Park Street

Park Street takes its name from a deer park Sir Elijah Impey once kept nearby; before that it was known as European Burial Road, leading to the South Park Street Cemetery, consecrated in 1767 and still anchoring the street’s eastern end. As Calcutta grew, the road filled in around this path: the Asiatic Society, founded 1784 by Sir William Jones, took root here, and by the turn of the 20th century Park Street had become one of Calcutta’s most fashionable thoroughfares, lined with grand residential blocks.
That affluence peaked in the 1950s-60s, when Park Street was Asia’s most cosmopolitan avenue, its restaurants, jazz clubs and bakeries now objects of considerable nostalgia. A handful survive intact: Flurys (1927), the oldest surviving tea-room in the area, its Art Deco room still serving a largely unchanged breakfast menu to office workers and elderly regulars; Mocambo (1956), a mid-century continental restaurant whose prawn cocktail and devilled crab menu is a record of what Calcutta’s elite wanted from a night out around 1960; and Trincas (1918), where the city’s jazz musicians once played and Satyajit Ray drank, still hosting jazz evenings today.
A denser commercial layer has filled the gaps: chain restaurants and bars radiate especially from The Park hotel (1967), whose nightclub Tantra and live-music venue Someplace Else keep the street going into the small hours, earning it the reputation of “the street that never sleeps,” a reputation that peaks every Christmas and New Year. The lanes off the main road hold schools (St Xavier’s), churches and mansions: La Martiniere for Boys and Girls; Loreto House, founded by the same order whose young novice, Agnes Bojaxhiu, later left to found the Missionaries of Charity as Mother Teresa.
The South Park Street Cemetery is the single best reason to walk the street’s full length: among its graves are Sir William Jones, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (leader of the Young Bengal Movement), the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt and one Rose Aylmer, who reportedly died from eating too many pineapples. The most satisfying way to experience Park Street today is as a curated set of stops: Flurys for breakfast, Mocambo or Trincas for dinner, the cemetery at the end, rather than a street to wander freely, since the modern commercial layer can crowd out the older one.