workers digging in Pyrmont's three sandstone quarries named the sites Paradise, Purgatory and Hell Hole. Such descriptions could aptly apply to the suburb today - beautiful in parts but a no man's land in others, primarily because of the gigantic Western Distributor.

"There's no other way to describe it: it's scary," said a resident, Rachel Shepherd, 44, whose two young children play in a park beneath the flyovers. "They don't have any choice. That's the nearest park that is suitable for children."

But under a City of Sydney plan for 2030, residents in Pyrmont and neighbouring Ultimo will benefit from a remaking of the southern end of Darling Harbour.

The distributor's flyovers would be dismantled and the busy thoroughfare brought back to street level. A new park stretching from the harbour's edge to Paddy's Markets would be built over the distributor. Thousands of residents would move into new apartments constructed where the convention and exhibition centres stand.

Darling Drive, the underused road behind the centres, would channel traffic from the Anzac Bridge to Broadway and beyond.

The ambitious idea, which is yet to be costed, would provide new green space for children to play and also transform Harris Street into a village hub like Glebe Point Road in Glebe or Norton Street in Leichhardt.

"At the moment you've just got five lanes of traffic belting down Harris Street, so it makes it very unpleasant," said Garry Glazebrook, an urban planning lecturer from the University of Technology, Sydney. "It's basically just a traffic sewer. To the extent that they can use these new proposals to reinvigorate these areas, that's a good thing."

Ken Saunders, a community development worker at the Harris Community Centre, said turning parts of Darling Harbour into a residential community, instead of a tourism-focused locality, would be a windfall for the area.

"That offers the capacity for Darling Harbour, Pyrmont and Ultimo to hit a critical mass to sustain movie theatres, fruit and vegetable shops and start to be a place where people who work in the area might stay afterwards."

But Tourism and Transport Forum's managing director, Chris Brown, said the Western Distributor was functional and Darling Harbour was well loved by Sydneysiders. They should be left alone until other less functional places, such as the air space above Central's railway tracks, were redeveloped to include convention and entertainment centres, as well as retail, office and residential buildings.

An unbroken public transport corridor from the central business district to Botany could also be established, Mr Brown said.