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When state Labor MP Katie Hall steps outside her office and the heavy door clicks shut behind her, a confusing mix of carnage and cherished memories lies at her doorstep.
Fewer than five minutes’ walk from her electorate office is Nicholson Street Mall, where her grandmother used to take her to Forges, Footscray’s premier department store.
It was a time when people would dress up and make a day of visiting the tailor, the shoe shop and the locally revered Coles cafeteria.
In those days, Footscray was a proud and beautiful place, Hall says.
It’s still proud – but now it has a volatile edge.
Just beyond Hall’s electorate office, a couple of hundred metres from the mall, posters are plastered on the hunched white shoulders of the Nicholson Street bridge.
“Avenge Abdifatah Ahmed,” one reads, referring to a 35-year-old man police shot dead in Footscray’s CBD in April 2025. “No justice. No peace. F— cops.”
Across the bridge is the Courthouse Hotel, its historic facade recently spruced up with fresh paint and warm lighting.
On June 7, a brawl broke out in the pub before spilling onto the street. Millenium Nyolic, 25, was stabbed in the chaos and died in a nearby laneway.
Orange leaves crunch under an older woman’s feet as she walks up to the pub. Hall points to a spot on the woman’s path. The MP was attacked here on Nicholson Street, too, a few metres from her electorate office. “Just up here,” she says.
On June 25, a man came running past her before he collided with two women walking down Nicholson Street. One of the women, an office worker returning from lunch with a sandwich in her hand, fell to the ground.
The man lined her up before kicking her in the head “like she was a soccer ball”, Hall says, her face grim.
A man of no fixed address was charged with assault .
The MP takes off her hand brace to reveal a long bluish scar trailing down her ring finger. She needed emergency surgery after the man headbutted her when she intervened, knocking her over and damaging the tendons in her hand.
She winces as she moves her fingers gingerly up and down, practising the motion.
Walking now onto the pavers of Nicholson Street Mall – the section between Barkly and Paisley streets, closed to car traffic back in 1971 – the old Forges building can be seen, now largely derelict and vacant.
A large metal roller door seals off an entrance beside an immigration law firm and the adjacent Snap Fitness, the only occupants on the strip.
Four doors down, a postie stuffs letters into the mailbox of a business beside another roller door, shuttered at 3.15pm on a Wednesday.
The pizza joint opposite – a local favourite – is boarded up after its windows were smashed, and the remaining open restaurants and businesses look out over the mostly barren space.
The pedestrian mall was Melbourne’s first and among the first in Australia, but now the MP wants to reopen it to cars.
Forges was the anchor of this place before the likes of Highpoint shopping centre opened, profoundly shifting the retail landscape, Hall says. After a change of ownership – and more than a century trading – the department store site was sold off to developers in 2009.
City of Maribyrnong Mayor Mohamed Semra who, with two council colleagues, was confronted in the mall by a man with a knife on August 5, is considering the member for Footscray’s pitch as among ideas to revitalise its CBD.
“It started to become about food, and we have the best food in Melbourne,” Hall says. “We have beautiful small businesses. But the mall here has never really been the same since Forges closed.”
Hall argues opening the mall to at least one lane of traffic would make businesses more accessible, with places to park directly outside them.
Where other attempts to revitalise the mall – including a $250,000 playground, which had to be dismantled – have failed, a tree-lined and cyclist-friendly boulevard would also strengthen passive surveillance, Hall says.
“It’s just an idea, right?” she says. “People have different views.”
Woww Grocery owner Alex Embaye watches from his shopfront as Hall is photographed. He agrees it might be nice for people to be able to park outside. But he worries what a thoroughfare would mean for local homeless people who frequent the mall. He doesn’t want them to be moved on without stable housing.
“If the cars are coming here, that means no one is sitting outside,” Embaye says.
“The big problem is a lot of problems. [There are] always fights, always something broken.”
Embaye’s friend Nyambol Muorter worries about one particular man who often walks slowly through the mall – and sometimes finds it difficult to walk at all. “It’s not safe,” she says.
The community’s reaction to Hall’s proposal is mixed. After warm greetings and handshakes from some passersby, she is locked into an argument with a woman who accuses the MP of sucking the life out of this place.
The woman is a member of local advocacy group Footscray Community Response, which later shares a statement condemning Hall’s proposal.
“Opening up the mall to traffic is Katie Hall’s knee-jerk vision to ‘solve’ homelessness by displacing the most marginalised people in Footscray to less visible locations, further from the services they rely on and the community they are a valued part of,” group spokesman Lach Buckley says.
At one point in the heated back and forth with the woman on the street, Hall walks away, only to come storming back, accusing the woman of trivialising her attack. “I needed surgery,” she says, her voice strained with anguish.
The woman is similarly distressed, and waves us away, denying the claim.
In Footscray, volatility breeds pain, and pain manifests division. But through all the fighting, most share a common desire: to recover something this suburb has lost.
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