Hellscapes, eyesores and housing hopes: These are Sydney's boulevards of broken dreams

Sydney Morning Herald

17-06-2025

Would you enjoy an al fresco dinner by Parramatta Road? How about sitting and reading while enjoying a coffee beside the Princes Highway?
Some of Sydney's biggest eyesores and traffic choke points were once grand boulevards, enjoyed by Sydneysiders as retail destinations. Now many of these main roads drive people away – to smaller suburban cafe clusters or pedestrianised promenades.
But there is hope for Sydney's boulevards of broken dreams, with an influx of new housing developments putting pressure on our city's planning thinkers to come up with fresh projects to pedestrianise and beautify our sprawling roads.
Princes Highway, Rockdale
Once a bustling auto-alley, the Princes Highway at Rockdale has fallen victim to the 'urban decay' befalling many of Sydney's ageing arterial roads.
Shops have been shuttered and fallen into disrepair. The local post office closed in 2024. There are no bustling bars or buzzy restaurants, save a few nearby cafes.
It's a road you drive through to get somewhere else, but for Rockdale locals, this is supposed to be their high street.
'There's just nothing to hold people here,' Jennifer Dean, a resident of 20 years, says.
Cindy Phan has run the local butchers with her husband Anthony for 15 years. They work next to a row of empty shops.
'It affected us a lot,' she says. 'There have been less customers since the post office closed.'
Lily Wu says foot traffic has gotten so quiet she could go a full day without a single person stepping inside her furniture store.
She'd like to see more events and nighttime activations in Rockdale, similar to Lakemba's night markets, to get the community excited to stay in town.
Bayside Council Mayor Ed McDougall wants to see the road transformed. The council is working on a masterplan to rejuvenate the town centre.
'The Princes Highway at Rockdale has been the victim of urban decay like so many main roads. It's sad to see the number of businesses that have closed down replaced by empty shopfronts,' he says.
'We need a vibrant town centre that locals can enjoy – at the moment it's basically a commuter suburb; if you want to enjoy an outdoor area you are probably travelling somewhere else in our LGA or further afield.'
Hope isn't lost.
While construction of the M6 tunnel project has been plagued by major challenges and delays after two sinkholes opened up during tunnelling, its eventual opening could be the perfect moment to revamp the Princes Highway.
Committee for Sydney's Eamon Waterford says his solution is simple. Reduce the lanes of traffic, build a bike lane, tear down the metal fence that divides the town down the middle of the highway, and plant more street trees.
'We need to learn from our mistakes; we have 2½ years until the M6 opens in late 2028 to get ready. We missed an opportunity with Parramatta Road when WestConnex opened in 2019 to re-balance the place and movement considerations of Parramatta Road,' he says.
'It means there's an opportunity for us to reclaim the Princes Highway along this corridor as a place for people, as a high street.'
Parramatta Road
The scar through Sydney. Beirut on a bad day. The boulevard of broken dreams.
Parramatta Road has been given every negative label under the sun. Anyone who has had the displeasure of driving, not to mention walking, down Sydney's original boulevard knows its biggest problem. It's ugly.
'You mean this hellscape,' Leichhardt local Naomi Cooper says. 'Nobody is doing their errands here.'
In the late 1800s horses and carts dotted from village to village, and retail trade boomed on the link between Parramatta and the city.
Now a walk down Parramatta Road on a warm summer day feels like a challenge to overcome.
Cars and noisy buses fly past, exhaust fills the nostrils and heat blasts from the concrete with little to no landscaping for reprieve.
You only need to walk down the road for 10 minutes to find shop after shop left empty and decaying. Once grand buildings look mouldy and crumbling. Weed-infested parcels of land have become havens for rubbish dumping.
Customer-facing businesses struggle to survive with grim foot traffic. Streetside dining here is unthinkable.
Various councils and state governments have come up with plans to fix the roads with little success.
The Parramatta Road Corridor Urban Transformation Strategy (PRCUTS) was developed in 2016 and identified precincts on and around the road for increased housing density, improved active transport and urban beautification.
The recent Transport Oriented Development rezoning in Homebush will help this vision get off the ground, as will the Inner West Council's recent proposal for increased density across the council area, but key parts of the PRCUTS have yet to materialise.
Despite a 2016-2023 implementation plan that outlines several areas for short-term transformation, Leichhardt's Taverners Hill precinct remains virtually unchanged with no bike lane and no new housing development.
While big picture plans, including suggestions to decrease lanes of traffic and build a light rail down the road, haven't gained any real traction, the impending arrival of several housing developments along Parramatta Road means new residents are coming fast, and no doubt they'll be wanting a nicer neighbourhood.
More than 500 homes will be built at the old WestConnex dive site in Camperdown, 1100 apartments would be built under the Kings Bay Village proposal in Five Dock, and Burwood Council's Burwood North Masterplan would have more than 7000 additional homes built adjacent to Parramatta Road.
Ricky Choi runs a barber shop on the Petersham stretch, nearby Crystal Street where a proposed co-living development would bring seven storeys of new potential customers. She's confident an influx of residents will put pressure on the council to make the area more viable for businesses.
'People want to do more things in their local area. I think the more apartments come in, the more businesses will too,' she says.
Eamon Waterford believes lane reduction and a major public transport overhaul is the only way to reclaim Parramatta Road for the people.
'What's needed is something big and grand that declares to Sydneysiders … that this road is now a Boulevard, is now a high street for people, for place, not movement,' he says.
Sydney Olympic Park
On game day, Olympic Boulevard is booming. It's almost impossible to see past the crowd of sports jerseys, as people stream out of the train station to walk down the 60-metre-wide street towards Accor Stadium and Qudos Bank Arena in Sydney Olympic Park.
But the next day, the road is a ghost town.
'It's pretty quiet outside of game day because there isn't a lot of things that can be activated down there at the moment,' says Allison Taylor, chief executive of the business association in the area.
'The southern end of the boulevard is basically sporting venues and they're just big buildings with no activation opportunity onto the actual Olympic Boulevard.'
Synonymous with sports and events, Olympic Boulevard, along with the rest of Sydney Olympic Park, has been routinely subjected to bold visions from the state government and the Sydney Olympic Park Authority over the past 25 years. Despite that, the key road remains virtually the same.
There's been the Master Plan 2002, Vision 2025 and Master Plan 2030. Last year, the authority announced Master Plan 2030 would be replaced with Master Plan 2050.
The new plan reveals the precinct's hopes to transition away from being known as just a place for sports and events to a 'thriving urban community'.
In 25 years, Olympic Boulevard, between Dawn Fraser Avenue and Figtree Drive, is proposed to become a 'green, active transport corridor' featuring public open space, plazas, an extensive tree canopy and a new cultural centre. Towers of up to 55 storeys would be built along the boulevard and pave the way for more opportunities for eateries and bars, with the stretch of the road alongside Accor Stadium and Cathy Freeman Park to become car-free.
Business Western Sydney executive director David Borger, who also sits on the Sydney Olympic Park Authority board, has high hopes the 2050 plan will finally be the one that breathes new life into Olympic Boulevard.
'The Olympic Boulevard was designed to be big enough that you could march an army through it, but unfortunately the army only turns up on game days in the stadiums and the rest of the time it can feel empty,' he says.
Oxford Street
Oxford Street is in the midst of its transformation. Local business owners say it can't come soon enough.
The delayed Oxford and Foley development is set to open later this year, and with it the hoarding that has blighted the city-side of the strip for years.
Local favourite bar and restaurant Big Poppas, known as the best place on the strip for late-night food and hip-hop music, has closed temporarily during the construction work.
Just a stone's throw away, popular western-inspired bar Shady Pines Saloon, run by the embattled Swillhouse hospitality group, has closed as part of another redevelopment bringing Sydney's first Soho House – an exclusive members-only club where membership is likely to cost north of $4000 a year.
The new developments are set to bring new retail offerings and office spaces, but the local LGBTQ community has concerns that a shiny new building won't bring back the soul of the strip.
'I worry it will be of a level that ordinary people won't be able to access or enjoy, and more than that, feel a part of,' Noel Lee, of the Bookshop Darlinghurst says.
Lee has worked at the shop for more than 20 years, and has seen the area become run down, even as Darlinghurst and Paddington became gentrified. A row of shops near Taylor Square sits empty and run down.
The former bank building, which once housed the T2 nightclub at Taylor Square, is awaiting redevelopment, but for years sat empty after a council plan to use it as a bike hub were abandoned.
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'You feel sorry – we get customers coming in all the time as an LGBT speciality store international tourists will pop in and say they were here 25 years ago, and talk about how great it was especially in the '90s,' he says.
'And then they'll just say: what's happened to the street?'
Despite the decline, Lee says he sees green shoots popping up.
Simon Fowler opened his cafe, Simon Says, six years ago on the corner of Oxford Street and South Dowling Street. Nearby, a luxury hotel development at the old Odeon Theatre is set to open later this year with new restaurants.
'After living overseas for a number of years, you see how advanced, cosmopolitan, culturally rich cities treat their spaces. This in particular, this space, it's got so much potential,' he says.
'As long as it's not another convenience store selling vapes, I'm all for it.'