The grandeur of Spring St, early autumn 1899
The wealth and extravagance of the 1880s, the era of Marvellous Melbourne, was long gone when this photograph was taken, but it is still evident in the two main buildings you see here – the Grand Hotel on the left and the Princess Theatre on the right.
The ornate Princess Theatre that dominates this streetscape gives no sense of the terrible fate that overtook Victorian society in the 1890s. The collapse of the banks and the suffering that followed overwhelmed almost every aspect of life.
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