Maintaining Focus

Last week we showed a street view of Surfers Paradise and the newly opened cylindrical Focus building.

Here from Alexander McRobbie's unsurpassable history of the city, The Fabulous Gold Coast, we see the Focus still under construction in an aerial photograph taken in 1975 looking down The Strip, heading south.

The Focus was part of the 1970s construction boom in the city that attracted Nora's grandparents to the region. The boom continued until the late 1980s when Australia's parlous economic state brought the ambition plans to an end for a good decade.

Over the past eight years the big, ambitious high rise developers have returned to Surfers Paradise to create the iconic Q1, the rather interesting Circle on Cavill trio of buildings, Chevron Renaissance and the upcoming Soul building.

Experienced developers such as Jim Raptis have also turned their eyes to other parts of the Gold Coast, such as neighbouring Southport to help redevelop the city's tired CBD to create Southport Central.

Just as it did in the credit crunch of the 1960s, the down turn in the 1970s, the near bankruptcy of the late 1980s and the recession of the early 1990s, the start of low part of the economic cycle is here with Raptis exposed to the volatile US finance market and now forced to call in an administrator.

Hopefully this will be just for the short term and that projects such as the re-re-re-redevelopment of the part of Surfers Paradise that once had Cathay Cafe before it was torn down as part of the Dolphin Arcade Development which was torn down as part of the upcoming Hilton Hotel development will go ahead as scheduled.