West Side story
Posted: August 16, 2019 Filed under: Inner West | Tags: hoyts marrickville, keith petersen, marrickville, theatre history, theatre restaurant 13 Comments
I found the business card in a country antique store, inside a plastic folder of old tram tickets, maps, and pamphlets for tourist attractions and theme parks. The West Side Theatre Restaurant, Keith Petersen. I could picture the West Side, as I had passed it many times on Illawarra Road, its blank facade stripped of adornments besides the small vertical sign with West Side printed on it in red. The sign is hidden for most of the year behind the leaves of the tree beside it, but I notice it nevertheless.
After I bought the card, I added it to the stack of miscellaneous library and loyalty cards in the back pocket of my wallet. I’d be searching for the card to check out a book or print something at Officeworks, and instead pull out the card for the West Side Theatre Restaurant, as if that would provide me with the help I required.
Keith Petersen was a vaudeville and pantomime actor and comedian, who made his name performing in productions in Sydney’s live theatres, like the Theatre Royal and the Tivoli (his one notable film role was as the drunk man on the ferry in They’re a Weird Mob who slurs out abusive comments about migration as he staggers around the cabin). But by the 1960s, audiences for live theatre had been diminished by television, and traditional theatres were closing, in favour of theatre restaurants.
In 1967, Keith Petersen announced he was “Bringing Variety Back” with the opening of the West Side Theatre Restaurant. He had invested all his money in the theatre, he said in a newspaper interview, and was both the manager and the theatre’s leading actor. The interviewer wasn’t convinced about the location – Marrickville? Implying: working class, migrant, Marrickville? Petersen, however, was adamant that the people of Marrickville wanted variety entertainment as much as the people of Neutral Bay or Woollahra. Advertisements for the theatre restaurant describe how it was “the largest and most lavish theatre restaurant in the country”, and also “the only restaurant with full dancing facilities”.
The article also included the unusual detail that Petersen, as a hobby, kept a pig farm near Campbelltown. However he’d been so busy setting up the West Side, he’d had to spend much less time with his pigs. “And that’s a pity,” he said, “because my pigs are my relaxation.”
It’s hard to determine the success of the West Side from the newspaper traces. Petersen died in 1971, (at his home in Campbelltown, it was reported), and then, at some point, West Side became the reception centre it operated as until recently. In even more recent times the building has housed a series of final-days businesses – a co-working space, a rug shop – while it is on the market as a development site. I often walk past the back of it, where ferns sprout from the bricks, and the pigeons are always up to something. They used to preside over a squashed air conditioning unit, before the unit was removed, and then they took over the nook where it used to be.
The building has all the signs of having once been a movie theatre, being long and wide with a peaked, corrugated iron roof, and indeed started its life that way, as the Hoyts De Luxe in 1921, before it was redesigned and reopened in 1938, screening the film “Dead End”. The film is set in New York, amid the crime and poverty of the tenements of the Lower East Side, alongside which new, luxury apartments have just been built with views over East River.
When I stand on the corner of the former theatre, where eighty years ago audiences gathered to watch this screening of Dead End, and Keith Petersen once dreamed of his lavish theatre restaurant, I can hear the pick and churn of new apartment complexes being constructed all around. One complex is being built directly across the street. Its sign promises residents will “Wake up Wonderful”. They will wake to the view of the Westside, where the painted signs in the window of the rug store say “Everything Must Go!”, until the West Side itself goes too.
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This post is dedicated to @ripmarrickville – which is an excellent chart of Marrickville past and present.
mirrorsydney.wordpress.com 
I love reading your stories. Thank you for writing them.
Thanks Cindy! I love to write them and it means a lot to know that people are enjoying them.
Thanks so much for this, Vanessa. It brought tears to my eyes as I remembered all the cinemas that have gone to Hollywood in the sky. I’m sure that is where I saw “The Greatest Show on Earth” in the early 1950s with my cousin who lived in Addison Road. And what a trouper was Keith Peterson! I’ll bet he even saw that film there in 1953, perhaps even sitting near me! Love your blog. xx
Thanks for your comment Trish – I’m glad it brought up some memories for you and thanks for your kind words about the blog. The changes of the 1960s were tough on Sydney cinemas – there used to be so many! Every suburb had one. But there are still traces of them around, even if few remain as cinemas.
great post – fascinating to read about the history of theatres in Marrickville
Thanks Rose – I do love to delve into cinemas past – there’s a fair few hiding around the suburbs (though many of course are long gone).
Even though we were poor I still remember them as the best years of my life.
When I was 6 months old my parents moved with me and my two older siblings from the slums of Sydney to a shack in the sticks outside Campbelltown.
We collected rainwater off the corrugated iron roof into a corrugated iron tank. Sewage disposal was by way of a bucket Dad emptied and buried in the field. Dad paid for electricity to be extended down our dirt road to run the one bare light bulb in the shack.
Yes, we were poor, but we didn’t feel it. Everyone was poor back then. Except our next door neighbor, Keith Peterson, he was rich.
Keith Peterson was an actor and comedian. He had to be. He had a natural face that looked like he could play a clown and not need to apply makeup. If you asked him what he did for a living he would say “show business.”
Keith had a weekender next door that he rented out to friends or relatives. He had pigs and a horse. He would saddle up the horse and let all the neighborhood kids take a ride.
Saturday nights (I think, can’t remember which night it was) he invited us all over to watch TV. I remember Bonanza, Rawhide, Cheyenne, Maverick, and all the great TV westerns of the late 50s and early 60s that we first watched there and later on our own HG Palmers black and white.
I remember years later he came over and told us to be sure to watch the premier opening of Channel 4 out of Wollongong. He was on it doing his signature drunk pantomime schtick from his vaudeville days.
Yes, he was fabulously wealthy by our standards but he never made us feel poor. He was a very kind man.
Thank you for sharing these memories, Robert, it’s wonderful to know a bit more about Keith and his generous character. What a fantastic neighbour to have!
Thank you Vanessa. Please excuse my misspelling of his name. I only knew him as a child and had never seen it written.
Even though we were poor I still remember them as the best years of my life.
When I was 6 months old my parents moved with me and my two older siblings from the slums of Sydney to a shack in the sticks outside Campbelltown.
We collected rainwater off the corrugated iron roof into a corrugated iron tank. Sewage disposal was by way of a bucket Dad emptied and buried in the field. Dad paid for electricity to be extended down our corrugated dirt road to run the one bare light bulb in the shack.
Yes, we were poor, but we didn’t feel it. Everyone was poor back then. Except our next door neighbor, Keith Peterson, he was rich.
Keith Peterson was an actor and comedian. He had to be. He had a natural face that looked like he could play a clown and not need to apply makeup. If you asked him what he did for a living he would say “show business.”
Keith had a weekender next door that he rented out to friends or relatives. He had pigs and a horse. He would saddle up the horse and let all the neighborhood kids take a ride.
Saturday nights (I think, can’t remember which night it was) he invited us all over to watch TV. I remember Bonanza, Rawhide, Cheyenne, Maverick, and all the great TV westerns of the late 50s and early 60s that we first watched there and later on our own HG Palmers black and white.
I remember years later he came over and told us to be sure to watch the premier opening of Channel 4 out of Wollongong. He was on it doing his signature drunk pantomime schtick from his vaudeville days.
Yes, he was fabulously wealthy by our standards but he never made us feel poor. He was a very kind man.
Vanessa,
Keith Petersen may have been one of the original investors in WIN 4 in 1955.
I was in Marrickville about a week ago and saw that the Westside building has been demolished. I stopped and peered through the hoardings and could see a small ghost sign advertising “Vetta” pasta, and the words “Continent Delicatess” on the adjoining shop, which is currently a butcher. Quintessential post-war Marrickville!
I’ll have to go by and have a peek to see if it’s still there – thanks Kate!