Threeways

A stairwell inside Marina Picture Palace, Rosebery, records what the building has become since its doors closed for the last time as a cinema on 8 February 1984. Eight concrete steps climb toward a shadowed upper passage. The balustrade and handrail are intact. Dark damask wallpaper covers both walls, broken on the right by a section of red-painted render. Dust coats every surface; the dim overhead light catches the texture of the patterned walls more readily than the worn treads beneath it. The Marina Picture Palace opened on 28 May 1927 on a corner site in Rosebery. Architect William de Putron designed the building in 1925, the same year he left the firm Morrow and de Putron due to ill health. He was not merely the hired designer; he was a member of the consortium that built and operated the cinema 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. Ownership passed through several hands across the following decades. The Ward brothers acquired the building in 1935 after rates went unpaid, leasing it to Horace Edward Nagle before selling to Mascot Theatres Pty Ltd 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 operated it as a Greek-language and continental film house through the era before SBS television, then converted the stalls to a video shop after the cinema closed in 1984. The building has stood vacant since around 2002. The Marina is the only surviving pre-World War Two cinema in the former Botany Bay local government area, and one of only three known surviving examples of the Inter-War free-classical cinema style in suburban Sydney. This photograph was made in 2019.