Talk:McDonnell & East Ltd Building

This is one building that I can't work out exactly (or at least source) what happened to it. I know the department store no longer exists and hasn't for ages, and it seems like the ground floor now contains various commercial shops, but I'm struggling to source that much. I also found one source suggesting that the building was facaded, which would affect all the content here. Anyone able to help with this one? The Drover's Wife (talk) 11:41, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

I've added what I recollect about Mac & East's closure and what I can see with my own eyes today. But I cannot find a citation to support it. There are mentions of other Mac & East's stores closing in 1990, so I think that's when they went into receivership and all stores closed. The previous decade or two had seen the growth of regional shopping centres (e.g. Westfields) which had Myer and David Jones and people stopped going to the Brisbane CBD and Fortitude Valley for their department store shopping, and that sent a lot of the inner city department stores to the wall. Mac & East had purchased some regional stores in the preceding years and it may be that they over-extended financially. As for the facade issue, not sure, but I can't remember the interior as being anything special, so it could be that the heritage value was only in the facade. But I am inclined to think they just refitted the ground floor into a bunch of tenancies. I suspect the upper floors are just abandoned (like many of the older CBD buildings). I remember having to go there to get school uniforms each year. Kerry (talk)

I got curious and trawled through Factiva to update the article. I get a bit surprised at how out of date some of these listings already were at the time of listing - to go on about how the store was still surviving four years after it closed is a bit much. I'd appreciate your thoughts at Family Services Building as well - that one might be a bit harder to solve. The Drover's Wife (talk) 14:30, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Well done! I think the out-of-date-ness may relate to the changes in the heritage register process. When the Commonwealth go t tired of running the Register of the National Estate (I don't know the reasons for that), the states were told to set up their own legislation to run state-based heritage registers. But in Queensland that took a few years to happen (1990-1992?) and a lot of entries go into the QHR in 1992, so I am suspecting that those entries were largely carried over from the RNE so might be much older than we think. Kerry (talk) 00:20, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! The death of the RNE was actually much later than that, though - it was in the mid-2000s [edit: I checked, the legislation was passed in 2006], and my memory of it is that the Howard government (or at least his heritage minister) wasn't too fussed about actually protecting heritage, and saw demolishing the Register of the National Estate as a means of eliminating red tape that was restricting development. My hunch about the mass 1992 listings would be that was about the time the Goss government got around to seriously doing heritage protection, considering how little regard any of the Bjelke-Petersen Nationals had for it (seriously, have you seen Bob Katter's comments on the Belle Vue?). I can't work out what the deal is with some of these late 90s ones being so out of date, though. I was wondering if it had something to do with the Borbidge government being slow off the mark on heritage, but this was already nearly two years out of date when the Goss government fell. The Drover's Wife (talk) 04:53, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

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