FORMER LEITRIM HOTEL

The former Leitrim Hotel was designed by the architect Henry E Tolhurst and built in 1888 for the Victoria Brewing Co Ltd by Jason Fraser of West Melbourne. The site had been occupied from 1852 by a four-roomed brick house and stable, which by 1855 was owned by Martin Rooney and used as a shop. The first Leitrim Hotel was built on the site by Rooney in the mid-1860s, and was named after a hotel of the same name in Dublin where an historic meeting was held in 1850 to express sympathy with the dismissed Orange magistrates. By 1882 the hotel was described as dilapidated and dirty, the license was in doubt and in 1888, at the height of Melbourne's boom, the building was replaced. The architect Tolhurst had been Town Clerk and Surveyor for the Borough of Eaglehawk, where he had designed the old Town Hall (replaced in 1901) and the Mechanics Institute (1865, VHR H713). In 1884 he became Surveyor for the Municipality of Collingwood, but also practised as a private architect and surveyor and was involved with a number of works for brewing companies. The hotel was in the part of Melbourne known as 'Little Lon', notorious in the second half of the nineteenth century for its supposed poverty, crime and debauchery, where hotels abounded. The hotel was taken over in 1906 by Carlton & United Breweries, which closed it in 1907. A Chinese cabinet-maker, Lim Wing War & Co occupied the building until the 1920s, joining other Chinese who pursued similar occupations in this part of the city. The building was converted into offices in the 1980s and later into a residence.

The former Leitrim Hotel is a three storey brick building with an unusually intact unpainted stuccoed facade ornately decorated with classical motifs. At the ground level the pilasters dividing the central bar window from the former bar entrance on the right and the former residential entrance on the left are decorated with rustication, incised fluting and foliated patterns. Decorated panels, pilasters and stucco roundels also adorn the stucco on the upper levels. The building is surmounted by an elaborate entablature, a balustraded parapet and a central segmental-arched pediment with 'LEITRIM HOTEL 1888' written in the raised letters. The exterior is intact apart from the replacement of the bar window. The interior has been completely rebuilt.

This site is part of the traditional land of the Wurundjeri people.

How is it significant?

The former Leitrim Hotel is of architectural and historical significance to the state of Victoria.

Why is it significant?

The former Leitrim Hotel is architecturally significant for its ornate and unusually well preserved boom period stucco facade, which displays many of the elaborate decorative devices used in the Renaissance revival of the nineteenth century. It is unusual as a particularly fine and intact example of a smaller city hotel of the period which retains its original appearance with separate bar and residential entrances either side of a central bar window on the ground floor.

The former Leitrim Hotel is historically significant as a reflection of the many smaller hotels which were once common in Victoria and particularly in this area of the city of Melbourne, which was once part of the notorious 'Little Lon' district.

Group

Residential buildings (private)

Category

Terrace