Snack Bar

A gutted room inside the Marina Picture Palace on Gardeners Road, Rosebery, photographed in 2019. Two wooden-framed windows let pale light into the space. Yellow graffiti reading '121' marks the frame of the left window. Black and white damask wallpaper clings to the walls in peeling sections, the pattern still legible despite decades of neglect. A faded red carpet covers most of the floor. Above, the ceiling is stripped to its joists, with loose wiring trailing through the frame. A large wooden board leans against the far wall, half-blocking a doorway set beneath a low arch. The Marina Picture Palace was designed by architect William de Putron and opened on 28 May 1927, the work of an independent 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 is Inter-War free-classical in style, its stepped parapet and rendered facade a deliberate contrast to the single-storey bungalows that characterise the surrounding Rosebery streetscape. The Marina passed through several operators across its life: the Ward brothers acquired it in 1935, leased it to Horace Edward Nagle, then sold it to Mascot Theatres Pty Ltd (Snider and Dean) in late 1938. In 1967, Chris Louis of Louis Film Company purchased the cinema in honour of his wife, whose name was also Marina. The Louis family specialised in continental and Greek-language films in the era before SBS television. After the Marina closed as a cinema on 8 February 1984, the Louis family converted the stalls area into a video shop, which operated until around 2002. The building has stood vacant since. The Marina is the only surviving pre-World War Two theatre in the former Botany Bay local government area. This photograph records what remains of one of its interior rooms as the building awaits an approved redevelopment that will retain only the Gardeners Road facade.