Find Me Friday #9

Welcome back to Find Me Friday, the series where I post a picture of part of a building and you have to find it.

Here’s last week’s puzzle:

And here it is again:

It’s the Westside Laundromat, on the corner of Goulburn and Molle Streets in West Hobart. Congratulations Meg for identifying it.

Above the Laundromat there are flats.

So what do we know about this building? My first thought was “pub” because there are so many old pubs and pub sites around Hobart. My standard answer to “what was this building originally?” is now “pub”. It’s my General Douglas MacArthur answer. (Slabs will understand that.)

But this building, 87 Goulburn Street, doesn’t appear to have been a pub, so this time I’m wrong. The white building to the right of it, however, was the Star Inn, which was first licensed in 1839. It closed in 1900.

There’s a picture of the former Star Inn in the book Here’s Cheers (by C.J. Dennison), which is undated but looks like it could be from the 1970s. That picture also shows part of the Laundromat, and the façade is painted blue. That’s how I remember it from when I used to live in the area in the 1990s. I think the cream paint is a fairly recent change.

It wasn’t a pub, so what was it?

Was it always a Laundromat?

I’ve drawn a blank. Do you know anything about its history?

Now for this week’s puzzle. Do you know where this is?

I’m having a break next week, so come back in two weeks to find out if you’re right.

Happy searching!