Mounts Bay, 1900
Mounts Bay
Years ago, as drivers approached Perth from Fremantle via the Stirling Highway, they would come around Point Lewis (where the northen abutment of the Narrow Bridge now stands) they were greeted with the site of the city skyline beyond a tranquil stretch of water called Mounts Bay. Mounts Bay Road still follows the steep hillside of Kings Park, following what was once the shoreline of Mounts Bay, but the bay no longer exists, having been progressively reclaimed over a period of 20 years as the Kwinana Freeway/Mitchell Freeway city interchange was built and extended.
Mounts-Bay-1964
An elderly Bessie Rischbieth famously protested against the project by standing in the shallows in front of the bulldozers for a whole day in 1967. She succeeded in halting progress - for that one day.
Though the freeway on and off ramps and loop roads of the Narrows Interchange occupy large sections of the reclaimed land, the reclaimed area to the east of The Esplanade has been put to a number of uses since the original reclamation work was completed in 1961.
What became known as No. 2 Car Park was built here with entry points at the foot of Mill Street and also on the car park's southern side, giving access from the Mitchell Freeway. City workers coming to work by car via The Narrows Bridge, Stirling Highway or the Mitchell Freeway didn't need to drive right into the city. They simply went as far as The Esplanade, parked their cars and walked into the city. When it was time to go home they walked to their cars and drove away (without having to go into the city block). That worked well until someone decided Mounts Bay Road and Riverside Drive should be widened so they could take more traffic. In order to facilitate that, the car park shrunk. A decade later, as traffic got heavier, someone decided it was time to encourage city workers to come to work by public transport rather than by car, and so the car park shrank again to make way for the Transperth City Busport.
Mounts Bay, 2000
In 2000, what was left of the car park was deemed too valuable to leave undeveloped, and selected the site for The Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre (when viewed from Kings Park, it's the building that looks like a giant shed). In a move to welcome motorists back into the city again, they built a 1,500-bay car park under the Convention and Exhibition Centre.
That part of the Esplanade between William and Barrack Streets has recently been redeveloped. The $440 Elizabeth Quays project includes an inlet with an island in it, surrounded by nine watefront towers containing 1700 residential, hotel or service apartments, 150,000 square metres of office space and 39,000 square metres of retail space. The concept is to create a riverside public space similar to Melbourne's Southbark, but in reality its design and location is more like a cross between Sydney's Circular Quay and Melbourne's other riverside redevelopment - Docklands.
Circular Quay's saving grace is that it has the Sydney Harbour Bridge on one side and the Sydney Opera House on the other. Docklands is a concrete jungle which Melburnians and tourists shun because of its wind tunnel effect, lack of soul, lack of open, green spaces and its disconnection from the CBD.
