The United Streets of: Riverwood

What's that? Do more southwest suburbs? I thought you'd never ask.

Riverwood

If you're the kind of faithful reader who's been refreshing the page all day waiting for this to come up, you'll know that Riverwood is a short walk from my previous suburb of Narwee (and you'd probably do best by subscribing by email to save yourself the heartache).

I made my way in by strolling through the semi-main, relatively quiet and tree-lined Broadarrow Road. 

The brand of suburbia here doesn't differ too wildly from my previous stop, with a mixture of older, smaller houses and newer, larger builds.

I found this house to be pretty interesting compared to what we normally see these days. This is appears to be a triplex (i.e. three houses in the one building) and is sitting on a massive corner block, leaving the residents with a huge shared front yard. I feel like today they'd fill this block with as much house as they can possibly fit in. I guess land was a lot cheaper back then...

I continued through suburbia, passing a few more interesting houses along the way.

I knew I was starting to get close to the town centre and train station, as I started to see a lot more apartments. Rather than the shiny new high density we are seeing all over Sydney, the apartment block of choice here is the older style brick, with only a few storeys each.

What's Deep Dene supposed to mean?

Before long, I made it to the train line. Here, the train line is straddled by a thick and imposing metal fence, with commuter parking roadside.

As you might expect, the streets around Riverwood Station hold the suburb's commercial centre.

One of the first (and by far most bizarre) stores I caught walking into the area is Dr Koala. This amusingly branded store is one of those Ugg Boot-Baby Formula one stop shops aimed at the daigou market (for those not in the know, a daigou is a personal shopper who buys things from overseas to send to China for profit. You may have heard about them from news stories about people clearing out their supermarket shelves of baby formula). I personally just like that they misspelled "products" on their sign and that their logo is a koalafied Johnny Depp.

Also in the suburb is Gus's Seafood, the best seafood in town. (I will note that I did not see any other seafood in this town, but you do you Gus. Their Google reviews seemed pretty good anyway, so I'll allow it.)

Other eats in the suburb are Chinese dumplings and a Lebanese bakery, as well as a handful of cafes. Sadly, today was not the day for me to eat in Riverwood.

I didn't spend too long in Riverwood's commercial centre, but I did stay long enough to enjoy the "over-the-top-ness" of Riverwood Variety Discounts.

"I want to start a shop?"

"What will you sell?" 

"Every item known to man."

Back at the train station (actually quite a modern looking place), I decided to catch a bus to the other end of the suburb because something on the map caught my eye.

That something was Salt Pan Reserve, but on to that in a second.

The bus dropped me off on a residential street in front of some folks' houses. One thing I immediately noticed was a big blue sign on top of one of the street name signs.

So it turns out that Riverwood used to hold a US Army hospital during the Second World War. As a result, all of the street names in this corner of the suburb have American names. Here's Idaho Place.

And here's Michigan and Kentucky. Other street names here include Montana, Florida, Washington, Roosevelt, New Hampshire and a bunch of others. I found that kind of interesting.

But back to Salt Pan Reserve.

This is a park, but it's not a normal park.

It's an absolutely massive plot of grass.

And I just think it's swell.

Circling the park is a cycle path. Apparently there are also wooden boardwalks through some swamp out back, but I didn't feel like crossing The Great Plains to verify this myself.

I exited the park to the northeast (skipping past Kentucky Road).

This led me to a bridge over the M5 Motorway.

The other side of the bridge is the final stretch of residential Riverwood.

On this street, I found these interesting looking houses (is this also a triplex? I think it may be) which reminds me of the kind of beach-side motel you often find yourself staying at when you take a trip up the coast.

Interestingly, Google Street View shows an old mint-green fibro house where these houses stand today. The image is from 2014. 

I will note that I enjoyed some of the cars on this street, with a few modified examples,

including this excellent van where kids can get on and rock.

This particular residential street ends with a T Intersection, leading to my next suburb.

Riverwood: Land of the free, home of the triplex.