The war saved this police building

On the way across, he told the papers, he had managed to sell one of the detectives “a couple of blocks of land”.

The police offices on the corner went up in 1888–89, on a site the police had used since the 1850s. By 1940 the detectives of the Criminal Investigation Branch worked there.

That year work began on a new police headquarters for the whole block, to be built in sections as the money came. The old corner offices were to be rebuilt to match it. But the war was on, and in 1941 the state capped its borrowing for building works.

The new headquarters opened in April 1943, half finished. The Mackenzie Street corner, the Herald noted, still “has to be remodelled to conform to the general design”.

It never was. The state heritage register puts that down to the war. It was the last piece of the nineteenth-century police buildings that had once run all the way along this side of Russell Street, from La Trobe Street down to Mackenzie Street.

The police left in 1995. When the site became apartments, the builders held the corner walls in place and took down everything behind them. The Indigo Loft Apartments were built inside, and there are about 44 of them.

From the corner it still looks like the police offices of 1889.