Sydney
It is the sort of event that Sydney does well. A big crowd of Bellevue Hill money, media types, politicians, diplomats, artists and beautiful young things is packed onto a rooftop terrace for the launch of a glitzy hotel. The evening is warm, the music's pumping and the champagne flows freely, but a distinct sense of unease runs through the crowd. What the hell, everyone seems to be thinking, are we doing in Kings Cross?
Almost five years after the then lord mayor of Sydney, Lucy Turnbull, unveiled plans to clean up the city's notorious red-light district, the unthinkable is actually beginning to happen: Kings Cross is becoming habitable again.
Once the sole preserve of drug dealers, gamblers, prostitutes and low-life criminals (and more recently backpackers), 'the Cross', as it is universally known, is today making a concerted effort to shed its sleazy image. Although a few of the old strip joints on Darlinghurst Road still survive, most of the gangsters have long since moved south of the border to Melbourne.
The death in 2006 of Abe Saffron, the man once dubbed Mr Sin, marked the passing of pimps, stand-over men and pornographers who once ran the area.
Saffron, who owned the notorious Roosevelt club, amassed a fortune by supplying American servicemen with booze, drugs and girls during the Vietnam war. His death prompted an outpouring of nostalgia for the Kings Cross of the 1950s and 1960s.
Indeed, for much of the 20th century Kings Cross and the surrounding suburbs of Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay and Darlinghurst were the centre of bohemian life in Sydney. The poet Kenneth Slessor, actor Errol Flynn, painter John Olsen and novelist Frank Moorhouse are just some of the famous names who once lived here, drawn to the precinct's raffish charms and cheap apartments. Moorhouse was a teenager when he first visited Sydney's den of iniquity.
