Footscray Shopping Centre Goes Retro – In A Bad Way

According to one of the historical plaques along Barkly Street, in the 1950s the Footscray Shopping Centre was the second largest shopping district after the Melbourne CBD.

As a child in the 1970s, the Nicholson Street Mall (a new experiment then) was a vibrant place. There was Forges of Footscray on the north side, and the Coles variety store on the south side. An arcade on the south end led to the Target store which otherwise fronted the southern part of Albert Street.

Where the ANZ Bank now sits, there was a Woolworths variety store – precursor to Big W.

All of that went south in the mid 1980s, mostly with the consolidation of the big retailers, opening of Footscray Plaza further to the west of the main shopping district, and the doubling in size of Highpoint West in Maribyrnong, which had opened initially in 1975.

Suddenly, overnight, there were a lot of vacant retail spaces in Footscray, as the major chains deserted for Highpoint.

Drug dealers moved in, and a visible heroin problem manifested itself – syringes littering the streets and people clearly affected by drugs everywhere.

Now, about forty years after all that occurred, Footscray has not been successful in reinventing itself. There are, mostly in Barkly Street, a large number of trendy bars, and there are many Ethiopian restaurants (one of my favourite foods), but there are a lot of issues. This is despite my high hopes a decade ago, when the bars and Ethiopian restaurants really took off.

Yesterday afternoon, I decided to stop in Footscray around 2.30pm to grab a kebab in Nicholson Street (I was on my way to the Rugby Test at the MCG) and I noticed that there were more than ten people sleeping or seated in doorways on the southern end of what is left of the Mall (the Council reopened the part of Nicholson Street between Irving and Paisley to traffic 30 years ago).

This is more than I have seen there before – ever. This is in the part of Nicholson Street where, through the 1970s and early 1980s, the Footscray Lions Club would have a raffle wheel set up for fundraising every Saturday morning and you could win some silly prizes (my father won several sets of cutlery over the years which my mother has still not unpacked).

I don’t feel unsafe there – in broad daylight. But it does seem to me that this is a social problem which is worsening in the area, and that any businesses trying to operate in Nicholson Street run a huge risk of being threatened with violence or having their customers scared off. This is not me being judgemental about people with drug problems (I try very hard not to use words like ‘junkie’) – it is being mindful that someone with problems bashed a local resident to death one Sunday morning in the Mall recently, and that a cafe in Buckley Street closed after the owner was assaulted in his own shop a couple of months back.

It does not help that there are so many vacant shops either – and the number seems to be increasing.

I would like to see Nicholson Street become an al fresco dining location, similar to the Eaton Mall. There are currently three businesses there which seem to have the potential to do that. But not if their potential clientele are being scared off.