Barrier Reef Hotel

Barrier Reef Hotel is a heritage-listed hotel at Abbott Street, Cairns, Cairns Region, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by Lawrence and Lordan in conjunction with Richard Hill built in 1926 by Carl Peter Jorgensen. It was also known as Empire Hotel. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 29 July 1997.HistoryThe Barrier Reef Hotel, a two-storeyed reinforced concrete building, was erected in 1926 for PJ Doyle Ltd, wine and spirit merchants of Cairns and Thursday Island. The architects were Lawrence and Lordan in conjunction with Richard Hill, both Cairns-based firms. The building replaced an earlier Empire Hotel on the site, opened in 1898.The Barrier Reef Hotel is situated at the corner of Abbott and Wharf Streets on what was formerly Section II of the 1876 Cairns Town Plan - the survey point from which the town of Cairns was laid out was fixed at this corner just 0.5 metre from the present building. On the opposite side of Abbott Street the Government Reserve was established. Close to the earliest wharves, this end of Abbott Street developed during the last quarter of the 19th century as the principal business and administrative district of Cairns, composed principally of government offices, warehouses, shipping agents' offices and hotels. The latter catered for local office and wharf workers, as well as for travellers arriving by the coastal steamers. Little of this district's 19th century structures survive, the area being largely re-built in the first four decades of the 20th century as wharf facilities expanded to cater for the emergence of Cairns as a major sugar port. And of the buildings extant in this district by the late 1930s - Burns Philp Building, Joseph Pease Building, Jack and Newell Building, Consolidated Fertilizers Building and a string of working- class hotels: the Australian, Criterion, Mining Exchange, Oceanic, Royal and Empire - only the Barrier Reef Hotel and the former Jack and Newell Building remain to perpetuate the association of this part of the city with its waterfront origins.