113–115 Gloucester Street, The Rocks is a heritage-listed terrace house located in the Long's Lane Precinct at 113–115 Gloucester Street, in the inner city Sydney suburb of The Rocks in the City of Sydney local government area of New South Wales, Australia. It was built during 1881. It is also known as Longs Lane Terraces/Precinct. The property is owned by Property NSW, an agency of the Government of New South Wales. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 10 May 2002.
History
In 1807, this site is shown by Meehan's Survey to contain a defined building alignment with a lane on the northern boundary. Artists' views of the western side of Sydney Cove between 1800–1820 confirm a large number of small buildings in the region. By 1822 the site appears on Harper's Survey as containing a single relatively small structure. Robert Russell's Survey in 1838 shows the site as the eastern half of Allotment 18 of Section 74 which was granted to William Long by Governor George Gipps in 1839. In 1829, prior to the formalising of the land claim, Long had acquired the eastern section of the property fronting Gloucester Street.
A former convict, Long arrived in Sydney aboard the Baring in 1815, but by 1829 was a successful wine and spirits merchant as well as being licensee of pubs in Millers Point and Lower George Street. Long assumed ownership of the western section of allotment 18 fronting Cumberland St after the death of his wife Mary Walker. Prior to her death, Mary Long had inherited the property from her former husband, Richard Walker, in 1825. Maps of the area drawn in 1823 and 1825 show only one building on the site, but by 1831another building had been erected on the corner of Gloucester St and Long's Lane. This building was probably erected during the course of 1830, although the intended use of the building is unclear. In 1845, when the City Council assessed the site, it was described as containing a small tenement of three houses each of two rooms with shingled roofs. The "date of taking" this assessment is noted as 1842 and in 1848 they are described as "bad repair". By 1848 a trio of single-storey, shingle-roofed houses, with two rooms each had been built.
Around 1881–1882, the three houses, by now in "bad repair", were demolished, making way for a pair of two storey-terrace houses, with five rooms each (later expanded to six rooms), and slate roofing. These are the houses that remain on the site today. In addition to the main houses, the rear of the lots contained outbuildings, rear wings and rear yards which extended into land formerly occupied by the demolished Long's Lane tenements, which were last listed in the rate books for 1877. The site continued to be the property of William Long (later part of his estate) until the NSW Government resumed the site in 1900.
The houses were always tenanted. One notable tenant of No. 113 was Joseph Law, also known as [Joseph] Ah Chong, a Chinese interpreter reportedly working for the government. Law occupied the house from 1885 to 1902, with his wife, Margaret Gratrix, with whom he had up to 18 children.
The 1902 Sands Directory was the last mention of Law as the tenant in the house. The following year his wife Margaret was listed as the tenant. Following the outbreak of bubonic plague in Sydney and The Rocks, the NSW Government, under The Rocks Resumption Act 1901 resumed the area. Local people worked at the task of cleansing, disinfecting, fumigating and lime-washing buildings. Although The Rocks area became synonymous with the plague, only three of the 103 people who died of the plague in Sydney were from The Rocks. Between 1905 and 1915, the buildings on the "Dig" site were demolished and, in the 1920s, major demolition's took place nearby for the Sydney Harbour Bridge approach. In the 1950s, several houses to the south of Long's Lane were demolished when the Cahill Expressway was constructed.
Under state ownership the houses continued to be leased to various tenants until the mid-1980s. About this time the rear wings and outbuildings were demolished, and the buildings boarded up. The buildings were occupied by squatters, and vandalised during this period, falling into a ruinous state by the 1990s, when renovation work commenced.