Sydney city (regional capital), places of interest - - Pictures
Sydney is a beautiful city despite the incongruity of modern skyscrapers in the central business district with the colonial public buildings and handsome terraces. Sydney Harbour Bridge, completed in 1932, is one of the longest single-arch bridges in the world. The curve of the arch stands 135 m (443 ft) above sea level and the 49-m (160-ft) wide deck carries dual railway tracks, an eight-lane highway, a bicycle track, and a pedestrian footpath. The bridge, linking north Sydney with the southern and eastern suburbs, became a symbol of the harbourside city but its iconic significance was, if not eclipsed, certainly equalled with the opening of the Sydney Opera House at Bennelong Point in 1973, now one of the most recognizable edifices in the world.
Hyde Park Barracks, in Queens Square, is a fine, classically proportioned building designed by Francis Greenway. Once providing accommodation for 1,000 convicts, it is now a museum of social history. Other fine Greenway buildings are St James Church, opposite the Barracks, and the Government House stables, now the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music. Sharing Queens Square with the Barracks is the Mint Museum, the oldest public building in Sydney and originally part of the 1816 “Rum Hospital”, as was Parliament House in Macquarie Street, which is still the home of the New South Wales legislature. The oldest surviving private building in Sydney is the two-storey Georgian Cadman's Cottage (1816) in George Street in the Rocks. The Rocks, once a raucous slum, has been redeveloped as a tourist precinct with cobbled streets, colonial buildings, and converted warehouses. Other vintage sites are the Queen Victoria Building, housing a huge shopping gallery, and the colonial sandstone-built Observatory. More modern contributions include the AMP Tower (1981), which at 305 m (1,000 ft) is the highest building in the Southern hemisphere, and the Monorail connecting the city centre with Darling Harbour to the west. Darling Harbour is itself a redevelopment of gradually decaying dockland in an area that the early colonists called Cockle Cove. It is the location of the Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney Aquarium, the Chinese Garden, and the largest cinema (IMAX) screen in the world; to the south-west are Chinatown and Spanish Town.
