Although mainly residential, there are many shops along Grand Junction Road and the closed Rosewater Loop railway line runs through the suburb.

Originally, the area was mainly used as vegetable and dairy farmland but became more and more residential as the railway lines and Grand Junction Road were completed and as Port Adelaide grew and developed.

They called the general area north of the Torrens River Yatala[4] retained in an early land division in the area and the cadastral Hundred of Yatala which is the lands administration unit defining real estate boundaries in the southern half of Rosewater and more than a hundred other suburbs north of the Torrens.

The area west of Levi's subdivision was farmland owned by William Henry Gray and was called Graytown (section 699, Hundred of Port Adelaide).

[5] An alternative etymology came to light in 1945 when a Commissioner of Police report accompanying a parcel of human bone fragments discovered in Rosewater stated the following: As the population grew the area became crowded with subdivisions.

The Rosewater Gasworks was the largest local industry and many of the residents of the area worked in the timber mills, rail yards and woolsheds to the east of Port Adelaide.

Opened 1 October 1912 it operated from 8am to midnight every day of the week, and was one of the first points of contact for ships sailing south from Hong Kong and Japan.

[9] In the 1980s the extension and widening of Grand Junction Road and the construction of the Redhill Bridge (over the Outer Harbor railway line) spelt the end for many of the small shops in the area and property value experienced a slump.

[4] In April 1975, Clyde Engineering opened a locomotive manufacturing plant in Rosewater, transferring production from Sydney.