Does this look almost finished to you? The pictures above were taken in the Chinatown Mall on January 4.
City Council’s early Christmas gift to Chinatown Mall traders – to have large areas of the mall open to pedestrians a week before December 25 – has proved a hollow gift indeed for business owners struggling to survive through the much-delayed $8 million plus makeover.
Council was true to its word and removed many barricades on December 18, but council claims that the move would give traders a much-needed boost in Christmas trade as people flocked to look at what had been done did not eventuate.
Claims by traders that festive season bookings had already been badly affected by the ongoing noise and dust of the makeover proved correct, with reports of poor trading figures up to Christmas and beyond.
And the project builders have now rebarricaded the area under the grand awning, with many other sections of the mall, including the fish sculpture and water feature on the mall’s northern side, still behind construction panels.
The dust may no longer be a major problem, but noisy jackhammers were still working just outside his Green Tea restaurant when owner Tom Tran spoke to The Independent earlier this week.
“It’s a maze again,” Mr Tran said, pointing to the solid barricades metres outside his doors. “How to people know where to walk?
“We were led to understand that once it was opened it would stay open. It is very disappointing to see the machinery back and the fences up again.”
Outside his restaurant, a workman was putting an undercoat on the main supports of the grand arch, but the arch’s canopy – a red and white structure in the pattern of a fish’s scale – remained only half completed.
Mr Tran said the first half had taken some weeks to do, and he was staying hopeful that the second half would not take as long. Of his pre-Xmas trade he said: “Christmas was really nothing this year compared with last year. We continue to dig into our pockets and we shouldn’t have to do that.”
Mr Tran said some night trading in the week after Christmas had been sound. But he doubted council claims that “all finishing touches” would be completed by the end of January, in good time for Chinese New Year on February 14.
“I’ve heard from construction workers that we will be lucky to have things done by March.” He also questioned whether the look of the new mall when completed was going to engage people. “I have heard no-one say anything good [about the design.] They’ve been saying: ‘We’re spending eight million over eight months for this?’”
Down the mall, Nelson Long at the Mandarin Palace said ongoing nightworks had cruelled his festive season trade. “They’ve been going from 9pm every night for weeks and our late-night trading has suffered. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel.”
Mr Long criticised the lack of information from council about when the mall would be completed.
“We’ve had no official word of when it will be finished. No one knows and we can’t really do any planning until we know.”
Mr Long said he had become frustrated with the way work had been undertaken on parts of the mall reconstruction. In any particular area “they seem to do about 80 per cent of the work and then stop it and go and start somewhere else”, he said.
