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Lemon Tree Hotel Complex

Location Cnr Grattan and Rathdowne Streets,, CARLTON VIC 3053 - Property No B7080 File Number B7080 Level Regional

[1/1] B7080 Lemon Tree Hotel

Statement of Significance

The Lemon Tree Hotel complex, built between 1868 and 1885, is historically, socially and architecturally significant at a regional level. The current hotel complex, a Carlton icon, with its striking and unusual curved facade facing the north-west corner of the Carlton Gardens, is formed by an amalgamation of five originally separate buildings (2,4, 6-8, 10 Grattan, and 257 Rathdowne), of which 10 Grattan Street functioned as the original Lemon Tree Hotel from 1869.
Buildings within the Lemon Tree Hotel complex have housed important Carlton social centres from the late 1860s until recent times and this owes much to the unusual site. Situated at the intersection of Grattan and Rathdowne Streets, the original Lemon Tree Hotel building of 1868-9 served a key Carlton traffic junction created by that major 'traffic block' the Carlton Gardens.
The building numbered 6 to 8 Grattan Street (next to the earliest hotel) has always had a social dimension. It was originally built circa 1871 as a residence with 'classroom', and became a 'dancing saloon' in the 1880s. Jewish immigrants of the early twentieth century used this building as an important social club and library centre that operated between 1909 and 1920 and the building served as the nucleus for a later very important centre of Australian Jewish culture: the Carlton kadimah. Immigrant Jews at the beginning of the twentieth century were often fleeing Czarist persecution. Carlton would attract larger numbers of continental Jews during the 1920s and 1930s to form one of Melbourne's (and Australia's) most lively centres of Jewish culture. Between the 1920s and circa 1960 Carlton would become a power house of antipodean Jewish culture, and would nurture many successful Jewish commercial and manufacturing families.
Classified: 02/10/2000