Rooftop Cinema

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Curtin House is a six storey Commercial Palazzo style building on Swanston Street in the Melbourne city centre, known in the 2000s as a 'vertical lane', with a range of specialist retailing, dining, and entertainment spaces occupying much of the building.HistoryCurtin House was built in 1922 as the Tattersalls Club, containing shops on the ground floor, bar and dining room and meeting rooms on the next two floors for the Club members, who were from the horse racing world, and offices to let above. It was one of the first major works of architect Harry Norris, who went on to design many important city buildings in the interwar years. The Club either disbanded or merged with another club and left the building in 1937, when their rooms were put up for lease with the bar and other fitting sold off in 1940. In the late 1930s and early 1940s the building housed the offices of the Victorian Branch of the Communist Party and its youth wing the League of Young Democrats. As supporters of Stalin, who had made a pact with Hitler, the CPA Australia was anti-war, and so seen as unpatriotic, and their offices and library here were famously raided on 17 June 1940 minutes after the Federal Cabinet decided to ban the party, 'seizing enough literature to fill two vans'. The League of Young Democrats had been spared, but were also raided on 25 february 1941 minutes after it too was declared illegal by Cabinet. By 1948 the name had been changed to Curtin House, when it was reported as become the new home of the National Secretariat of Catholic Action, which included a range of Catholic organisations and a bookshop, in the old Club rooms on the first floor. It is presumed that the new name commemorated the war-time Labor Prime Minister John Curtin, who had died in office in 1945. He was a lapsed Catholic, but it is not known exactly why or when the name was changed.