LAND IN SYDNEY.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIX, Issue 5320, 31 August 1928, Page 2

LAND IN SYDNEY.

HIGJI-PRICED PROPERTY. £4OOO A FOOT PAID. Property in Pitt Street,. Sydney’s busiest thoroughfare, changed hands at £4OOO a font a week ago,. Sydney is* wondering, just where and.- whqn| ■these sparing prices will ejid. A decade ago £lOOO a fqot would have been regarded as a fictitious valuation. Three or four years- ago even land in thoroughfqr.es like, Phillip and Macquarie streets, the home of the legal and medical professions, wo,uld have, sold readily fc|r £2OO a foot. The pheriome'nal rise which is; illustrated effectively in- the Pitt Street deal is manifest ,all over, the city (states the eorrespQiHltent of the Evening Post). In October, 1926, for example, a wellknown hotel in Wynard Square, the proposed site of one- of the big. underground railway stations', changedhands for £’70,000.' Last January it again changed hands for £103,500. The story of Pitt Street is one of the most fascinating in the histqry of Sydney. It was not very far from where the property has just chanlged hands, at £4OOO a foot that Farmer’s, one of Australia’s biggest business emporiums, was established in 1840 with twenty hands;, in premises occupying. a space' of 24 feet by 75 feet. It was iii this street, top, that Australia’s oldtest afternoon paper once had .a. dovecqt for pigeonr outside its office anfl they carried on a very useful news service, it was these winged messengers on one qceasion which brought to tiie newspaper office the result of the world’s spulling championship on the Parramatta river. In Pitt Street also was qne of the principal bakeries in the , good old days when bread cost 5s for, a 21b loaf. O teimpqra, O mores. Times and manners have indeed changed,