Newcastle council must find a way to save the splendid Marcus Clark facade in Newcastle West.
Until last month, hardly anyone knew that we had a large 1929 facade on the site at Bank Corner of what used to be Spotlight, before that Waltons and, originally, the department store Marcus Clark & Co.
Many older people who remembered the original facade didn't know that it was still there, behind metal cladding that had covered it since about 1964 (though its hidden survival was mentioned five years ago in a Herald article).
Then, three weeks ago the old front was revealed to surprised Novocastrians when the cladding came down in preparation for demolition - demolition that the council approved in December after doing not enough to try to keep this valuable urban asset.
Still standing, the facade looks robust. Its problem is damage from alterations. Repairs would be costly, but the council should now try to make them worthwhile to the developer.
How? By offering in return to support a drastic upscaling of the company's residential and office development, creating more profit.
At 31 storeys, the current proposal by developer 711 Hunter Street Pty Ltd fully uses the zoning limits. But those limits should be no obstacle. Under state policies aimed at getting more housing, zoning maps are being chucked out of windows all over Newcastle West and Wickham.
By the standards of projects that are in the works nearby, the Marcus Clark site is in fact on track to accommodate what would be a fairly modest development. We have buildings of 39 and 45 storeys proposed for land behind the former Cambridge pub and 44 storeys on a Wickham site next to Newcastle Interchange.
Even without those prospects, we should strongly desire to see more homes on the Marcus Clark site. At 4700 square metres, it is well sized for a tower going to 40 or 50 storeys or even higher, with upper floors peering over Honeysuckle to take in wonderful harbour and ocean views.
Many older people who remembered the original facade didn't know that it was still there.
Crucially, the site is inside the five-minute strolling radius of the interchange. Now, isn't that where we want to see more homes built, rather than on farmland or bushland up the valley?
On other city-centre sites, the key to escaping the zoning limits has been inclusion of some low-cost housing in a development proposal. Under state regulations, this usually gets the proposal into a fast and generous bypass process.
For its own good reasons, the Marcus Clark site's developer has preferred not to go down that road. But I suggest that the company should be regarded as holding a different zoning-escape key in its hands - the facade.
We want the facade, but the company has authorisation to demolish it. So let's offer a deal to keep it.
Developers will generally want to get rid of an old facade, even if it is in good condition. Building a new front is cheaper than constructing behind an old one, and maintenance costs are lower, too.
But the Marcus Clark front at least offers considerable length on two streets, so it could work well with a large development that was designed to resonate with it.
The old front could form most of the development's podium and could be prolonged along the site's National Park and Little King borders with a sympathetically designed extension.
There are problems, too. The podium levels of new buildings in town tend to be used largely for car parking, and the Marcus Clark facade's height isn't enough for the number of vehicle spaces that would be needed. That means either a costly basement would have to be dug below the water table or upper parking levels would have to be set back from the street.
Among the facade's damage is loss of its parapet, which was removed when the cladding was added more than 60 years ago. But the parapet could be rebuilt, and indeed rebuilt precisely to the original design. A corner cupola was also taken down when the cladding went on. It, too, might be rebuilt.
The council's demolition authorisation was in keeping with official acceptance in 2023 of a recommendation from a heritage architect who assessed the site for an earlier, now superseded residential project there.
The front was created by modifying and extending a small original build in 1899, so the result we see today was far from a pure 1920s design. Noting this, the heritage architect had no high opinion of the facade and judged that repair and reconstruction would be very difficult to justify.
Two issues arise from this. First, experts can differ, and the facade was of such obvious potential importance to Novocastrians that the council should have sought a second opinion - or sent in its own heritage officer to make an assessment. It didn't try hard enough.
Second, if old Newcastle facades must reach a high architectural standard to justify retention, then we'll end up keeping hardly any. The sad fact is that we are not blessed with many old facades of unusual quality.
But we should want to keep most old facades, anyway, especially any as big and impressive as the Marcus Clark.
OK, so it wouldn't attract study tours by admiring scholars of architectural history. But it would nonetheless be important to ordinary Novocastrians.
We must count for something.
The same issue arose with the Victory Buildings facade on Maitland Road, Mayfield, which the council, after diligent effort, finally decided last year could be demolished (though it still hasn't been).
And, before that, we should not have lost the Store facade, which was also aesthetically unmeritorious to the expert eye but meant a lot to Novocastrians. Developer Doma has done an excellent job with the replacement, but it might instead have attractively kept the familiar and historically important department-store front.
We must not make the same mistake again.
