Lavender Bay escalators were an exciting novelty
One hundred years ago this year, train and ferry passengers had the novel experience of being conveyed between the Lavender Bay foreshore and Glen Street at Milsons Point by escalator.
The device wasn’t quite a first, but it was impressive. Australia’s first escalators had been installed in Mark Foys department store in the city in 1909. But they only lasted until 1914 after many breakdowns. So, the Lavender Bay escalators were the only moving stairway in Australia when activated in 1924. Furthermore, they were the second largest set in the world, pipped by just two months with the installation of escalators at Bank Street station on the London Underground in May.
The technology was 33 years old, if Jesse Reno’s 1891 US patent is accepted as the first modern escalator design. There were earlier versions of revolving stairs going back to the 1850s. Nonetheless, the experience of being delivered effortlessly up or down a cliff was new and exciting for the good folk of North Sydney in 1924.
Lavender Bay received its remarkable set of three moving stairways because of the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. That project, which also began in 1924, required the relocation of Milsons Point train station from near the ferry arcade at the southern-most point, back along the Lavender Bay foreshore in order to make space for the bridge’s pylon. The ferry arcade survived for two more years. In between the ferry and train stops were the bridge workshops.
The escalators were an impressive concession for travellers who would have otherwise climbed hundreds of steps up the steady incline of Alfred Street.
Milson Point railway station
Newspaper accounts from the time convey the thrill. Two weeks after the escalators began operation on 26 July, the Sydney Mail combined pen and ink drawings with humorous observations: ‘The Lavender Bay escalators have given joyous excitement to thousands of people, especially school boys. Businessmen with a minute or two to spare while waiting for the steamer or train join the boys and revel in the novelty.’
The amusement continued as The Sun reported the escalator’s ‘first tragedy’; a shoe was caught in the mechanism, and with that a high heel snapped, resulting in the leg of a ‘Sydney girl’ being ‘made an inch or so shorter than the other’. In fact, there were no serious mishaps over the life of the escalators.
As part of his exhaustive documentation of the changes being wrought on North Sydney by the construction of the bridge, Albert Mitchell photographed the escalators under construction in June 1924, and again when they became operational at the southern end of Milsons Point station in September.
The Lavender Bay escalators operated until the Harbour Bridge opened in 1932. They were put in storage and one was reused at Town Hall Station in 1937.
Historical Services, North Sydney Council