Precinct 2: The Rush To Be Rich

In the late 1880’s, shipping moved downstream towards the new Victoria Dock and businessmen began to look for compact offices, with typewriters and telephones, rather than the old bluestone warehouses.

Irishman Patrick McCaughan bought up the southern frontage of Collins Street and began to build some of the city’s most ornate buildings. He sold the three middle allotments for Record Chambers (1887), the New Zealand Insurance Company (1889) and the Winfield Building (1891) and developed the ‘bookends’ himself, as the Olderfleet (1889-90) and the Rialto (1890-91). With his white spats, top hat and twirling moustache, McCaughan was as flamboyant as the Venetian Gothic facades of his new buildings. Both captured the high hopes of an era when Melbourne businessmen dominated the South Pacific.

A few years later it was all over. In 1893 Melbourne’s banks crashed and many of the tenants of the new building were ruined.

Stop 5
Thirty years after the first gold strike, Melbourne witnessed a second rush. This time it was not a rush to dig beneath the soil, but a rush to get rich through land and share speculation. 'Marvellous Melbourne' — as an English journalist dubbed it — became the fourth largest city in the British Empire. At the giddy peak of the boom in Collins Street, land sold for as much as in London’s Regent Street!

Stop 5
The Venice of the South
Le Meridien Hotel, formerly the Rialto (1890-1) is the most magnificent of the 1880’s office buildings. Young Australian-born architect William Pitt drew inspiration from its namesake, the business quarter of medieval Venice. He arranged leasehold offices and sample rooms along an internal gallery, and embellished the façade with multi-coloured bricks, pointed arches and a candle-snuffer shaped tower.

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Marvellous Smellbourne
Remember the curious corrugated iron structure we glimpsed from Flinders Lane? In 1890, when the Rialto opened, Melbourne was still unsewered, and male tenants were obliged to relieve themselves in this primitive outdoor urinal. Bad smells and rampant typhoid inspired one wit to re-christen the city ‘Marvellous Smellbourne’! The Rialto urinals were saved from demolition by order of the Victorian Heritage Council.

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A fortune won and lost
The Winfield Building (1891) was built to house the Melbourne Wool Exchange. But after the crash of 1893 the business was hit hard. One of partners, Thomas Fallon, lost everything including the £50,000 his wife had inherited from her father. As the ship bearing her back from England neared Melbourne, Fallon shot himself dead in a Fitzroy boarding house.