Named after the frogs that once croaked here, by 1900 Frog Hollow accomodated 38 houses, four factories and one hotel. Filled to overflowing, with houses literally stacked one on top of each other, Frog Hollow was then a place of razor gangs and illegal two-up games. In 1925, Sydney City Council decided to 'wipe out this congested area'. In the mid 1920s many residents were evicted and most houses were demolished. Some homes survived into the 1950s, though conditions were deteriorating badly.
Listen hard - can you hear the frogs returning, or perhaps the echoes of a distant past?
In the early 2000's South Sydney City Council commenced work to make the park more useable as green space, and Sydney City Council completed the work in 2007.
"...Despite being poorly suited, the gully was developed by speculative builders and stuffed full of small tenements. The housing was substandard - dark, damp and overcrowded - accessed by steep stairways, with poorly-lit and narrow laneways...."
(skyscrapercity.com; by nOchAos)
"The frogs which gave the swampy, crater-like gully in the bowels of the Riley Street escarpment its name sensibly departed to more congenial surroundings sometime in the 1800s, leaving the stinking labyrinth of narrow, dark and airless alleys and higgeldy-piggeldy, jammed together hovels to a scarborous collection of blackguards, and their bare foot children, mangy pets and vermin. Local clergymen had no trouble evoking a picture of hell for their parishioners - they merely told them take a stroll to Frog Hollow.
..."
(Razer; by Larry Writer, 2009) Co-ordinates changed from: S 33° 52.982 E 151° 12.740