28 February 2024

You probably know this place as The Top of the Town, a brothel in Flinders Street near King Street – it’s a fairly nice building too, with a bit of a history. It was built in 1880 as Coffee Tavern No 2, one of the first of the ‘coffee palaces’ in the city, and the second by this company, the first being in Bourke Street – the promoters thought to do good by providing a place of relaxation, with a coffee room, billiards and smoking rooms, but no alcohol, right amongst the wharves warehouses and pubs of an area with a hard working low wage area. The fine building was designed by Lloyd Tayler in Renaissance Revival style. I don’t know how successful it was, but like many of the other Coffee Palaces (mostly a bit grander than this one) it closed after the depression of the 1890s, becoming a warehouse in 1897. Nearly a century later, it was renovated as a brothel in 1990, when it faced the now King Street overpass, dem in 2005, but now we can all admire it in its jaunty colours (above the annoying row of aircons).

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