The Frisco Hotel at 46 Dowling Street, Woolloomoloo, is of historic and social importance.

There was a hotel on the site as early as 1854, when William Shipman held a license for the Dowling Street Wharf Hotel. It was a stuccoed two storey Victorian Regency Style building. Around 1892, the hotel changed its name to the Frisco, reputedly after the ship “Frisco”, was launched in 1890.

The Cowper Wharf at Woolloomooloo was subject to large scale reorganisation between 1905 and 1912 when the Finger Wharf was completed. Concurrently, a number of road widening and upgrading projects were commenced by the Sydney Municipal Council, one of which affected Duke Street, leading to the partial demolition of the buildings at the rear of the Frisco Hotel. The area at this time underwent an intensification of maritime and shipping activities, and the pubs of Woolloomooloo played an important role in the social life of the area.

In 1921, Toohey’s leased the land adjacent to the Frisco Hotel and constructed an extension closely following the design of the 1907 building.The original part of the Frisco Hotel was designed by Ernest Lindsay Thompson, a prolific city architect of the early twentieth century, for Toohey’s Ltd. It is a good example of a Federation Free Classical Style Hotel and demonstrates many of the key elements of the style. The three-storey building was extended in the same style in 1921 to the design of Hassall and Stockham Ltd., Toohey’s own architects.

The verandah was added in 1985.

The facades of the building, its corner position and the scale of the building all make an important contribution to Dowling Street.

The hotel still retains significant building fabric surviving includes the decorative fibrous plaster ceilings on the ground floor, the main stair and timber joinery. The layout is largely intact.

By

Andrew Woodhouse