Angled Stage

The corner of Gardeners Road and Sutherland Street in Rosebery holds one of the more quietly remarkable facades in Sydney's inner south. The rendered exterior of Marina Picture Palace, with its stepped parapet, symmetrical fenestration, and ceramic tile detailing above the awning line, has stood here since 28 May 1927. That was a Saturday. The opening programme ran Mary Pickford in Sparrows, John Barrymore in The Beloved Rogue, a film on the Birth of Canberra, and a live performance by Bill Mason. The building was designed by William de Putron, an architect who had spent years in partnership with David Thomas Morrow before leaving the firm in 1925 due to ill health. The Marina was one of the first things he designed on his own, and he did not design it as a hired hand. He was part of the consortium that built and operated it, alongside builder William Henry Rumble and cinema entrepreneur Eric Christensen, who held NSW Exhibitor's Licence No. 1 and placed a gold sovereign in the brickwork during construction. De Putron's design sits in the Inter-War free-classical style, the same language he had used at the Vanderbilt in Potts Point and at earlier civic and commercial commissions across Sydney. The facade was intended to read as something apart from the surrounding suburban bungalows; *Building* magazine, writing about the Marina in March 1927, noted the building's compliance with the 1908 Theatres and Public Halls Act for emergency egress. Over the following decades the Marina passed through the hands of the Ward brothers, Snider and Dean's Mascot Theatres circuit, and finally the Louis Film Company, which operated it from 1967 as a Greek-language cinema before converting the stalls to a video shop after the final cinema closure on 8 February 1984. The video shop ran until around 2002. Six cinemas once served the Botany Bay district. The Marina is the only one left. Its Gardeners Road facade was captured in 2019, vacant and intact.