It’s a long weekend here in Sydney! So tomorrow is a holiday Monday, but that means Sunday also feels special somehow, because you don’t have to get up early on Monday.
My wife and I did our usual morning long walk with Scully. We took a different route home, through some bushland, which we’ve been avoiding for the past few weeks because of COVID, and the large number of walkers out taking that route along narrow walking tracks. But today it felt like the right time to be ale to do it again, and it was nice.
I did more rewriting of photo walks to convert into web pages, completing walks 11. North Sydney and St Leonards Park and 12. Greenwich Baths. While researching historical details for the first one of those, I found out something amazing about St Mary’s Catholic Church in North Sydney. It looks like this:
Now, it looks like it’s built of sandstone, and I’d always assumed that was the case. But not quite!
There’s been a church on this site since 1855, when services were first held in a tent. The first church building was built in 1856 of wooden boards, supported by tree trunks, with an earthen floor. In 1868 a church was built of sandstone, which was then enlarged in 1896.
In 1938 they rebuilt the church, demolishing the old sandstone one, to create a larger church building. But they reused all of the sandstone blocks, the roofing slates, the marble interior decorations, and the stained glass. To make the new church bigger they built it of brick, and then they cut each sandstone block of the original stone church in half, and used the thinner stones as a veneer over the brick structure, to make it look as though it’s solid sandstone!
It’s amazing the stuff you can learn by researching local history.
New content today:
Very cool. I love a church building with personality.