The Espy Story (Hotel Esplanade, St Kilda)

hi everyone welcome so I appreciate your interest um in uh this amazing building and this crazy story uh and really happy that you came so thank you and firstly just wanted to acknowledge traditional homes in the land for which this amazing building sits the Ellicott villain we pay our respects to the elders past present and emerging it's the story of the SP actually begins in 1835 when a man called John Batman sailed up from Tasmania with a little ship and then up through the heads up the bay up what is now the yarrow River and stopped got out landed in around about sort of King Street Melbourne and decided that would be a great place for a city and Batman then set about negotiating to buy all the land that was now greater Melbourne he basically comms the indigenous people who owned all that land and had done four thousands of thousands of years with some Trinkets and some tools and some blankets and unknowingly they had effectively sold all of this land to the one man John Batman and another man called Faulkner was already here he also agreed to buy all the land from the same people it owns 38 so a couple of years after white guys arrived and you can see it's a you know pretty modest little town uh not not massive a lot of sheep farming in that town and then just outside it um but pretty small it's uh it's not not an enormous town um it ain't 39 people started moving away from that little Township so they started crossing the era and heading down a little Dusty track that would go on to become Saint Kilda Road one day eventually so over the marshy swamp lands that are now South Melbourne and made their way down to this little part of the country and the first farming lease was granted in this area in 1839 where this species right now sits on that first original farming lease from back in 1839 so in 1841 uh a guy called Captain John Lawrence parked his clipper off the beach literally just down there right down there and the name of that boat was the lady of Saint Kilda and so this town got its name from the boat that was parked there for a couple of years that's how some killer becomes and killed originally named after an Island off Scotland you know the island of Saint Kilda so things Roll Along for the next 10 years or so the town continues to expand it's mostly a farming Town more sheep more Farms more people but only small numbers of each until 1851 when something pretty wild happened anyone know what happened in 1951 in Victoria Gold Rush yeah yeah so the Victorian Gold Rush would become the greatest gold rush in the history of the world so by 1900 Melbourne had become the richest city on earth unbelievable amounts of gold pulled out of the ground unbelievable numbers of filthy rich people as a result an unbelievable number of people coming from all around the world to try and make their fortunes at about the same time of course Melbourne starts being built up and developed so to build a big bridge across the river now the princess bridge that allowed people to travel down to kill the road um enormous big mansion started springing up down St Kilda Road and then ultimately down Fitzroy Street as well and then along across in front of the Esplanade it's Flinders Street there and of course as more and more people are getting richer and richer in and around Melbourne as they're building their enormous big houses down synkilda Road and then arriving here in St Kilda um all those people are looking for places to spend their money and they don't want to spend shoes smelly Melbourne they want to spend it in a luxury town they want to spend it where they can be amongst other ritual people with big enormous houses and hotels and whatever and so since Kilda starts to become very quickly Melbourne's luxury resort town there were obviously a big pair the boats coming and going there were sea baths right along the foreshore um St Kilda just had fresh air beautiful blue fresh water and that's part of what made it so attractive as opposed to dirty dusting bustling Melbourne that's the Esplanade so in 1957 the very first hotel is built on this site it's called the new bath Hotel the new bath Hotel was unusual in that it was in Australia one of the early hotels that invited people in to just come and eat and drink and have fun that's that's it there so we think it's that building there located at the end of the pier as this one is now you know even the new bath Hotel didn't last very long and um within about five or six years it was demolished and the site just sat here vacant until 1877 when a local politician called James orkney bought the site and decided to build three terrorist townhouses so three three-story side-by-side houses and he hired Smith and Johnson who just finished renovating these two amazing buildings the law court building which is now a supreme court building in Melbourne and the GPO which is our actual GPO in the heart of Melbourne so halfway through the project they convinced James Oldman the owner to build not three terrorist townhouses but an incredibly Grand luxury resort hotel in the Renaissance Regency Revival Resort Style with Italian references so we didn't make that up that is the actual architectural style that they were working on at the time so it took them somewhere between one year and at the most nearly two years to do that and the fact that it's still here now still standing still largely the way it looked originally so this is the hotel when it first opened in about 1878 this is a line drawn version of it the part of the hotel we're in right now which is this Art Deco extension this added a little bit later but that's how the hotel looked when it first opened but just to think that they could build that in inside two years having stopped half my throat it's just extraordinary to me unbelievable so when it opened it was the luxury resort hotel in the country certainly the greatest luxury resort hotel in Victoria when um when the Rich and Famous would either want to take a holiday from somewhere in Australia or anywhere else in the world or traveling business might come from somewhere else anywhere in the world and everybody at some point they'd find themselves having a holiday at the SB in St Kilda it's just one of those things that you did on holidays um so among those people Mark Twain the American author he visited here in about the 1890s he was here to see the Melbourne cup funnily enough but he stayed at the Espy while he was in Melbourne for a couple of weeks um Sarah Bernhardt the most famous actress of her day she actually moved in here to the hotel um in I think 1912 it was and she moved in famously with a um menagerie of animals so she bought like a dozen animals with her including a couple of monkeys like just crazy to think about actually um you'll see an old poster from that era over there also when Sarah burnout was in Australia performing on stage in one of the theaters that's actually Sydney but there was a that's all we've got but that was a similar post it was built for the theater in Melbourne is that a naughty one by far the most important of all the people who ever moved into the SP arrived and he of course was Alfred beldan so Alfred Feldman was an Englishman born in Essex in England in November 1831 . so when he turned about 18 he was put on a boat for Australia from Melbourne about 20 years after he was born the Gold Rush had happened right so he was I guess 20 get or taken or so when he arrived here in 1851 and he had just enough money or so out of 53 my apologies so 22. so just enough money to buy a horse and a cars and some Hardware Felton wasn't going to make his fortune gambling in the gold mines just to see if he could get rich he was going to work his ass off and get rich the old-fashioned way running a business essentially Commerce so he took that first car load of Hardware up to the mines sold it came back to Melbourne reloaded went back up there again sold it and did this all day every day for years and years and years and after about five six seven years he'd grown really wealthy he he again had done this all day every day in the in the first five six years of the gold rush and he'd made an absolute Fortune Within a couple of years of visiting the gold mines to sell Hardware he had made enough money to set up shop in Swanson Street so by about 1860 when this photo was taken in Swanson Street he has built a little hardware store on Swanson Street a couple years after that though he'd changed professions he was no longer selling Hardware he was now selling pharmaceutical products he was mostly on the road in the first years and then he was very very busy working all day every day um in his pharmaceutical shop and didn't have time or inclination to buy a house or build a house so he just moved from boarding house to boarding house most boarding houses in those days were run by ladies who owned and operated a really quite lovely house in most cases possibly they were the daughter of parents who had passed away and they were unmarried or possibly their husbands had died and they were left the house and were taking borders to maintain the house and keep it running felt and moved from building us Abbotsford Collingwood and then eventually St Kilda and he never left and killer once he arrived here he fell in love with a place and stayed his entire life but by about 1860 is she's moved he had moved into Mrs O'Reilly's boarding house which was just down the road on the Esplanade a couple of minutes from here and there he met another young Englishman called FS Grim wide the fifth or sixth of many many sons and are unlikely to ever take on his father's business which was coincidentally pharmaceutical products so Grim Wade's father in London wrote a very successful pharmaceutical business he worked in his father's business but he was never going to get to take it on because he had older brothers who would do that so his father sent him to Melbourne which was an exciting and amazing new place where he could build his own life and he sent him with a letter to one of his father's old apprentices who had once worked with him in London business but it's since come to Melbourne to run his own business and Grim White's father essentially said to his Old Furnace hey I'm sending you my son Frederick Shepherd he's a competent Pharmaceutical guy would you please take care of him and employ him so grenade arrived here in about 1857 and began work in a pharmaceutical business in Melbourne of course in competition with Alfred Felton and the two guys find themselves living in Mr Riley's boarding house just down the road they're about the same age from the same part of the world they had the same profession and they become great friends and when FS GreenWise boss decides to go back to England after a family tragedy he offers his business for sale to Greenwood Greenway can't afford to buy it because he hasn't got any money yet but his might Alfred Feldman was filthy rich so Felton agrees to put up the money to buy the business and together Grim white and Felton built this company called Felton room lighting code and over the next 40 50 years Felton blue blood and Kobe comes one of the biggest businesses in the country and absolutely enormous Corporation essentially it's made up of a huge number of different offers not just simple selling of pharmaceutical products it's run out of an enormous big Warehouse in Flinders Lane among the businesses they've got the Chemical Works in Sandwich which is just down the road a little bit where they actually generate produce make chemicals for the pharmaceutical products and other products they've got um a bisulfate of carbonate Works which is essentially assault works that's in Sandwich as well they've got a glass works as you can imagine pharmaceutical products used to be sold in glass primarily so small glass vials or glass bottles and no one in Australia made any glass products in this era so these guys used to have to order glass bottles from Europe or America but as you can imagine glass back then was pretty fragile stuff so they basically built the first glass bottle works in the country so pretty inventive guys on top of that a um laboratory and a drug Mill and then a lich Aquarium we didn't know a lot about Felton's life here but Russell groom right here was Frederick Shepard's son wrote a book about life with Felton Russell Grim Wade talks about visiting Felton here in his rooms [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] had taken over not just one room but a series of rooms here at the hotel um in actual fact he'd taken over a couple of rooms where a public our main bar is now and renovated them filled them full of books magazines sculpture um and a lot of artwork as Felton was a an enormous fan of um paintings and art generally there was a lot of interest in his life here at the hotel after his death and um we had the descriptions from Grim Wade about what his rooms looked like and what happened here and um what what it made of the rooms here at the hotel and then about 10 years ago maybe maybe 12 years ago a curator at the ngv noticed that there was a small dirty Dusty tattered old photo album that was up for sale at a local auction house and he flipped through the images online and thought I see that those paintings look like some of the paintings that Felton once owned I wonder what the story is there went down to the auction house and had a closer look at this um pretty unimpressive little photo album and and found that indeed these were photographs of Felton's ass the paintings had Feld mode but not just that there were photographs of the rooms in which the paintings were hung and the ngv pretty quickly worked out that these were in fact photos of Felton's rooms here at the Espy this photo album had been lost for a hundred years or more and turned up randomly at a local auction house but as you can see they give the most amazing insight into what this hotel looked like back in 1901 when the photos were taken and in particular what Collins rooms look like just crammed full of Art and books magazines and sculptures exactly has been why I described it but until you see it you can't quite believe it right like just amazing to think this is this is our hotel 130 odd years ago [Music] so not surprisingly the ghost of alpha felden was modeled very much in these photographs so we tried to design the place so it conjured some of this feel this is obviously an open fireplace just there you can sort of see there's light coming in from a window um and we now know where Felton's rooms were so we we've been out of work out that that where our main bar is now in the old up the old facade that used to have a bay window that would wrap around where our bar is now and then we discovered that this is my tiger before we renovated it so directly above so you know you know the chef's table in front of the duck window so there's a bay window there that would have been an exact replica of the bay window the ground floor and there was this fireplace which is an exact replica of that one and um so it's just it's just uncanny to look at these photos from 120 odd years ago and um and find these little Snippets of the same fabric you know the same fireplace the Middle East one four separate but uh with light coming in the same way from that bay window up in the chef's table so when Felton died in his room in the might talk about in 1904 he died one of the richest men in the country and he died with no wife and no children and his only relatives were very very distant and largely estranged living in London and he hadn't seen them in years and years and years but he had this enormous estate worth hundreds of millions of dollars in today's terms right so no one knew what was going to do with that mistake but there's no one to leave it to turns out that Felton had been planning something for years with his lawyer Felton had decided to give away his entire estate the first half he decided to give to local charities supporting women and children the second half though no more impressive but certainly in many ways more impactful the second half he gave to the ngv Our National Gallery Victoria which is a tiny little gallery in Melbourne at the time overnight the ngv became the best endowed gallery on Earth so the ngv could go out with Felton's money and buy any painting any sculpture any work of art anywhere in the world and beat any other Gallery because they had more money the end of his art today is worth about four billion dollars it's an insane amount of art insanely valuable one of the most valuable questions in the world Felton's contribution to that four billion was three billion dollars foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] my partners and I the boys and I we'd never heard the name Alfred Felton when we bought the SP we'd walk past that plaque hundreds of times each over the years and never bothered looking at it funnily enough just assumed it was a you know some mayor opened this Pub in some date and you sort of just roll past it and get to the bar for a beer um but um it was the most amazing surprise to us to learn the story about fulfillment well after we've bought the place to understand that there was this incredible history so a bit more history of the SP Beyond felt and so 1921 this Art Deco extension is put onto the front all the hotel rooms out the back of the ground floor they're opened up and converted into a ballroom which is now of course the Gershwin room this is the hotel after 921 this is a little bit later so um the next big extraordinary moment in the ESPYs live really came as a result of the 1900s and you know the what happened to the ESPN to secular through the 40s 50s 60s and 70s so what was a luxury resort Town back in the 1800s um was in a slow decline through most of the 1900s so especially by the time the second world war arrived and American GIS were posted here in Melbourne and the SP there were no wealthy luxury Resort Hotel customers um there was no one here to keep the doors open um by coming on holidays and killed it was in the middle of the second world war right um but there were gi's little prostitutes so most of the rooms in this hotel were rented by the hour through the entire second world war and then when the hotel reopened at the end of the second world war sin Kilda really had lost its luster it wasn't a luxury Town anymore um most of people with real money had started to move out of St Kilda and and were building up turak and South yarrow and maybe even Brighton down that way so during the 50s and 60s uh this amazing old town was amazing our buildings started to get a bit run down and while that was disappointing in one way it was really exciting another way because replacing all those people were artists so by 1978 um when live music starting to grow in singular the SB starts running its first gigs here in around about 76 77 and it slowly started to build up a really great live music reputation there are other videos [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] 1990s people start looking at circular as a way to make money again and so suddenly developers are here looking at these amazing old buildings and saying what can I do with those buildings what can I do with that that crappy old building that's full of artists and singers and rock stars and punk rockers or whatever else what could I do with it to make money and um so the first of many campaigns to basically take the SB and either knock it over to put up apartment buildings or at least convert it to something non-public non-like music like those campaigns all started um one of the campaigns um by developers was was designed to basically knock it over most DSP or at least leave just the front of it and put up like a 40-story tower on the site and so very quickly a big campaign of um big ground swell of local support came out and started um you know actively trying to stop that from happening um big protests had on the steps here of the hotel over many many years to try and stop it in 2015 the previous owners having left the place um relatively relatively decline I started looking around to see if someone would want to buy my partners and I we were we'd always you know if you're Republican in Melbourne as we'd been at that point for nearly 20 years um you know the ESPYs like the Holy Grail right you just you dream that maybe one day you'll get to take over the place and run it and and make it sustainable you know give it a future um by the time we came in here they'd started renovation so the place was empty so they literally pulled out all the bars floors wall ceilings bathrooms everything um the top couple of floors were condemned so you couldn't really go up there they nothing had been happening up there for 30 or 40 years in most cases the whole top floor probably more like 50 years um and so um it was a pretty daunting task to be honest to take on the place given that it wasn't open and it wasn't a hotel anymore um but um we certainly delayed that there was an amazing opportunity here and that we could do something amazing even someone had to save it because otherwise give another five years with the pub being shut and empty and with water leaking through roofs and vandals coming in and whatever at some point there'll be no more campaigns to save that building it's just going to fall fall over basically um so we were lucky enough to buy it and so thousands of conversations later we slowly slowly built up an idea of what we should do here and what it should look like what it should feel like what the offer should be and then opened um after renovation in November 2018. it's been uh just an unbelievable joy to be honest um to have spent our lives coming here as we were growing up and not knowing most of these people but still loving the place you know still believes it's really the greatest Hotel on Earth and then obviously you learn some of those stories and some of the history of your life performance this is unbelievable um so uh yeah just an amazing Joy it's been such a treat foreign

Channel: Ujjwal vadhani

Views: 2,488

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Id: MePOLPmh1jw

Length: 30min 40sec (1840 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2022