City Baths, Melbourne City Baths, Melbourne City Baths in Melbourne, Australia, is an architecturally and historically significant building. It is located at 420 Swanston Street. The triangular site between Swanston, Victoria and Franklin streets was reserved for a public bath facility in 1850. Melbourne City Council opened the first City Baths on 9 January 1860, which housed public baths. The objective was to stop people from bathing in the Yarra River, which by the 1850s had become quite polluted and the cause of an epidemic of typhoid fever which hit the city resulting in many deaths. However, people continued to swim and drink
Empire Building (Melbourne) Empire Building (Melbourne) The Empire Building was home to commercial, retail arcade with offices and showrooms over, in the city of Melbourne, Australia. It stands beside the Mutual Store building on the corner of Flinders and Degraves Streets, opposite Flinders Street station. The Empire Building and Mutual Store were redeveloped into a residential complex, completed in 2006. Originally known as the Empire Arcade, the building was designed by Nahum Barnet and constructed in 1906. It housed a variety of different uses, with a dead-end retail arcade at ground level and 'rooms' above, accommodating over the years the usual array of