Banana Joe’s

Posted: April 11, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Inner West, Shops | Tags: , , | 5 Comments

It is busy in Marrickville, even now with the lockdown measures in operation. On Illawarra Road it seems little different to other Saturdays, although people are wearing face-masks and trying to keep as much distance from each other as the pavement will allow, and there’s an undercurrent of tension that’s the mood of these pandemic times. However there is one Marrickville character who has remained as relaxed as ever.

Leaning back in her hammock, between two steel palm trees, the Banana Joes banana has the same starry-eyed look of unconcern that she has worn for decades, although she has, in recent years, lost the cocktail glass she used to hold aloft. Rain or shine she leans back, staring up into the sky, on her own tropical island of the awning.

The reclining banana is the mascot of Banana Joes, the independent supermarket that has, since 1984, traded from this shop on Illawarra Road. It’s a family business, run by Joe Khouri, and started out as a fruit market chain, with a number of Sydney suburban stores in Ashfield, St Peters and Campsie. It was fairly short-lived as a chain, and the focus has long been the Marrickville store.

Original Banana Joe’s logo. Source: Facebook.

I’d heard rumours that it was closing, but nothing seemed to happen for a while, until the recent announcement that the Easter weekend will be the store’s last. Among the signs on the door and the posters of weekly specials on pickles and giant beans, is a green Woolworths notice, announcing that a “fresh new store is coming soon”, news that no one would be greeting with much enthusiasm. For Banana Joes is a Marrickville shopping landmark, known for its fresh food, capacious canvas shopping bags, slow lift, and reclining steel banana. Just saying its name made going to the supermarket sound interesting.

From the rooftop carpark there’s a view out over Marrickville. I’m not the only person who is looking out over it: a man and his small daughter are standing at the corner, peering down, pointing out familiar places from a new aspect. Maybe this is something they often do, or maybe, in these days of isolation, when one of the few sanctioned reasons for going outside is to shop, any safe opportunity for amusement is worth taking.

Between the carpark and the store an old, slow lift conveys the shoppers who are patient enough to wait for it. Inside the metal interior of the lift posters of the weekly specials are displayed in frames on the wall. This gives it something of the look of a miniature art gallery, inviting scrutiny of the loaves of bread or cans of four-bean-mix or ground coffee that are featured inside. For a time, some years ago, there had been written in black marker on the door the words “smoocher’s lift”: it is obviously special to many people in different ways.

 

On its last weekend the shelves in Banana Joes are a little barer than usual, but the community noticeboard is still cluttered with the usual leaflets for services like the continental philosophy group, knife-sharpening, and meditation courses. Beside it is a crate inside which are stacked empty fruit cartons printed with mascots like top-hat-wearing avocadoes and smiling oranges. People queue up in distanced lines, waiting to buy their last round of Banana Joes groceries.

I’ll miss Banana Joes, but at least the word is that the banana on the awning is set to remain. In years to come it will confuse newcomers to Marrickville, who might wonder at its significance. But the locals will know, and remember.

BJ - 1 (6)

West Side story

Posted: August 16, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Inner West | Tags: , , , , | 13 Comments

business card for West Side Theatre R

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.

West Sides

**

This post is dedicated to @ripmarrickville – which is an excellent chart of Marrickville past and present.

The Ming On Building

Posted: June 15, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Favourite Buildings, Inner West | Tags: , , | 10 Comments

Marrickville’s most striking building is painted a breath-mint green. Two pointed fins rise up from the roof like the tips of sails. The fins slope down into a protruding, triangular block at the centre of the facade, forming an angular nose. Attached to the windows of the nose are advertisements for washing powder that have, over years, faded from red to grey.


In the last week new signs have gone up, signs for the impending auction of the two warehouses that make up the green building: “Invest, Occupy or Redevelop”. It’s the last option that has Marrickvillians nervous. The building is a landmark, a moment of novelty among the otherwise functional architecture that surrounds it.

For decades the building has been occupied by Ming On Trading, a retailer and wholesaler of sewing accessories: buttons, zippers, threads, labels. An arrangement of boxes inside the entrance displays some of the miscellaneous goods that Ming On trades in. Tubs of washing powder are stacked up, there are plastic baskets of socks and sticky tape, bird cages hang from the ceiling. Further inside, almost the whole lower floor of the showroom is dedicated to sewing thread. The metal shelving makes narrow aisles, lined with a rainbow of reels of thread. Unspool it all and it would reach to the moon.

The Ming On building is the kind of place that people stop to notice, photograph, and wonder about. What could be inside this bright, strange building? It’s vernacular value is high, but in other systems of worth – architectural, historical – it has left few traces. I find a newspaper article about a fire on the site in 1970, which destroyed the two existing factory buildings: the current building must have risen from these ashes. In the early 1980s, ads for Pacific Furniture exalt the new, unique dynamic collections of lounge furniture available at their showroom there. Then, later, come references Ming On Trading Co. Pty Ltd.

The style of the building – like a rectangle has swallowed a triangle – is less 1970s-functional, more a kind of industrial Googie, the post-war, space-age American architectural style that was given to Californian diners and petrol stations. There’s no functional reason for its preposterous outfit, the fins on its roof and bright green coat. But the building is a reminder of the importance of eccentric spaces, in a city where, increasingly, the oddities are being ironed out.

Inside Ming On Trading, business continues as usual among the millions of buttons and racks of lace trims. Once the building is sold, Ming On will move south west, to Villawood, but apart from the real estate signs out the front, there’s little indication of the change. Heading up to the top floor, I start up the central stairs, pausing at the landing in the middle. I’m inside the triangle that forms the building’s nose, looking out towards Addison Road through the angled windows. Across the road, I notice a woman has stopped walking to reach into her bag. She looks over towards the Ming On building, with its fins and bright green paint, holds up her phone and takes a photo of it, a bittersweet expression on her face.

Marrickville Mona Lisa

Posted: June 2, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: ghost signs, Inner West, Shops, Signs | Tags: , , | 14 Comments

On an upstairs window of a long-closed shop on Marrickville Road is the fading painted sign for the Mona Lisa Photographic Studio. Its cracked silver lettering makes me think of a logo on a 1950s powder compact, silver letters on a pink plastic case. I imagine that the interior of the photography studio might continue in this powdery style: white carpet, chairs with spindly, gold-painted frames and fluffy pink upholstery, gladioli in a tall glass vase.

At street level, in a stripe above the entrance, are more signs, some in Greek, others in English: another for the Mona Lisa, and one for Finix Discount House, with an illustration of an ascending golden phoenix to accompany it. I peer inside. The two showcase windows to either side of the door are empty, but further back inside the store is a pile of leftover objects: chairs, debris, bedspreads compressed into squares and wrapped in plastic.

The yellow-striped wallpaper is peeling, and wires hang down from the roof, but the space doesn’t quite seem abandoned. A ladder and a broom are propped up against the wall as if at any moment someone might come in and resume the task of clearing out the store. I could see a row of signs on the windows for Blankets, Carpets, Gifts and Crystal. With each word I imagine the store in its heyday, the topography of soft or glistening objects that would have made up its interior. Things bought here would still be in people’s houses, or have recirculated through op shops, or remain at the back of cupboards, never-used wedding presents from decades before.

I am being watched: from the tiled stairwell at the side of the store hangs a framed print of the Mona Lisa. She looks in my direction serenely, with her seeing-but-not-seeing expression, from the wall-mounted glass cabinet lined with flocked wallpaper where she has been, for decades, encased.

A handpainted sign in English and Greek above the cabinet directs all photography enquiries to the shop downstairs. I stumble my eyes over ΦΩΤΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ, decoding it as “photography”. I don’t read or speak Greek so later, when I am back home, I type the words on the sign into an online translation site and they come out, after auto-correction of the text, as “information about the photography lost under the story”. I like it. For as I stand peering through the metal grille that seals the premises off from the street, I dream up stories about the Mona Lisa Photographic Studio. I think of the carefully dressed people who once climbed the stairs, walking up towards the portrait photographs that were soon to be taken of them, preserving that day, that moment.

***

(Those with Marrickville connections might be interested in the Marrickville Map  I made, which includes the Mona Lisa among other landmarks.)