Our postal service has been a key criterion in enabling the success of businesses, none more so than the communications and our general postal services.

The 2011 postcode area’s first post office in the late 1890s was in Wiliam Street but was letter moved due to wide road widening.

The second post office was in the Cahors building, 117 Macleay Street, where today’s Poho Florist now is.

The third was more than a post office: it was the whole eastern suburbs’ sorting office and five/six levels occupying large frontages to Macleay Street, Greenknowe Avenue and Crick Avenue at 46 Macleay Street.

It has since been adaptively reused and incorporates distinctive tall white columns with current real estate and retail offices including today’s R & W Elizabeth Bay offices.

It is renamed “The Post” building.

Today’s official current local post office is a modest shop front inside the Rex apartments facing Fitzroy Gardens whose entrance is within the northern side of the building’s loggia.

Letters have generally been replaced by emails.

And real estate agents were historically quick to utilise postal facilities and new communications technology generally – including telephones.

When phones were first introduced in the 1890s Richardson and Wrench’s offices were then in Pitt Street, CBD, next to the new telephonic exchange network HQ. Thousands of overhead and underground wires and cabling indicated a single phone line for subscribers.

And in Sydney’s first phone book, the original of which is still held in the NSW Mitchell Library state archives, R & W were allocated the phone number one, a simple convenience and a coincidental but effective public relations coup.

Since then, faxes and emails have overtaken some postal services but not door-to-door deliveries, still the bread and butter of out traditional postal services.

By

Andrew Woodhouse

Heritage Solutions