreign students, bohemian types and short term tenants housed in a number of low budget holiday apartments. I speak from first hand as I lived there for eight years, from 1996 through to 2004, moving three times to different apartments within the building.

There was never a dull moment, whether it was the swimming pool on the roof which burst its bottom and flooded the immediate tenants below or a series of robberies that took place when security was incredibly lax. When the body corporate decided to install an expensive Persian carpet in the foyer it lasted only a few months before a couple of enterprising thieves walked in one day, simply rolled it up and took off with the booty.

When the new Sydney Stock Exchange was being constructed just down the street, there were a number of audacious daytime break-ins that could only have been executed with some kind of industrial device. A hole was punched in the door of one apartment that you could have put your head through. The finger of suspicion was pointed at construction workers at the Exchange, perhaps unfairly, but nothing could ever be proved.

During my years at the Cliveden, the building was home to at least two brothels that I knew of. The first, known as ‘Tokyo Steam’, was housed directly under the second apartment I occupied. I would regularly get a knock on the door from a middle aged gentleman who had got off on the wrong floor, gingerly enquiring “whether the girls were working today?”.

In the early 2000s, a couple of big burly Korean gangsters set up a more disturbing  operation from an apartment on my same floor. The girls were all Korean and could well have been trafficked into the country. The two thugs who ran the business were decidedly unfriendly and I often heard screaming and shouting coming from the premises. Most of the patronage came from businessmen during the daytime but late night and often highly inebriated punters were not uncommon.

On one occasion I woke to the sound of an obviously terrified customer being dragged from the apartment by the Korean enforcers, either to be drowned in the roof top pool or thrown down the stairs. Maybe his credit card had bounced but a week later the knock shop was gone, along with the scary kimchi crims who ran it.

Such was the excitement of life in the Cliveden a couple of decades ago. There could well be ‘escorts’ working in the building today but cameras and full security have long been installed and the impressive steel door that once protected a bunch of Nazis is there to keep the riff raff out.