The Madrid Restaurant and Madrid Fruit Palace was a restaurant and boarding house at 54 High Street. It was run by the Andinach family (also sometimes Andrinach) until about 1938 when the Buffalo Club took over the building. It opened in about 1903.[1]
The building is on what was the original 1833 Town Lot 105 which was granted to G.F. Johnson. It is now lot 500.
Before that there was a cottage housing the telegraph office.
Hitchcock:[2]
On June 21 of that year [1869] the telegraph line to Perth, which was built by private enterprise, was opened, the first office being an old cottage standing back from the road at the rear of where the Madrid Restaurant now [1929] stands in High Street. The first operator was W. Holman, who had been an officer of Mrs. Habgood's barque Zephyr, and the first messenger was the late W. T. John, then a boy. The first telegraph cadet was Horace Stirling who was appointed to take charge of the Fremantle office. Horace Stirling was afterwards closely allied with telegraph extension throughout the State and was a keen observer and a well known historian.
The fifty-five boarding rooms in 1904 had "large windows from which extensive views may be gained […with] the shipping signals from the flagstaff being in full sight".[3] There was a sitting-room at the front, opening to the verandah.[3]
In 1906 the Madrid was still a boarding house, catering to Fremantle's "large bachelor population" with sixty rooms and a dining-room that could seat over a hundred. The Andinachs had spent £2,000 on improvements.[4]
For the post-1938 history of the building, see the Buffalo Club article.
References and Links
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 The Madrid Restaurant (1925, August 22). Mirror (Perth, WA : 1921 - 1956), p. 10. Retrieved September 26, 2024, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article76442275
- ↑ Hitchcock: 54.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 THE MADRID RESTAURANT. (1904, June 4). Truth (Perth, WA : 1903 - 1931), p. 4 (CITY EDITION : SUPPLEMENT). Retrieved September 26, 2024, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article207387264
- ↑ THE MADRID RESTAURANT (1906, March 10). The Daily News (Perth, WA : 1882 - 1955), p. 3 (THIRD EDITION). Retrieved September 26, 2024, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article82683864
Hitchcock, J.K. 1929, The History of Fremantle, The Front Gate of Australia 1829-1929, Fremantle City Council.
Parker, David Dare & Ron Davidson 2010, The Clubs, FotoFreo, Fremantle.
Page for Josephina Andinach on streetsoffreo.com.au.
Streetsoffreo.com.au page for the Buffalo Club and Madrid Restaurant.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 1 October, 2014 and hosted at freotopia.org/buildings/madrid.html (it was last updated on 3 April, 2024), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.