Glenferrie Riversdale corner – typing and Chinese takeaway.

6 June 2025

If you’ve ever been along Riversdale Road in Hawthorn you would have noticed this, a rather grand shop/office building. The 2020 hawthorn heritage gap study says it was built c1923, of Mt Gambier limestone, now painted unfortunately, but no architect found. It’s relatively rare as a set of shops with purpose built offices upstairs, usually it was the shopkeepers house. It was Stotts College for some time, so sometimes known as Stotts Corner.

Not sure why it’s so rounded, thought might be something to do with tram lines turning, but there’s no turn here, nor when it was built (love the dinky tram in the second c1926 pic), but maybe they thought there might be in future, or maybe they just thought it would look good, and it does !

Showing my age here but I vaguely recall this being built in the 1970s, when I was changing trams to and from school on the corner of Riversdale and Glenferrie Roads – it was originally a Chinese Restaurant ! I remember it being a lot more chinesey, but the only old image I could find is streetview from 2010, showing it was 70s brown brick. That was when it was up for lease, before that it was a Dairy Bell for many years, from c1995. And before it was a chinese restaurant it was a petrol station.

Update : possibly built 1973, and possibly called The Wok, with an extra pagoda roof on top.