Russell Street Police Headquarters in Melbourne, Australia was for many years the headquarters of the Victoria Police before they were moved to William Street in about 1990. The main multi-storey brick building located on the west of the site was constructed 1940-1943 in the Art Deco style by architect Percy Edgar Everett and is reminiscent of the design of the Empire State Building. The complex also included buildings along Mackenzie Street constructed in the 1880s and modified in the 1920s, as well as a 1970s brown brick building on the east of the site, which has since been demolished.
It was used in the opening titles of the television series Homicide, a fictional police drama series dealing with the homicide squad of the Victoria police force.
The complex is located on the north-eastern corner of Russell and La Trobe streets, and extends along Russell Street to the intersection of Mackenzie Street, Melbourne. Across the road on Russell Street is the Old Melbourne Gaol, old City Police Station and City Courts buildings (both now occupied by the RMIT University). The Police Headquarters was the site of the Russell Street Bombing in 1986.
Following vacation of the buildings by the Victoria Police in 1995, the site was involved in several failed redevelopment proposals including conversion to student accommodation and to a hotel. In 2005, the eastern wing of the complex, a 1970s building and part of the 1940s southern wing including a theaterette, were demolished to make way for a new apartment building, and the remainder of the complex was being converted into apartments. The apartment complex is now known as "Concept Blue".
-
Russell St Police Headquarters
-
The control room for Air Raid Precautions services during World War II were located at the Russell Street police headquarters
-
Control room during World War II.
Famous quotes containing the words russell, street, police and/or headquarters:
“What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us!”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)
“Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It’s just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities.... Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.”
—Diane Arbus (1923–1971)
“There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see without awe, that no man thinks alone and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with him into life,—now under one disguise, now under another,—like a police in citizen’s clothes, walk with him, step for step, through all kingdoms of time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Anything goes in Wichita. Leave your revolvers at police headquarters and get a check.”
—For the State of Kansas, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)