History
The street was named in honour of James Norton (1795–1862), an colonial Sydney attorney and solicitor who purchased the grand estate of Elswick in 1834. The 30-hectare Elswick estate was bounded by Parramatta Road, Norton Street, Marion Street, and Elswick Street, Leichhardt; in 1882, it was sub-divided and offered as 600 lots.
Norton Street was once a working-class area populated primarily by first- and second-generation Italian migrants. These days, many of the original inhabitants have moved to outlying suburbs, and the area has gentrified but the Italian flavour remains with Norton Street as its centrepiece. Throughout Sydney, Norton Street is known as "Little Italy" with many Italian eateries.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)