The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. This week, Melbourne added another tally to its count of beloved institutions lost to the pandemic. The Melbourne Star, our questionable answer to the London Eye and the Singapore Flyer, announced on Monday that it would stop lighting up the city skyline after 13 years of intermittent operation, citing the pandemic on top of existing challenges like increasing numbers of high-rises in the Docklands area. I moved to Melbourne just months after the current iteration of the Melbourne Star opened at the end of 2013, freshly rebranded from the Southern Star in an image overhaul with debatable success. Coming into the city on the SkyBus, it loomed in the distance, impressively big, gleaming white, bracketed by the high-rise buildings of the C.B.D.

Source: International New York Times September 10, 2021 07:07 UTC