Madeline and Maria St, Strathfield South; Mina Rosa St, Enfield on Tuesday, 25 August 2020
On one end of Maria Street is Ford Park. There is nothing much happening in this street. In front of a family home are several suitcases in various styles and sizes with a ‘For Free’ note on them.
Madeline Street begins as a residential street and then after driving through the tiniest passage between curved concrete walls, it starts to be industrial. There are lots of trucks thundering along this street, obviously via another route than that narrow passage. It doesn’t feel safe to walk. There is a large complex named “Sydney Meat Market”. It houses many known brand names. I immediately think ‘Corona hotspot’, just because one or two meat factories had outbreaks.
Mina Rosa Street in Enfield is also unremarkable but has an Olympic swimming pool at the end with a little park around it. There are Art Deco lamp posts. The plane trees are still bare. The pool opened in 1933 and was Sydney’s first freshwater swimming pool. I am reading in a blog about swimming pools that not long after the opening, which attracted a crowd of 16,000 visitors in the first week, there was a big flu epidemic in Sydney. Some reports blamed it on the crowded pool.
Today it looks deserted at first glance, but it’s open by appointment and a young man is just walking through the park and enters the gates.
