Abandoned Oz - The Story of Sydney’s Farmer’s Building
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 ก.พ. 2024
- Abandoned Oz
The Farmers Building which is now part of Westfield Sydney sits on the corner of George & Market Streets in Sydney’s CBD.
A mate came across some old slides which tell a very interesting story about the Farmer Family and the Farmer’s Building.
He scanned them and kindly sent them to me.
I put them together to make this interesting video!
Thank you to David Heckenberg for letting me use these scans!
#urbex #urbanexploration #sydney
Wow!! This brought back some amazing memories. I was the first male trainee manager for Farmers in January 1970. I worked on the 7th floor. Farmers had the first computer installed which occupied the entire 8th floor and this required that floor to be air-conditioned and was the only air-conditioned floor in the building. Farmers was eventually sold to Grace Brothers and then again to Myers. Thanks for the video Phil.
Sorry to correct you but Myer bought Farmers in the early 1960’s (but retained its name until the mid 1970’s when they did change it to Myer. In the early 1980’s Myer also brought Grace Brothers. HOWEVER as Grace brothers was better known Myer rebranded all their former Myer stores as Grace Brothers as well (which is when this store may have become Grace Brothers); but it was still owned by Myer. Then again in the early 2000’s, Myer decided AGAIN on a rebranding exercise and changed all the Grace Brothers stores back to Myer
@xr6lad Thank you, I was not aware of Myer owning Farmers prior to 1970 as all the paperwork I filled out only referred to Farmers. I also remember Farmers competing with Grace Brothers Broadway store at the time with no mention of Myers. Thanks for your information 👍
@@xr6lad exactly as I recall events while working for Myer.
We may have worked together. I think I joined the management training course in 1971 and worked in boys wear and menswear.
My father Allan Cotter was the longest serving employee at farmers- later becoming coles myer. I got my first job there at Christmas 1977 as a casual unloading trucks. The tank stream runs under it and i recall the huge doors of the directors meeting rooms and offices. Basically what was internal was a facade. And behind that was the original stairs, walls offices that many wouldnt know. Disable war veterans would man the lifts. There was a art gallery which we would attend as a child (mum was an artist) nice resturants. I basically know the place from about 1966
I still have part of my nurses’ uniform from 1976 with the Farmers label inside it. I remember shopping at Farmers in the 1960s as a little kid. My mother used to buy our shoes there. Those were the days when we wore our best clothes to shop in Sydney including shirt and tie for my brother and hat and patent leather shoes for me.
I worked in the display production workshop in Kent St in the early 80s. It was in a 5 or 6 storey industrial building with a rickety lift. We used to do the main store animated Xmas windows as well as point of sale promotions fabrications & for fashion shows for half a dozen other Myer/s stores. About this time some corporate genius decided to turn the giant street display windows, which had absolutely massive ornate brass picture frames, into mean little 1 metre high strips at eye height. The display boys saved the hundreds of feet of trashed brass from the skip & hid them at Kent St.
Back in those days, only about half the floor area in department stores was for displaying/arranging stock for the public. The central floor was surrounded by "reserves" which was where most of the stock was warehoused. They were like consumer wonderlands but with everything in cartons, drawers & shelves. As time went by & "Just In Time" stock control & cheap trucking took over, these reserves got smaller & smaller then were replaced by an expanded central floor & 24 hour loading docks
Oh gawd! One year i had to dress up like a mickey mouse at xmas, and some young men started shoving me around on one of the floors and gried to tip a drink into the eye socket of the head. I got into a punch up dressed as a mouse and was never asked by your dept to wear or be involved ever again😂
I'm glad to see so many views on this clip - I had access to the original slides in the early 90s, long before digital imaging was popular, so I took the opportunity to duplicate them onto film, which I stored for quite a few years, and recently decided to scan them. Such a great part of Sydney's history, that I felt needed to be shared. Great work putting this together Phil !
My grandfather, Sir Archibald Howie, built the present Farmer’s building through his firm Howie Moffatt and Co. He was great friends with the then chairman of Farmers, Sir Norman Pope. While it was indeed the first building to have escalators, the city council at the time refused to approve them for some reason when the plans were submitted. My grandfather, in his inimitable style, ignored the council and installed them anyhow. They were imported from the US I believe.
The slides would date around 1938-1955. The ladies at 10:13 are sitting at a calendar which appears to be Thursday 1st September being only occurrences of that with people wearing the similar clothing are Thursday 1st September 1938, Thursday 1st September 1949 and Thursday 1st September 1955. Cars in the street look roughly like 1949 vehicles, dates can vary.
In the days when Farmers existed, it participated in the construction of the building now known as the Gordon Centre. I can't quickly pick up when the building was opened, but Farmers was in competition with David Jones. DJ's had a store at Chatswood, and went on to open one at Hornsby. The Centre was very substantially altered following the failure of Farmers and now has a Woolworths, a Harvey Norman store, and a few smaller shops, with professsional rooms on higher levels.
My first job after leaving school in 1972 was at Farmer's in their screen printing department on Kent Street. When I joined the company was owned by Myers but all promotional materials (posters, price labels etc were purely Farmer's). We were often involved in the window displays especially at Christmas where the art department created some fantastic animated displays. Fantastic video Phil, brought back many happy memories for me.
Extremely interesting, thank you ! I love the roller skating in the carpets department.
At age 16 in 1960, in the weeks between completing the school Leaving Certificate and Christmas I was employed as a casual by Farmers. It was my second paid job, the first being the previous year pre-Christmas at McDowells, another department store located on George Street near the GPO. At Farmers my mundane job entailed wheeling loads of stock up from the second basement by lift to the relevant department. I was under close supervision and the experience was not very enjoyable. I vaguely recall there was a staff cafeteria, a highlight of my days there.
Consolidation in the department stores started in the 1960s. Farmers was bought by Myer in 1969 with i believe this building rebranding to Myer in 1974. Later in 1983 Myer bought Grace Bros with building consolidation and NSW stores transitioning to that name, before back to Myer in 2004.
hi ,
I remember going there with my mum when I was little &
mark foys as well .
Thanks for sharing some history of the place I work at. The evolution of these places is always so interesting.
Great work 🎉 Thank you for sharing 😊
Another memory of Farmer's: The moon landing was just before lunch time, Eastern Australian time. Along with thousands of others, we saw the event on large screens in shop windows. The window that mates of mine and i saw the event was one of Farmers - like DJ's, they had a large screen in each window.
Interesting video. It was interesting to see how much space there was in the various departments in the photos towards the end. Nothing like the way everything is crammed into stores nowdays.
Really beautiful slides. Amazing stuff. Thanks for preserving.
I remember going to Farmers in Gordon in the 70s with my mom and then in the city before it was bought by Myers
Myer bought Farmers in 1961 but kept the name. So even in the 1970’s all the Farmers stores were owned by Myers by that point. They didn’t change the name until the 1970’s.
@@xr6lad I see I didn’t know that
Awesome. The innovators
Wonderful slide show. Thank you.
I remember going to Farmers at Carlingford Court when I was little, which changed to Grace Bros, then Myer. This prehistoric shopping centre also had a Franklins! Remember Franklins..lol. Thanks for the memories 🙏🏼
Thanks for sharing, many memories.
Nice work, shared
Cheers mate! :)
Very interesting. Thank you.
Great video! Thank you! I love learning about history of Australia. I'm in Victoria, so didn't know the history of this building. I was intrigued. Please more like this! Great work 😊
FAB Thanks Phil
Awesome Video
Very cool slides. Been looking for photos of the original interior of this building but have only managed to find a few. Thanks for posting.
❤ i rember Farmers was a gr8 store better than now it has style
Good stuff. What a great discovery
It is very interesting indeed! :)
@@AbandonedOZ The closing shot was taken in the morning as the sun is rising.
A similar building is the Marcus Clarke building in railway square and is now the Tafe college my mum and dad meet there then got married I used to go there on Saturday mornings and go anywhere I like one of the maintenance men took me up to the globe on to of the building once
sad its lost the awning hedge
Really good...music ....??? Whoah....
One of Sydney's early AM radio stations originally broadcast from a studio in the attic of Farmers City store , possibility 2FC . I have seen a photograph accompanied by comments about this in a book , which I would still have ( somewhere ) ! Farmers City store once had quite an elaborate rooftop restaurant / cafeteria at the Pitt Street end , which was definitely not mundane ! This was lost in the rebuilding which unified the differing floor levels of the various buildings as shown in the street plan in this video . At one point during these renovations , it was possible to look down into the basement area from Market Street near the George Street corner , to see excavation works for the lower retail level which is now a food court . As for the suburban branches , I remember Gordon , Carlingford , Miranda as well as others which may or may not have been originally Farmers , such as Penrith and possibly Blacktown ? Perhaps someone could verify this ?
Yeah, 2FC. The FC stood for Farmer & Company. From the Dictionary of Sydney - Second full-time radio station in Australia, established by department store Farmer & Co in 1923. In 1929 the station and studios in Her Majesty's Theatre were taken over by the Australian Broadcasting Company. Known to ABC listeners for many years as 'Radio 2', it was rebranded Radio National in 1985.
Worked there in the book Dept, Grd floor George St in 1970
Ps and the basement had a proper menswear dept where you wpuld be fitted with suits shoes ties shirts a barber shop and you were treated like a king and the cothing fitted perfectly
My surname is Farmer, and my parents have a framed page of a catalogue on a wall
The weather in Sydney in February 2024 was grey and dreadful as depicted in the video. 🌧️ ☁️ ☁️
What’s the history of gowings building?
Got to love the Masonic symbolism in some of those drawings. Did they really and truly construct such grandiose and ornate structures of masonry in an era of horse and cart? All is definitely not as it seems...
Is this the same Farmers that still exists in New Zealand today? Or is that one a completely different thing?
Different companies
Some where in the 1970`s Farmer`s were absorbed by Myer`s Melbourne and Farmer`s by that stage had several complexes in the greater Sydney Metro area to which Myer re labelled them to Myer except for this one. Later on under Debunked businessman Allan Bond (Bond also built the Sydney monorail ) Took over Walton`s ,Norman Ross, Grace brothers leaving himself vulnerable and was Taken over by Myer`s Melbourne and that is why it Myer`s still to day. Farmers policy is if you had purchased any thing and it was not truly what you wanted then a refund or exchange would always be granted ( I met a woman who complained her 15 year old T V was not right and she was given a new t v. The companies logic was they may lose on a single item but over the years they would enjoy many years of repeat customer and very much more profits from that. If only modern retailers could learn that logic.
Back in those days it would of been a mission to undress a woman haha