John Street Square

John Street Square was my next light rail stop and it took me deep into the heart of Pyrmont, which is about a hundred metres from the fringe of Pyrmont but whatever.  John Street Square itself turns out to be more of a rectangle and can best be described as a sort of plaza in miniature.  A plazaette if you will.  It actually looked more like a courtyard for one of the apartment blocks around and I couldn't help the feeling that I had come up from the station directly onto private property.

And I did have to come up!  John Street Square is buried at the bottom of a deep cutting into the hill that Pyrmont is largely built on.  The resultant shady gloom makes the place an ideal pigeon roost which is why I had to navigate my balcony levels of bird crap in order to get out.  Once one has ascended to surface level it is only fair to say that Pyrmont improves.  There's less visible pigeon crap for one thing.

Over the course of its history Pyrmont has been a quarry, dock, industrial site, slum and largely abandoned.  Now it is the most densely populated piece of real estate in Australia with thirteen thousand people per square kilometre which means that thirteen thousand people live in Pyrmont.  The remaining old industrial buildings have been repurposed as residential buildings and are surrounded by new apartment blocks most of which are also home to shops, offices and the occasional light rail station.  With the exception of a couple of large parks down at the waterfront the largest open spaces are the roads.  All of this contributes to a look I like to call ultra modern medieval a style that appeals to me almost as much as genuine medieval but with better plumbing.

Pyrmont tends to be hilly (until it meets the water where it becomes flat, wet and difficult to build on) and what with elevation changes, quarry remnants and high rise buildings it is difficult to find any part of Pyrmont that isn't overlooked by some other part of Pyrmont.  Somewhere in amongst all of this are the headquarters of a number of our media outlets but I didn't seek them out because I don't really give a crap.

What few parks there are tend to be small to the point where the largest part of them is the sign from the local council inviting you to enjoy the park as long as you don't do anything antisocial like light fires, drink alcohol or perform informal autopsies on deceased relatives.  There was one such sign which had me looking around in bewilderment honestly wondering what on earth it was referring to.  Eventually I worked out that what I thought was an ill kept nature strip was in fact a city park.  It would have been difficult to do anything antisocial there, there simply wasn't the room.

This "park" actually overlooked the light rail line snaking towards the city in its cutting below us.  A fence had been thoughtfully provided so that park enjoyers didn't inadvertently plunge to their doom.  On this fence was a plaque which gave me serious concerns about the intellectual and technical level of the people who ran this little part of our nation.

In tones of breathless adulation the plaque announced that there was a "tunnel" ("No," I hear you cry).  What's more that tunnel was made of brick.  Brick, children can you imagine it?  Ask your grandparents.  This mighty tunnel crafted from miraculous awe inspiring brick had once been a vital part of Sydney's industrial heritage.  Gaze upon it and be amazed!

OK, to be fair the tunnel does in fact serve a vital role in ensuring that the goods trains of yesteryear and the light rail of today don't plough headfirst into a rock wall when attempting the journey from Pyrmont to Darling Harbour but the plaque managed to imply that this was the biggest miracle since the second coming.  If nothing else it gave me an insight into the likely results if the local authority were to attempt a similar engineering feat today.

Having goggled in awe at the stupendous tunnel digging feats of our ancestors I trotted back down through the pigeon crap to await the second coming of the light rail.