Stone and brick warehouses stand along the Port River. The town centre has been a State Heritage Area since 1982.
What Port Adelaide looks like
The town centre is mostly nineteenth century stone and brick. and have most of the surviving shops and warehouses, along with the South Australian Maritime Museum, open since 1986 in a group of old port buildings.
Some early buildings in the town centre have their ground floor below street level. The 's first ground floor is now part of its basement.
Wool stores line , further east. They have stood empty for decades.
is at the other end, on a bend of the river. The mill buildings are state heritage listed and the yard in front of them is used for markets and events.
Shops in the main streets have been left empty and boarded up. Trains came back in August 2024, when reopened on Baker Street. The old goods yard beside Lipson Street is the National Railway Museum.
The Waterside Workers Federation laid the foundations of its hall on in 1926. A theatre company has used the building since 1992.
Shot in Port Adelaide
Crozier Street is a block of wool stores east of the town centre, and three films have used it. The 1986 film Playing Beatie Bow shot there for a story set in Sydney's Rocks. Rolf de Heer filmed the exterior of Bubby leaving home there for Bad Boy Bubby. Mortal Kombat shot the cage fight in Cole Young's Chicago gym inside the warehouse at 20 to 30 Crozier Street.
Bad Boy Bubby, 1993
Commercial Road
Rolf de Heer shot Bad Boy Bubby around Port Adelaide. Commercial Road and College Street were both used, and the exterior of Bubby leaving home for the first time was shot a few streets east on Crozier Street. Other scenes were made in the Adelaide city centre, including the old gaol and St Peter's Cathedral.
Playing Beatie Bow used the Crozier Street wool stores for its story set in September 1873 Sydney, released in 1986. Port Adelaide's nineteenth century stone and brick warehouses are close in scale to the sandstone bond stores built in The Rocks, most of them two or three storeys with heavy masonry walls. The Rocks streets are narrow and irregular where they climb the sandstone ridge. Port Adelaide's are wider and flat, laid out for wharf traffic on reclaimed ground, so the comparison holds best on a single warehouse front rather than a full street corner. Keep to a single warehouse front on Crozier Street rather than a full street corner. Port Adelaide's streets are flat and reclaimed. They read wider than The Rocks' narrow, sloped lanes once the frame pulls back. Try searching sandstone bond stores now.
Warehouse Precinct, Vogel Street in Dunedin, New Zealand
Vogel Street and the Warehouse Precinct around it were reclaimed from Dunedin Harbour from the 1870s, mostly for the wool and general cargo trade that also filled Port Adelaide's stores on Santo Parade. The warehouses are brick and stone, two to four storeys, with plain functional fronts rather than heavily ornamented commercial facades. Several Vogel Street buildings carry murals from a recent revitalisation and would need to be avoided or dressed out for an unbranded period look, along with the modern shopfronts at ground level. Try searching plain brick warehouse front now.
Old Port in Portland, Maine
Portland rebuilt its waterfront in brick after the Great Fire of 1866, and the Old Port's low commercial buildings have stayed close to that rebuild since. Commercial Road and Lipson Street have a similar run of two and three storey stone and brick fronts from roughly the same decades, and both waterfronts still keep working boats moored close to the old commercial streets. The Old Port's cobblestone paving is its clearest marker and has no equivalent on Commercial Road, so a comparison shot should avoid close shots of the street surface. Modern retail signage needs the same control on both streets. Try searching brick commercial street front now.
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