Have you noticed St Vincent’s Hospital is gradually moving north up Victoria Street?

Bill Warner’s chemist recently shut up shop, but it too is moving north, to the old laudromat site, on the corner of Surrey Street.

With the Garvan Institute on one side of the pharmacy, the other used to be two Victorian terrace houses, one of which was St Vincent’s Hospital’s Diabetes Education Centre. I am sad to see these lovely old buildings go.

The new community health unit is about to open on Burton Street, or maybe it already has, meaning the old Caritas building on Forbes Street is up for redevelopment and residents don’t seem all too happy about it.

The skyline looking south down Victoria Street is about to change.

And it’s called St Vincent’s Hospital.

Christmas dollars make as much sense to Darlinghurst shops as anywhere else. But there’s a different vibe here. So when decorations go up, they’re generally on a different tip.

A dishevelled looking Santa Claus appeared hanging from the roof outside the Darlo Bar on Darlinghurst Road this week. There’s a moulded plastic Santa in the window at hip second hand shop Blue Spinach. And at the cafe named for its location at the corner of Forbes and Burton Streets, a very rock’n'roll Santa Claus is tearing across the outside wall, propelled by a giant shark.

It’s well into the Christmas drinks season in the neighbourhood, so the streets are permeated with a generally relaxed vibe. Which is great, unless you’re still hard at work, of course.

Artists are trying all sorts of techniques to get by right now. The occupants of a top floor terrace on the corner of Forbes and Burton Streets, Darlinghurst, have paintings in the windows with a sign saying they are for sale.

Then these appeared.

Norman Pentzien, who’s based at 3 Darlinghurst Road, according to this, plastered poles around the neighbourhood this week.

If you need artwork on your wall, truck, clothes, or anywhere, small, big. Call me: 0406075108. Norman, I am experienced with any kind of architecture.

He’s on Facebook, and according to his Myspace page, on the road – Berlin, Goa, Sydney?

Swastikas with the words, “We’ll be back,” have been chalked at the corner of Bourke Street and Liverpool Street, at the corner of Farrell Avenue and Kirketon Place, and at Forbes Street and Liverpool Street.

These shots were taken by one of our readers. The bottle shop on Farrell Avenue and Darlinghurst Road is reportedly checking its CCTV for clues.