18 October 2023

Another surviving St Kilda mansion, in Barkly Street near the top of the hill, but the gates are better than the house. The house was built in 1868 for successful tanner and leather merchant Michaelis Helenstein, a pillar of the St Kilda Jewish community. The gates are a bit later, dating from 1877. The house became a boarding house by the 1920s, eventually becoming a rooming house run by Housing First, recently turned into self contained flats. The verandah of the house looks 1920s or 30s, definitely not Victorian; it was probably a timber one, cast iron being popular a bit later.

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