Business Insider was the first of more than a dozen outlets to pick up the Terminus Hotel gallery in 2016. They had the photos on the phone with me within about an hour of the gallery going live on Facebook.
The gallery itself went unusual fast. Inside the first twenty minutes it was being shared faster than I could refresh the page. Over the following fortnight, the Facebook post reached over 800,000 people. I had a colleague at work mention that at least a dozen of his friends, people I had no connection to, had shared it through their own feeds. That was the moment the scale became real to me.
I was surprised and not surprised at the same time. Terminus Hotel was already a local talking point in Pyrmont long before Lost Collective got near it. The federation-era pub on Harris Street, with its cloak of green creeper vines, has been visible for decades. Plenty of people knew the building. Hardly anyone had seen inside.
What no one fully knows is the why. The motivations of the Wakil family, who have owned the site for decades and let it stand empty, are only fully understood by the Wakils. Everything else is speculation.
Business Insider's feature ran with this framing:
"The photographer behind Lost Collective has taken photos of abandoned power stations, farmsteads, shoe factories through to flour mills, many of which have been neglected for decades. His recent collection of photos taken inside the Terminus Hotel in Sydney, which has been boarded up and abandoned for 32 years, has gone viral since being released earlier this month. The heritage-listed building on Harris Street in Pyrmont was built around 1865 and was originally named Coopers Arms Inn."
Read the Business Insider piece (archived) at businessinsider.com.au (Wayback).
