City Hatters, Flinders Street Melbourne – Iconic Melbourne Landmark
Image © Marcus D. Niski 2007
A collection of writings about place space writing and art …
City Hatters, Flinders Street Melbourne – Iconic Melbourne Landmark
Image © Marcus D. Niski 2007
Luna Park, St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia
Image © Marcus D. Niski 2018
Luna Park, St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia
Image © Marcus D. Niski 2018
By Marcus D. Niski
There is something elegant and peculiarly captivating about neon signs: they have a certain memorizing quality about them no matter how seemingly mundane their messages might be.
My earliest memory of a viewing my first neon sign was that of the ‘The Skipping Girl’ one of Melbourne’s most famous visual landmarks – in reality an elaborate promotional sign for a brand of table vinegar – located along Victoria Street, Abbotsford in the city’s inner suburbs.
While always very low key about it, my father in fact spent some of his early working life in Australia as a graphic designer of neon signs designing several landmark signs as well as later printing light box signage for national advertisers.
Many years ago in the 1990s whilst living in Sydney, I took this photograph of the St James Station entrance located on the northern side of Hyde Park. It has always remained one of my favorite photographs of neons given the electric blue and red hue set against the mundane entrance to one of Sydney’s famous inner-city stations.
Image © Marcus D. Niski 1995-2017
Melbourne’s famous ‘Skipping Girl’ landmark:
Opposite Pellegrini’s Espresso Bar on the Corner of Bourke Street and Crossley Street lays one of my favorite Melbourne bookshops – The Paperback Bookshop – a Melbourne icon established in the early 1960s.
Image © Marcus D. Niski 2011
Pellegrini’s Espresso Bar is a Melbourne cultural icon and is said to have installed the first espresso machine imported into Australia in the 1950s – ushering in a generational obsession with espresso coffee among Melbournians from all walks of life. A good short review of Pellegrini’s can be found at: https://www.broadsheet.com.au/melbourne/cafes/pellegrinis
Image © Marcus D. Niski 2010
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