Hire Shop

The metal door is spray-painted T103 in yellow. Above it, an arched sign in faded lettering reads "Greek movies", curving across the plaster of the upper wall. Price lists are still pinned above the white pegboard. A timber pallet rests against the wall below. This is the hire shop corner of the Marina Picture Palace at 409 Gardeners Road, Rosebery, and it is one of the more quietly specific rooms in Sydney's suburban cinema history. The Marina Picture Palace opened on 28 May 1927, designed by architect William de Putron and built by a small consortium that also included builder William Henry Rumble and cinema pioneer Eric Christensen, who placed a gold sovereign in the brickwork during construction. The building was an Inter-War free-classical design: a stepped parapet, symmetrical rendered facade, and an auditorium fitted originally with pressed metal Wunderlich ceiling panels and an orchestra pit beneath the stage. It was never a flagship. It was a neighbourhood house, and it passed through several hands across six decades: the Ward brothers, Snider and Dean's Mascot Theatres circuit, and finally the Louis Film Company, which purchased the Marina in 1967. Chris Louis bought the cinema in honour of his wife, whose name was also Marina. The Louis family specialised in continental and Greek-language films, meeting a specific need in the pre-SBS era. That is what the arched sign records: a period when a suburban cinema at the corner of Gardeners Road and Sutherland Street was one of the few places in Sydney where Greek-speaking audiences could watch films in their own language. The cinema closed for the final time on 8 February 1984. The Louis family converted the stalls into a video and DVD shop, building the steel-lined storage room and fixing price boards to the partition walls. The shop closed around 2002. The Marina Picture Palace has stood vacant since. When this photograph was made in 2019, the price lists were still on the wall.