So the Lebanese Café in William Street has closed for good.

It was difficult to find open for the last year or two. Perhaps there was no business – perhaps they just got sick of the drug deals. Copper coffee pots, brass tables and amazingly woven desert landscapes in soft silk just  don’t seem to do it anymore  - there’s no internet  for a start.

Not to get sentimental the café embodied the brief creative dimension to what was always going  to be a real estate agents dream- even the name Northbridge was artificial, an attempt to cover over its history of brothels and racial segregation, signaled by the railway line, with a veneer of bohemian good times.

Culture puts the rent up. Like all real estate dreams Northbridge is about to become a real nightmare. Artists may well have to leave William Street completely to fulfil the State Government’s dream of “opening up” (another curious real estate agents phrase) Northbridge for that peculiarly greedy gang the coffee bar owners and property developers' party.

Now Mr 8 Ball’s favourite restaurant, the Sri Melaka has given it away after nearly twenty years in bu siness. A last quiet dinner one Saturday night suggested it might happen Rowdy even violent suburban kids their drug dealers and aboriginal gangs have driven serious eaters away. The Sri Melaka was opposite the Verge, another long term presence still empty after the artists were forced out last year by that cultural disaster the East Perth Development Authority.Sex shops are the coming thing there are two new  ones, Two clubs next door to each other are table dancing joints. Sex pays better than art at time of down town despair.

Useless to point out that art and exoticism made Northbridge that when the artists leave prices stop rising and life lose its bite. Even Cafe Sport now  reopened after its dispute over redecorating has  cards with apicture of an old gent in a hat advertising ”authentic italian” There are human sacrifices, of all kinds, are everywhere.