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Kings Cross, New South Wales
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Kings Cross Sydney, New South Wales |
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 Alamein Fountain |
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| Location: | 2 km (1 mi) south-east of Sydney CBD | ||||||||||||
| LGA: | City of Sydney | ||||||||||||
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Kings Cross is an inner-city locality of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Kings Cross is located approximately 2 kilometres east of the Sydney central business district. The area is encompassed within the suburbs of Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay and Darlinghurst, which are in the local government area of the City of Sydney. Kings Cross is often referred to by the affectionate colloquialism "the Cross".
Kings Cross consists chiefly of a retail and entertainment precinct extending approximately 100 metres along both sides of Darlinghurst Road. The area is infamous in Australia as being a red-light district, (similar to Kings Cross in London) with numerous strip clubs and "girlie" bars along Darlinghurst Road, although many now accuse the City Council of seeking to gentrify the area, and the demographics have changed in recent years. It is also known for its Neon signs and advertising posters, the most famous being the iconic Coca-Cola sign.
Kings Cross is also the most densely populated place in Australia with a population of around 20,000 people in a 1.4 square kilometre area.[1]
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During the early 19th century the Kings Cross-Potts Point area was one of Sydney's most prestigious suburbs, being far enough to escape the noise and smell of the central city but close enough for easy travel. An additional attraction was the commanding harbour views to the east and north and (from some points) views to the west as far as the Blue Mountains.
In the early 1800s the Governor of NSW granted several large estates to favoured subordinates and leading businessmen. They built a series of grandiose mansions with sprawling gardens of up to ten acres (40,000 m²). The remnants of these gardens helped give the area of its leafy character, and many of the mansions are commemorated in street names, such as Kellett Street.
Most of the grand estates were ultimately subdivided with all but a handful of the great houses demolished. One of the surviving estates is Elizabeth Bay House, a quintessential example of Australian colonial architecture.
Known as Queen's Cross until the early 20th century, it was renamed King's Cross after Edward VII of the United Kingdom. The "cross" is a reference to the major intersection formed by William Street and Darlinghurst Road, which forms the locality's southernmost limit.
The Kings Cross district was Sydney's bohemian heartland from the early decades of the 20th Century. From the 1960s onwards it also came to serve as both the city's main tourist accommodation and entertainment mecca, as well as its red-light district. It thereby achieved a high level of notoriety out of all proportion to its limited geographical extent.
The area boomed during the late 1960s, with hundreds of American servicemen on R & R leave flocking to the area each week in search of entertainment. Organised crime and police corruption was well entrenched in the area—one of Sydney's most notorious illegal casinos operated with impunity for many years, although it was known to all and located only yards from Darlinghurst police station. Much of this activity can be related with Abe Saffron, commonly known as Mr Sin or "the boss of the Cross". This inevitably led to a rise in crime, vice and corruption, and a massive increase in the influx and use of heroin, much of which was initially brought in by American servicemen in the pay of drug rings.[citation needed]
From the late 1960s, drug-related crime was one of the area's main social problems, leading to the controversial establishment of Australia's first Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (where users of illegal drugs can inject themselves in clean conditions) at a shopfront site near Kings Cross railway station in May, 2001. As an example of harm reduction. The injecting room is credited with reducing the occurrence of fatal overdoses in the injecting drug user community, as well as reducing the number of needles left in the street.[citation needed]
Since the turn of the century Kings Cross has witnessed a large number of real estate developments, both refurbishments of historic apartment buildings and the construction of new ones. This has resulted in demographic changes as affluent professionals are increasingly residing in the area and are in turn significantly altering the character of the area.
The local business action group is the Kings Cross Partnership and the major annual event each autumn is the Kings Cross Food and Wine Festival.
Kings Cross is serviced by the Kings Cross railway station, an underground railway station on the Eastern Suburbs Line of the CityRail network.
 Kings Cross Fire Station, designed by W.L.Vernon in the Federation Free Style |
 Kings Cross Hotel, William Street |
 Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross |
 Horizon Apartments |
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- Kings Cross, New South Wales is at coordinates Coordinates:
| The City of Sydney | Sydney |
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| Suburbs |
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Alexandria | Annandale | Beaconsfield | Camperdown | Centennial Park | Chippendale | Darlinghurst | Darlington | Dawes Point | Elizabeth Bay | Erskineville | Eveleigh | Forest Lodge | Glebe | Haymarket | Millers Point | Moore Park | Newtown | Paddington | Potts Point | Pyrmont | Redfern | Rosebery | Rushcutters Bay | Surry Hills | Sydney CBD | The Rocks | Ultimo | Waterloo | Woolloomooloo | Zetland | |
| Localities |
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Barangaroo | Broadway | Central | Chinatown | Circular Quay | Darling Harbour | The Domain | East Sydney | Goat Island | Garden Island | Green Square | Kings Cross | Macdonaldtown | Railway Square | Strawberry Hills | Wynyard | |
| List of Sydney suburbs |