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Westgate-Point Street Carpark
In the 1950s and early 1960s, 8 Point Street (between Cantonment, Adelaide and Queen Streets) was a mix of shops, houses and a church manse, typical of mid‑20th-century Fremantle.
By 1963, the City of Fremantle had cleared most of the block (demolishing shops on Adelaide/Queen and a large two‑storey dwelling on Queen Street) to make way for a new shopping precinct. This cleared site was soon home to the Westgate redevelopment, with the new Point Street car park part of that scheme.
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Westgate Shopping Precinct
When Westgate Mall opened in December 1965, it was hailed as a major council-led effort to revitalize Fremantle’s shopping district. The Point Street Parking Station (sometimes known as the Westgate Car Park) was built at the same time. Designed by Oldham, Boas, Ednie-Brown architects, it was a five-storey, split-level garage, the first of its kind in Western Australia.
The car park opened on 6 December 1965, with room for 400 vehicles. Together with the Westgate Mall Shopping Centre, it was constructed at a cost of £2 million. In its early days, it was praised as an excellent example of local government partnering with private business to boost Fremantle’s economy.
The Fall of Westgate
As the decades passed, Fremantle’s shopping patterns shifted. The East-end Westgate precinct gradually lost business to newer centres (such as the big Myer store at King’s Square in 1972). Within a few years, retailers and shoppers began to drift away and Westgate went into decline. The Point Street car park remained in city hands throughout this period, managed as “Parking Station No.6” and continued to serve customers of nearby shops and hotels, even as the mall around it waned.
By the 2000s, the area still had small stores and some vacant lots but the heart of the old Westgate Mall had largely disappeared.
August 2021
