Carpark Level One

Level one of the Balmain Leagues Club carpark presents the kind of space that is easy to overlook even when a building is alive, functional, unglamorous, designed entirely around the act of parking a car and walking away. Photographed in 2015, five years after the doors closed, the concrete structure holds its form. Columns, ceiling, open bays. The geometry is still legible. What is missing is everything that made the geometry purposeful. The building at 138 to 152 Victoria Road, Rozelle, opened in 1957, purpose-built to serve the Balmain Tigers rugby league football club and the community around it. The club was one of nine foundation clubs in the first season of the NSW Rugby Football League, established at a public meeting at Balmain Town Hall on 23 January 1908. By the time the Victoria Road building opened, the Tigers had already won ten premierships. The venue provided what every leagues club of that era provided: a ballroom, a main bar, gaming, function rooms, and underground parking across multiple levels. Balmain Leagues Club closed on 28 March 2010. A NSW Government notice to vacate had been issued in connection with a proposed Sydney Metro transport project that later changed alignment and was never built on the site. The building sat vacant through a decade and a half of planning disputes, ownership changes, a compulsory government acquisition, a reversal of that acquisition, and two fires. By the time Inner West Council issued emergency orders in May 2022, the structure was assessed as derelict and dangerous, its copper wiring stripped, its floorboards buckled with water damage, its openings requiring boarding and structural bracing. This photograph was made before any of that. In 2015, the carpark level holds its shape without drama. Concrete does not buckle the way timber does. It waits. The shadows cross the floor in the same pattern they always did. The site was demolished in 2024 to 25.