The Rocks is one of Sydney’s most popular and expensive neighborhoods. But it wasn’t always so.

The rocky headlands that once lined the harbor and from which the neighborhood took its name are long gone. So too are the original mud structures that preceded the streets and stone buildings that the convicts created. Development began along harbor and led to the creation of George Street, whose side was lined with primarily warehouses and inland side primarily with bars and shops. Sailors lived and stayed in inns, boarding houses and brothels along the lower streets, while ship owners, captains and merchants built their homes higher up the hill.

The alleyways, some of which were originally open sewers, fostered vermin and disease (sounds enticing, huh?) and, even after underground sewage was built, helped lead to an early 20^th century spread of Bubonic plague, from which more than 100 people died. These same alleyways were also home to “Rocks Push”, the most notorious of the city’s gangs, and into which provocative women lured sailors to be mugged, robbed and sometimes beaten to death. And when the gangs weren’t out, packs of wild dogs sometimes were.

Such incidents forced business and families to leave the neighborhood, moving further up George Street and surrounding areas. It also led to repeated calls from citizens and politicians alike to tear down the slums and replace them with the type of modern buildings that were sprouting throughout the city. The city did tear down and replace more than 100 buildings in the early 1900s—a process that was ended by the outbreak of World War I. Another major tear-down effort got underway in the 1960s, when politicians and business leaders agreed on a plan and began work.

Not everybody, however, was behind the plan. The Builders and Laborers Federation argued that the historic buildings should be preserved and renovated, rather than destroyed and replaced by soilless concrete monoliths that would displace current working-class residents. The Federation’s members refused to work on demolition projects and blocked the efforts of third-party organizations to do so. The so-called “Green Ban” was aggressively supported by The Rocks residents and preservation groups and the city was eventually forced to relent.

Today,  The Rocks is the home of much of what is left of the city’s historical legacy. While some of this legacy can be seen from the exterior of the totally renovated buildings, much more is preserved in historical placards and museums including the Rocks Discovery Museum and the Susannah Place Museum, both of which are discussed in the Sydney Museums post.

However, the city is struggling under the financial burden of maintaining many of the city-owned terrace apartments that it currently rents to lower-income families at subsidized rents. This financial squeeze is particularly vivid given that the same type of apartments, when renovated, often sell for well over $1 million. The city is, therefore, now trying to evict some current long-time residents and sell the units in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Not surprisingly, protest signs are again appearing in local windows.

Among The Rocks most important and historic structures and streets are:

• Sydney Harbor Bridge, a single-span structure, nicknamed the “Coathanger” was constructed in 1932, during the midst of the depression. It provided both an economic boost to the struggling economy and a psychological boost by completing a project that many thought to be technologically impossible. Its building, however, did impose costs. These included the 16 people that were killed while building the bridge and another 60 that that used the Bridge to commit suicide in the first few months of its opening. We have crossed the iconic bridge by car, by train and on foot. Our last trip included a BridgeClimb tour, where we hooked up our safety belts for a climb up the maintained ladders, along the catwalks and up to the top of the arch. This time, we only gazed at it. While expensive when we did it years ago, the price seems to be more in the exorbitant range now.

• Argyle Cut, a street, that was created at the urging of influential ship-owners and merchants who lived on the higher slopes of the neighborhood, to facilitate access to the city. Convicts hand cut the road out of solid rock by convicts over a period of 18 years.

• George Street, was the city’s first and main street. It was once the home of everyone from the city’s moneyed elite, to its workers and itinerant sailors. Although relegated to slums in the mid-20^th century, it is now lined with renovated 19^th-century buildings that are occupied by a wide range of restaurants, galleries and tourist shops.
• Laneways and back alleys that run off and behind George Street provide much of the area’s current charm and previous years’ horror stories. Although fun to explore, Laneways such as Suez Canal (aka Nurse’s Lane), was named after the raw sewage that flowed down the alley and flooded into the harbor on rainy days.
• Dawes Point and Pylon Lookout, which while not exactly historic, do provide some of the best free views (in addition to paid views and restaurant views from Sydney Tower and other modern towers). They provide great views of the Bridge, the Opera House, the harbor and North Shore, as well as Luna Park, the city’s only remaining amusement park.

Among the neighborhood’s many historic buildings are:

• Cadman’s Cottage, the oldest of the remaining buildings, built in 1816 for the crew of the Governor’s boats.
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• Campbell’s Storehouses, the remnants of a multi-story wharf built over half a century (from 1839 to 1890) by Robert Campbell, the city’s first major global merchant, was originally used to store goods imported from India. Today it houses a number of popular restaurants.
• Sailor’s Home, a mid-18^th century testament to house visiting sailors, it was still a big step up from the run-down rooms in which they used to stay until being shanghaied to serve on departing ships. It is currently an art gallery.

• ASN Building, a fortress-like, towered warehouse building that is also home of a large art gallery.
• Argyle Stores, a series of warehouses from 1826 that were aligned around a cobblestone courtyard is now a huge, popular bar and restaurant complex.
• Sydney Observatory, built in the 1850s that, according to the stories we read and heard, had multiple lives, including as a windmill, a fortress, a tower to track and signal (with a cannon blast) accurate times, an observatory for mapping the Southern skies in the 1880s, and currently, an astronomy museum.

• Lord Nelson Hotel, an 1842-era hotel that was built of sandstone taken from the Argyle Cut, which bills itself as the oldest hotel in the city.

• Hero of Waterloo, an inn built in 1844 (also with stone from the Cut) era with a street-level bar that seems to look almost like it did in the 19^th century.

The human side of the community can be witnessed in the large, often filled restaurants and bars, such as MUNICH and those in the Argyle Stores. It is also evident on Saturday afternoon when the center of neighborhood is turned into a large craft and artisanal food market. The saw well over 100 booths, including a couple with products that we seldom see at such markets. These included one in which you could design your own lamps with combinations of different color, translucent plastic bands and another with a large selection of dukkah mixes, a few of which we just had to take home.

The Rocks Restaurants

• Sake We had four dishes at this modern Japanese restaurant. We were least impressed by the dish most highly recommended by our less than impressive server as a house specialty—popcorn shrimp tempura with creamy spicy sauce. Not bad, but not especially impressive. We were, however, much more impressed by our other dishes. While the lamb chops with wasabi chimichurri were quite good, we were most impressed with a crudo dish: white snapper with sesame seeds, chives, yuzu and white soy dressing. Better yet was the miso-cream seared scallops with baby corn, asparagus, shitake mushrooms and a wonderfully smoky yuzo miso cream. And since all Japanese food goes better with sake, we had it with a medium dry, rice-flavored Kirineach junmai.
• William Blue is not really upscale nor New Australian. It is the restaurant of a Hospitality Management College in which students cook and serve a range of contemporary dishes. We had three dishes: confit spatchcock leg and poached breast with couscous, dates and jus; and miso-glazed smoked bonito with daikon, yuzo and mayo; followed by dessert of honeycomb chocolate ice cream with praline, raspberry and meringue. Our wines were 2013 Pressing Matters “RO” Riesling from Tasmania’s Coal Valley and 2014 Aligrini Valpolocella from outside of Venice. While the service is very much a work in process, the food was mixed. The dessert was certainly the most interesting and the chicken was tasty, if not especially complex. In contrast, the bonito, which was ordered rare, was overcooked and lacking in taste.
• Fish at the Rocks, a local Rocks-neighborhood seafood restaurant where we had two nice dishes: Black mussels steamed in white wine with garlic, spring onions, tarragon and tomato; and broiled swordfish steak dusted in cumin, coriander and paprika with grilled potato, lentils and fenugreek, and passion fruit and mango chutney. The restaurant also provided us with the opportunity to taste a 2015 Giant Steps pinot noir, which we were unable to taste at the temporarily closed Yarra Valley winery (light, but complex with bright red cherry).