Strip of a Street

Strip of a Street
Deccan Herald

Wood Street is less than half a kilometre in length and what was once a quiet road with many residential cottages suddenly found itself important because of its strategic location. The reason behind the name Wood Street is a mystery and no reference to it is found in any available documents.

There are of course a few trees left and it can be construed that it was once a wooded area, but then the rest of the City too was tree-lined and green sometime ago.

Wood Street runs parallel to Castle Street and is located between Shoolay Circle and Vellara Junction on Brigade Road. The Tate Lane comes from Richmond road, intersects Wood Street and joins Castle Street.

On this one-way street vehicles will be allowed to proceed only from Brigade Road junction to Mother Theresa Circle on Richmond Road from where it further leads to Ashok Nagar Police Station, Infant Jesus Church and St Philomena’s Hospital.

The old style cottages are an endangered species here. In fact, many of them have already disappeared. Another old structure on Wood Street houses the Sri S S Jain Trust and at the entrance of this street from Brigade Road is an ancient style building which houses the State Clinic of Dr V S Lokanath Rao. One of the houses on this street belongs to V P Thomas Vellara associated with the Hotel Vellara and Vellara Junction.

Cosmo street

Some of the commercial establishments that have come up on this Road are a manifestation of Bangalore as an increasingly cosmopolitan city. Collage is a new fashion store which has space for designers such as Manoviraj Khosla and others.

Dragonfly is a high-end interior resource outlet. The Beary’s Group, developers and real estate firm, which was earlier located on Residency Road have now shifted to Beary's Horizon, an elite business point on this street.

The Institute of Event Management (EMDI), that conducts diploma courses in event management and public relations, is located in Casa Capitol, a building on this street.

There are a few fine dining restaurants on this small strip of a road. Olive Beach is a delightful restaurant with a lovely mediterranean ambience complete with large sunny open spaces and rough-hewn whitewashed walls all modified from an old cottage.

Taipan, a restaurant owned by Chinese immigrants, is found at the end of the street near Mother Theresa Circle.

Street of the classes

This street of the masses is now fast becoming a street of the classes.

However there are a few vestiges of the past like the friendly neighbourhood M Martien Scooter Garage housed in a small room in a low-roofed old building.

“The garage has been functioning for the past 25 years. Earlier there was a tailoring shop here,” says Cyril, the mechanic.

The new outfits that are coming up may be sleek and trendy, but they are impersonal and business-like. The human touch of the old joints is missing.

This is a sad aspect of a cosmopolitan city and very true of Wood Street.