After all those years of planning and hammering and closed streets and dust, Wollongong turned out in force on Thursday to see what its patience – and $200 million of investment – had yielded.
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Lunchtime queues stretched five deep at Wollongong Central’s new food court, where every seat was taken and demand was strong for fish and chips and sandwiches from Soul Origin.
The masses squeezed together into JB Hi-Fi and packed into the new ground floor burger joint, Grill’d.
The tide had begun with just a trickle at 8am, when Coles opened in the complex’s lower ground level.
‘‘I love the design elements – it’s really interesting visually. I just feel like I’m somewhere else now, not Wollongong.’’
West Wollongong’s Denise Ferrell was one of the first to wheel a trolley down the unsullied new aisles, where the cereal boxes were aligned to unnatural perfection.
She carried in her trolley a single red carnation gifted from the store.
Mrs Ferrell, who shops at Figtree Coles every Friday, is happy the new store will save her the drive. Thursday morning’s visit was a scouting mission, she said.
‘‘I came here to suss it out and see where everything is,’’ she said.
Up three storeys, Corrimal’s John Colquhoun sat encased in a timber-clad booth with a wrap-over ceiling, eating McDonald’s breakfast and looking like a piece of a performance art.
A retiree from the building trade, he admired the aluminium ceilings and thought of the skill it would have taken to get the material so flat and even.
‘‘It’s really well done, it’s bigger and better than I expected,’’ he said.
Elsewhere in the food court, mobile phone chargers were built into the tables and pots of living herbs made interesting green centrepieces.
Wollongong’s Penny Fisher was drinking a morning coffee when some of the precinct’s eight giant windows levered unexpectedly open, filling the floor with outside air and opening up views over the roofs of Keira Street businesses.
‘‘It was a really nice surprise,’’ Ms Fisher said.
‘‘I love the design elements – it’s really interesting visually. I just feel like I’m somewhere else now, not Wollongong.’’
The automated windows are the creation of Allstaff Airconditioning, and incorporate an indoor anemometer, to measure wind. When the windows open, the air conditioning switches off automatically.
They will open and close at different times every day, depending on the conditions, said Allstaff’s Adam Hook.
‘‘It measures the temperature and humidity outside and compares them to the temperature and humidity within this space and decides whether it’s advantageous to open them up to get free cooling,’’ he said.
The GPT Group’s CEO Michael Cameron told the Mercury light and open spaces were a hallmark of modern shopping centres, which were increasingly geared towards providing customers with somewhere to socialise, not just shop.
‘‘Shopping centres used to be designed that they were easy to get into and very hard to get out of – very much the concept of a box,’’ he said.
‘‘Where we’ve transformed things is by turning the shopping centre inside out.
‘‘This is unlike anything Wollongong has seen in the past.
‘‘Out of all the centres we’ve been involved in ... this has probably had the biggest immediate impact on a CBD.’’
Civic leaders met at 9.30am for speeches on Keira Street, which remained closed to traffic so rides, entertainers and crowds could use the space.
From the podium, Wollongong Lord Mayor Gordon Bradbery told the crowd the development had placed the city on the world stage.
‘‘It represents the fact that ... international design quality and services and opportunities have come to the Gong as well,’’ he said.
Minister for the Illawarra John Ajaka said the region was ‘‘very grateful for this wonderful development’’.
‘‘What an incredible job, what an incredible feat,’’ he said.
Harrison Double, 8, of West Wollongong, won a competition to push an oversized novelty detonator that sent two jets of glittery ticker tape into the sky.
‘‘When I’m older I’m going to get a job here and buy my mum whatever she wants,’’ he told the crowd, before counting down the explosion.
From the sound system, David Bowie’s Changes got going.
Some pieces of the tape rained down on the crowd but the wind got the rest of it, taking it high over the new development and west along Crown Street - where city leaders hope Wollongong’s new investment, progress and optimism will also soon spread.