19/08/2026
When created in 1913-1915 Myers Park was about Six Acres in size - as shown here in this map (an additional area to the south, donated in 1918 and the enlargement of the Queen Street frontage in 1944 brought it to its current size of about eight acres).
Rather surprisingly for such an inner-city site there were very few houses in the gully, and most of them were rather tiny. Most of the overgrown gully's landscape was unencumbered by structures.
This was probably a contributing factor in the decision by Parr and Myers to embark on this project - they doubtless realised that within a few years at least some of the property owners would start erecting more buildings.
The map shows that there were twelve small cottages and two larger houses inside the boundary of the envisaged park. Only two were to survive the clearance and landscaping processes undertaken by Mr Bush (the City Engineer) and Thomas Pearson (the Parks Supervisor) - one becoming the Caretakers Cottage which has recently been restores.
The other house (the small yellow coloured shape upper left below the M) was demolished in the 1990s. Although the creation of the park was noted in the papers as a 'slum clearance project' the fact that the unnecessary structures were advertised for removal rather than just being demolished suggests that this might not have been entirely true.
Neither is it true that the majority of the tenants which had to vacate were Chinese - the list of their names certainly doesn't suggest this, they all being very English sounding surnames.
There is one exception, Frederick Ching - but he is described as a metal worker (not a likely occupation for a Chinese man of the period). This suggests he might well have been a Cornishman. Cornwall is home to a crop of interestingly oriental sounding surnames - Wang, Woon, Hing, Wing & Ching etc (the New Zealand painter Raymond Ching being an example).
Although Greys Avenue did have the reputation of having a Chinese population the numbers appear to have been very small until the 1930s when an influx of refugee families fleeing from the Japanese Invasion of China created the "Chinatown' atmosphere many people remember.
The street directories from the 1880s to the 1920s show only about four or five Chinese names (mostly businesses clustered around the intersection of Greys Avenue and Cook Street). The vast majority of surnames of people residing or maintaining businesses in Grey Street (or Greys Avenue as it was renamed in 1927) have English or Irish surnames.
