The Paragon Cafe is a heritage-listed restaurant located at 65 Katoomba Street, Katoomba, New South Wales, Australia. It was designed in successive stages by Harry & Ernest Sidgreaves shopfitters, architects Harry Lindsay Blackwood and George Newton Kenworthy, with decoration by Otto Steen, and built from 1909 to 1940. It is also known as Paragon Restaurant or simply The Paragon. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 5 March 2015.
History Indigenous history Prior to European settlement the Blue Mountains was the home of many autonomous Aboriginal groups who lived and moved around the region. There are six distinct tribal groups who have traditional rights and custodial responsibilities for the indigenous heritage of the region that are: the Darug, the Gandangurra, the Wanaruah, the Wiradjuri, the Darkinjung and the Tharawal.
Evidence of Aboriginal occupation and custodianship of the country within Blue Mountains National Park dates back to possibly 22,000 years.B. P. Stockton and Holland 1974.Williams et al. 2012. The Blue Mountains contain a large number of significant sites which capture the relationship that Aboriginal people have had with country for thousands of generations.
The rich and varied evidence of traditional occupation of the reserves include archaeological deposits in open sites and rock shelters, stone implements, factory sites for tool production, axe grinding grooves and extensive art-work, including drawn, painted and stencilled images. Tracks and figurative motifs dominate the art sites. Motifs include anthropomorphic figures, animals, hand stencils and tracks of birds and kangaroos.NPWS, 1998.
Colonial history Katoomba initially developed in a fashion quite distinct from the other Blue Mountains townships along the 1860s railway line. From 1874 onwards trains halted at The Crushers, in the vicinity of the later station, not for passengers but for stone quarried near the later courthouse.
The first settlement in the area was to the south-west of the railway, near Katoomba Falls, where John Britty North opened a coal-mine complex in the Jamison Valley in 1878. There was a village near the top of Katoomba Falls and another village grew up deep down in the valley itself close to the base of the Falls, just below where the Scenic Railway ends today.
North built a private tramway from the top of the incline near Katoomba Falls to join the Main Western railway line at what is now known as Shell Corner, a kilometre west of the present station.Jack 2013: 7 All this diverted attention away from the current core area of the urban development, the area on either side of Katoomba Street, that essential north–south connecting link between the railway and Echo Point.
This area around Katoomba Street was within the large land-holding of James Henry Neale, a master butcher and Sydney politician, who had been a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly from 1864 until 1874. In 1877 Neale built a country retreat called Froma on what is now the new Cultural Centre site on the east side of Parke Street. In 1881 Neale sold his interest in central Katoomba, including the house, to Frederick Clissold. Clissold, a wool-merchant resident in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield, immediately sub-divided the land, creating and naming the modern street system.
Parke, Katoomba and Lurline Streets were created, running north–south, while Waratah Street ran east–west and defined the southern edge of the initial commercial centre of the new town. The Great Western Highway and the railway defined the northern limit. Katoomba changed rapidly; it started as only two industrial halts on the railway, with stone for railway works at one and at the other a private tramway leading down to a coal-mine and two mining villages. Then it became a characteristic Mountains town relating to a proper railway station, as the 78 allotments created in 1881 were, over two decades, purchased and developed.
During this period from the 1880s up to the World War I, the whole area below The Carrington, quite close to the railway station, along Katoomba, Parke and Lurline Streets, became a busy commercial precinct, dominated by shops, services and a cluster of guesthouses, tempered by a remarkable number of churches (Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic and Congregationalist) along with their halls and manses.
The influx of seasonal tourists and the increasing number of permanent residents who serviced the tourists created a need for local services, so the area between the station and Waratah Street gradually filled up with shops, restaurants, cafes, two theatres and public utilities, such as the post office and the public school.Jack 2013:7 There was still a lot of free space in 1906, captured in a marvellous photograph showing south Katoomba from the most spectacular of the early consolidations, the Great Western Hotel of 1882, better known as the Carrington, on its spacious hill-top site. Froma was still there in 1906, just below the Carrington although it was demolished six years later.
Between Froma and Katoomba Street, the site of the later Paragon was a large, empty space, which remained undeveloped until 1909, when William Newlind built four shops on the vacant Katoomba Street block. Newlind had built the four shops as a speculation and three of them were soon bought as an investment by the Anglican rector of St Hilda's, just across the street. These were all retail shops until 1916 when one was converted into refreshment rooms, called The Paragon.
Paragon Cafe and Zacharias Simos This was just at the beginning of a new phenomenon in Australian country towns, the Greek cafe. From the early 1910s onwards a number of emigres from Greece, often with experience of the United States, created a new cafe experience in cities and towns throughout Australia. The Greek cafe was "essentially an evolutionary amalgam" of the Greek coffee-house and the American-oyster saloon and soda parlour with the familiar fare of the existing British-Australian steak-houses. The names of the cafes, Californian, Golden Gate, Niagara on the one hand and Acropolis, Parthenon, Paragon on the other, reflected the shared inheritance.
In Katoomba a drapery store built at 92 Bathurst Road near the station about 1905 was converted in 1917 to a Greek cafe called the Acropolis and soon rechristened the Niagara to emphasise its trendy American drinks. This is the Australian environment which a fifteen-year-old Greek boy called Zacharias Theodore "Jack" Simos found when he migrated from Greece in 1912. He found work in Greek cafes in Sydney, Windsor and in Tenterfield. By 1916 he was in Katoomba, where in a brief partnership with Demetruos Sophios he became a fruiterer and a confectioner, opening his own premises in Katoomba called the Paragon Cafe and Oyster Palace.Jack 2013: 8
The Paragon and adjoining shopfronts (63-69 Katoomba Street) is located on Lot 21 of land in Katoomba owned by James Neale and subdivided in the 1880s. The lot was purchased by William Newlind in 1886.LTO, DP 692; vol.374 fo.169 Four shops, nos. 63 to 69, were built on Newlind's land in 1909. The three to the north, nos 63 to 67, including the future Paragon, were all owned in 1911 by the Rev. John Russell, who was the Anglican rector of St Hilda's across the street from 1902 until 1913.Church of England Historical Society Journal, 8 iii, Sept. 1963, 405 Since Russell did not own the fourth shop, it is likely that he was not responsible for building on the site but merely bought existing new shops as an investment. He retained ownership of the properties until 1924. From this date Russell maintained only one investment property in Katoomba: No.100-102 Katoomba Street (Rate Books). It is believed the income from the shops was an important part of Russell's income, particularly after Russell went to Sydney as senior curate to the rector of St James.Cable: 42
Russell leased the shops as three separate entities. By 1914 No. 63 was leased by a jeweller, L.P. Goldstein. He bought the freehold from Russell in 1924. The shop was later occupied by another jeweller, H. Lloyd. Jewellers have continued to occupy the shop for most of its history. No. 65 was leased by Russell to a series of shopkeepers - Sullivan in 1914-6 and Dagon from 1917 to 1919. By 1923 he had leased it to Zacharias Simos as refreshment rooms called The Paragon, and in 1924 Zacharias Simos purchased both nos. 65 and 67 from Russell.Rate Books
Simos was a Greek migrant who had arrived in Sydney early in the century. He migrated to Sydney in 1912 and like many of his countrymen worked in Greek cafes and other food related businesses in NSW. His arrival in Sydney predated the post world war one arrival of many young men from countries such as Greece and Italy after the United States began limiting the numbers of Southern Europeans it allowed into the country. Many of the young men paid their way to Australia and found work in the food industry.
Zacharias Simos worked in Sydney and Tenterfield for the first four years before setting up a business at Windsor where he sold ham and eggs next door to a skating rink and sold vegetables door to door. During this time he saved his money and learned English sufficiently well to establish himself as a confectioner in Katoomba. During this time he worked as a caterer. Zacharias Simos was naturalised in 1921and bought a commercial property at 110-114 Katoomba Street owned by Miss Kelly and previously run by a Mrs Banning. Three years later he purchased the refreshment rooms at 65 and 67 Katoomba Street.
In 1925 Zacharias Simos employed H. & E. Sidgreaves, the shop-fitting firm responsible for the design of Washington H. Soul's Sydney pharmacies, to convert the interior of the cafe premises on classical (Art Deco) lines, along with local architect Harry Lindsay Blackwood. A soda fountain, of the finest Moruya marble, and booths of Queensland maple were installed as were the timber-panelled walls decorated with alabaster friezes depicting classical Greek figures. The fine and intact leadlight shopfronts which characterise the building were probably included in this work and have become an important part of the architectural character of Katoomba Street. The street contains many other fine examples of glazed shopfronts from the 1920s and it has been suggested that together they may be the largest extant collection of 1920s leadlight shopfronts in NSW and comparable to Canowindra in the central west of NSW.Lumby: 2000
Upstairs in 1925 was the industrial side of the enterprise, not open to the public. There was a bakehouse, a large refrigeration plant for the ice-cream made on the premises and a new "sweet factory", with a gas boiler and a forced-air draught for cooling the chocolate.
The technology of the chocolaterie is well documented, although the equipment was dismantled a decade ago. The chocolate-making equipment is still stored upstairs and on April 10, 2013, members of the Australian Society for the History of Engineering & Technology (ASHET) committee inspected and photographed the various items. This industrial dimension to the Paragon is of exceptional importance. Chocolate-making at the Paragon had been of a high order ever since Zacharias Simos had been joined by his two brothers: George was a master confectioner and they were trading as Simos Brothers by 1926.Jack 2013:9