Walking up to Taylor Square this week, I couldn’t help but notice these boxes on the pedestrian crossing.

What are they, I wondered? Public art? Improvised cardboard robots?

Actually, no.

Looks like the days of walking unimpeded across the corner of Bourke and Campbell Streets are gone.

And there’s the culprit, a new set of traffic lights.

The guys at Concrete Playground asked us to dream up a perfect Darlinghurst Nights weekend, so we obliged – but thought we’d better cross-post here for you.

Spring has sprung: the flowers are blooming, the birds are singing and mating right outside your office window when you’re trying to concentrate on a spreadsheet. It’s time to fling off the knitwear and thermals and explore Sydney in the sun. Concrete Playground has collaborated with some of Sydney’s favourite bloggers to bring you the best picks of what our city has to offer in music, art, food, film and fashion this spring, as they describe their ideal spring weekend in Sydney.

This is Sydney By The Blog: Spring Fever.

Part Four: Matt and Polly from Darlinghurst Nights

Weekends are like gold for us. Wedged in busy weeks, we savour every free moment we get. We’re up at six on Saturday morning, and by seven we’re at Fratelli Paradiso on Challis Avenue, Potts Point, for sheep’s-milk yoghurt and granola. And coffee.

Then it’s up to the Sydney Sustainable Markets at Taylor Square to get apples, delicious East Sydney honey, and picnic goods. We have great plans of going to the pool, but actually wind up walking around the neighbourhood. Taking photos as we go. We might do some shopping at the brilliant One of a Kind on Darley Street or Blue Spinach down on the corner of Liverpool and Womerah Avenue.

We might stop and see new work by Matthys Gerber at Sarah Cottier Gallery, Matt Glenn’s show at James Dorahy, and the brilliant Turkish artist Ahmet Ögüt at Artspace – he took us on a very funny running lecture around Woolloomooloo and Darlinghurst last week.

By then, we’re shopped and gallery-ed out. Taking the papers and picnic goods we head to Beare Park, on the water at Elizabeth Bay. If we get through the papers, we have books: Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This is where we’re likely to spend most of the afternoon. Lazing, hopefully in the sun.

We’re dying to see Trevor Jamieson in Namatjira, across town to Surry Hills. The play doesn’t start until eight, so we stop at our favourite Frenchie, Tabou. The cote de boeuf is spectacular – it has to be shared. After a cup of Mariage Fréres tea, we’re off to the Belvoir Street Theatre for Big Hart’s take on the Arrernte country artist’s life. Can’t wait.

You need a debrief after a play. So throwing around ideas, we walk briskly back to Tastevin, another favourite French restaurant, on Victoria Street, Darlinghurst. The food is perfect here, but we’re after a nightcap – and cheese and muscatels.

Sunday morning, we wake up bright and early, strap on running shoes and head out. We drop a couple of DVDs at Darlinghurst’s answer to Empire Records – Darlo DVD – and run down to Rushcutters Bay park. After working up a sweat, we go to Sel et Poivre on Victoria Street, Darlinghurst – of course – it’s a local favourite, and although the duck rilettes and country pate baguettes are staples, we’re there first thing. For $7.50, the special – bacon and egg baguette and coffee – is hard to beat.

Reading papers and magazines, breakfast turns into lunch, and pretty soon we’re walking the neighbourhood again, looking for interesting sights for the blog. You never know where you’ll find them. So we try to walk different streets and lanes every time, eyes peeled.

As the afternoon winds on, we stop for a boost at Gelato Messina on Victoria Street. We always try the new flavours, and although the Muum Maam (Thai green curry) is interesting, we’re not taken. Liquorice is a favourite, but it’s rarely available. Instead we opt for Number Two (peanut butter, caramel and chocolate fudge) and the Salted Caramel and White Choc-Chip – with an espresso – and sit on the footpath to do some people watching.

On the way home, we pick up a bottle of Montenegro from ABC Cellars on the corner of Farrell Avenue and Darlinghurst Road. Every week, we get a box of fresh produce from farms within five hours of Sydney from Food Connect (we pick it up at East Sydney Neighbourhood Association on Wednesdays) – and this week, we got Warrigal greens, kale, beetroot, watercress and coriander. Lining up a couple of records by John Fahey and Seaworthy, we set about finding a recipe that works. There’s not one, so Polly improvises and throws together a soup of kale, Warrigal greens, stock, egg and parmesan.

It’s hard to believe the weekend’s over. It’s Sunday night, we’re racing into summer – but after a dream weekend like this, we feel completely ready for the week.

I spotted this flower on the wall where Foley Street ends on the Darlinghurst side of Taylor Square.

It was a gorgeous spring day, which seems less than a memory in today’s rain. But a closer look revealed an opportunistic bouquet of lips, perched above a guerilla fern on the wall. It reminds me of a rougher take on Phillip George’s remarkable Edge of Empire show at Breenspace.

Taylor Square has its own theatre, that’s for sure. But tonight it had the staging, seating and lights to go with it.

Approaching Taylor Square, I heard screams – which is fairly typical – but louder than normal, amplified, and as I rounded the corner, I realised it was a couple of actors. They’re in out of focus picture above, sitting on those round seat like objects.

It’s Milk Crate Theatre – based in Darlinghurst since opening in 1999, and working with homeless people.

It has one of the most striking sets in the inner city. With the background of bustling Oxford Street, and, in the distance, the sandstone courts, it’s set design taken to the limits. Something funny happens when you put actors in front of the scene, it does actually become a set.

My pictures don’t do the scene justice, it was hard to tear your eyes away from the actors.

This photo was taken while waiting for the lights to go green – looking from behind the actors to the audience.

I walked in half way through, and I couldn’t stay, so I can’t say too much about the plot. I would love to be able to next time.

Another temporary art thing appeared at Taylor Square recently.

We caught it mid-construction, but the final results are spectacular. It’s Dale Miles’ work, Underworld.

I love that this terrific beast is arising from the dingy downstairs toilet at Taylor Square. A real underworld.

These weird geometric objects appeared behind a fence on Taylor Square last night.

I walked by on Friday morning, as council workers tore plants out of their planters and pots, and tossed them into the back of their trucks.

They plant those flowers, take them out, plant them, erect new planters, take them away, without any real connection to what’s going on with the plants – they seem pretty healthy. Still, those planters have been strange from the moment they appeared.

I walked past later, at about midnight, and a fence had been erected around the Taylor Square public toilet. I peeked over the top, and this is what I saw.

I’m pretty sure it’s Dale Miles’s Underworld (the latest in the Taylor Square Plinth project – we blogged about Louisa Dawson’s work in October). He’s shown widely since graduating from the National Art School several years ago – see more here.

He says it’s a response:

to the mysteriousness of the shape of the space enclosed by the entrance fence and the two descending staircases. It is the mystery of the void inverted, the spider exiting its funnel.

The original idea is this. More pictures to come.

About this time last year, almost to the day, one of our readers spotted would-be Nazi graffiti on the road in Darlinghurst. Then this appeared over the weekend, near the old toilet block at Taylor Square.

But as one of our readers, Tony, noted in the comments at the time:

Well, actually, this is not a nazi cross (Swastika) at all. The real cross is the other way around (mirrored image).

This ‘reversed Swastika’ can be found in numerous places:

1. The Nydam Bog (look at the bottom of the page).
2. A buddhist temple
3. The flag of the city Hirosaki, in Japan

So we could be facing a very angry Danish from the year 200AD, a peaceful buddhist monk, a Japanese backpacker eager to come back to Oz… or an angry (and probably drunk) kid that doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. Place your bets ;-)

So there you have it, and it’s reappeared at the tail end of another summer holiday.

Walking through Taylor Square today at lunchtime, several council workers were hard at it laying some bitumen next to the old loos on the northern side of Oxford Street.

I asked one of the guys what it was they were working on. He told me it was for a “temporary art thing”.

Intriguing. Watch this space.

The council wants to increase city cycling by an amazing 500 per cent, and they’re putting in cycleways, cycle lanes and shared zones left, right and centre.

But it gets murky in the inner city, where new cycle paths eat into limited on-street parking. Like this cycle route through Bourke Street, from Woolloomooloo to Zetland, that’s recently gone to tender.

Residents object to losing precious parking spaces, but also what they’ve called the unsafe design of the cycleway, and along Bourke Street, between Taylor Square and Albion Streets, they’re making it clear which parking spaces are set to go.

Allegedly, 100 parking spaces are to go.

It’s a difficult predicament, but is it a bit of ‘not in our backyard’?

There’s a rooster and a fantastical island scene down at the corner of Foley and Langley Streets, Darlinghurst.

It’s just behind Oxford Street, near Taylor Square, and along with a Kill Pixie diss by some Slayer lover, there’s a fetching rooster stencilled on the wall.

There’s also this vaguely occult collection of symbols pasted up: an island palm, a pyramid, a skull, waves and sand.