Abandoned: Bellevue Car Dealership

These photos were taken in February 2018

I’ve titled this as ‘abandoned’ but it was more like “waiting to be sold”. Regardless, I drove past this every single day for years, both active and vacant. One day, I stopped the car and took some photos. Not much else to say, really.

There’s not much history to mention either. This funky little structure dates back to (possibly) 1977 but it’s hard to tell with the grainy historical aerial photography. There’s quite a bit of tree cover through the decades too, obscuring its purpose, but it appears to have been a car yard from at least the mid-90s. The location sold cars until late 2016, and except for my visit in early 2018, there was no activity on the site until later in the year.

The structure remained but was renovated into a drive-through coffee shop! Quite a modern-looking one too. I would have had my doubts that it was the same building, but in an October 2018 Street View capture, you can still see the “4X4” text on the awning mid-renovation.

For those wanting a coffee on the way up or down Greenmount Hill, the coffee shop is called Kwik Koffee Bellevue.

(Not sponsored, I have never wanted a coffee going up or down Greenmount Hill)

As a bonus, for some reason, I also took a photo of the old Darling Range Pub (which was down the road). At this time, the original pub building (built 1905) was an Indian restaurant and a tavern was attached inside an 80s brick extension. The windows on this extension were high and included permanently drawn curtains. You can probably imagine why…

The reason I probably took the photo was because, at the time, there was a proposal to bulldoze the tavern and original pub building for a petrol station. As you can imagine, this encountered backlash since there were already two of the bloody things at the same intersection. Thankfully, a compromise was reached where the seedy old tavern would instead get demolished for the service station and the pub would remain.

It now trades as The Bellevue Darling Range Hotel and appears to be doing good business despite opening just as the pandemic was kicking off.