Antias has a complex and baffling past. Before the site was quarried, it was much higher than it is today.
Residents in the new building (named after a Pyrmont street which has disappeared) look onto Blackwattle Bay. There, barges would load stone from the quarries, before there was a track for horse-drawn drays.

CSR expanded into this site in order to build a Char House. Its purpose was to incinerate animal bone, obtained from abattoirs on Glebe Island and in Pyrmont. In 1890, Edward Knox, the founder of CSR, explained that burnt bone (bone char) was used ‘for decolourizing syrups’.
CSR wasted none of its material: once the char had done its decolourizing job, it ‘could be used in the manufacture of superphosphate’.

Lend Lease hoped to retain the Char House as a café and exhibition space for industrial archaeology. In the event, the structure was demolished and some of its artifacts housed elsewhere in Jacksons Landing.

South of the Char House, the City built a splendid incinerator, designed by Walter Burley Griffin. Several such incinerators were built between the Wars (including one in Glebe), to process the rubbish that Sydneysiders threw out in increasing quantities. Sadly, plans to preserve the Pyrmont incinerator also lapsed.