Toilets

The toilets of Marina Picture Palace occupy a small, tiled room that time has treated without mercy. Three white ceramic urinals, stained rust-brown and eaten through with corrosion, line a wall clad in dark red square tiles. A long, shallow sink runs beneath a section of window that has been boarded over, its single brass tap turned green with oxidation. Paint peels from the upper walls in long curling strips, pulling away from the render in layers that record decades of humidity and neglect. Marina Picture Palace opened on 28 May 1927, designed by architect William de Putron, who was not simply a hired hand on the project but a member of the original consortium alongside builder William Henry Rumble and cinema entrepreneur Eric Christensen. De Putron had left his architectural partnership with David Thomas Morrow the same year he drew the Marina's plans, and the building reflects his Inter-War free-classical sensibility: a symmetrical rendered facade, a stepped parapet with roundels, and a scale deliberately set apart from the single-storey bungalows of the surrounding Rosebery streets. The cinema passed through several operators over its life: the Ward brothers from 1935, then Mascot Theatres Pty Ltd under Snider and Dean from January 1939, then Chris and Chaniglia Louis of Louis Film Company from 1967. Chris Louis purchased the Marina in honour of his wife, whose name was also Marina. The Louis family ran it as a Greek-language cinema and then converted the stalls to a video and DVD shop after the building closed as a cinema on 8 February 1984. The video shop operated until around 2002, after which the building stood vacant. When this photograph was made in 2019, the room recorded here had not been in regular use for the better part of two decades. Marina Picture Palace is the only surviving pre-World War Two theatre in the former Botany Bay area.