Tall Stories

The winking lion (image: City of Sydney Archives, photographer: Adrian Hall) Click here to see a larger version of this photo Size: 96 KB

There are plenty of stories associated with the building of the Town Hall. There are scandals galore (Shaky Foundations), attempts to write and revise history (Shonky Dates), and municipal puffery aplenty (Showing Off). Personality clashes were par for the course.

Some stories are apocryphal, but they are part of Town Hall legend. Like the winking lion. One of the stonework lions which decorate the building’s exterior has been sculpted with a wink. The lion is near the Town Hall’s main entrance on George Street. The story goes that ‘the stonemasons laying the huge blocks of Pyrmont sandstone used in the building were supervised by a foreman with a lively mouth and a colourful turn of phrase. The foreman sighted the true horizontal of the stonework by closing one eye and roaring instructions to his harried workmen. When the building was completed in 1874, one of the lions’ heads decorating the stonework was winking its eye … an uncanny resemblance to the roaring foreman.’ (Anchorpoint, December 1983) Another version of this story, now unproveable, is that the action of the foreman’s eye was a squint rather than a wink, and that this was memorialized in a lion’s head on the south, or cathedral, side of the building. When university students cleaned part of the exterior of the dirty Town Hall in the 1960s as a prank, Council was shamed into employing professional cleaners to finish the task. When the cleaners erected scaffolding, so the story goes, the lion’s squinting eye was damaged and the space it left was subsequently filled in with concrete. There is a lion with a concrete eye on the south side of the building but his squint, if he ever had one, is not apparent.