Sunday, February 7, 2010

Steps through the Grafton bush

A friend showed this to me at yesterday's meeting of the Avondale-Waterview Historical Society, and said I could publish it here: a 1909 postcard showing the steps leading down from Symonds Street end to the first (1885) wooden footbridge across Grafton Gully. Our predecessors in this city must have been truly fit to carry both themselves, and their clothes, up those steps on a hot summer's day such as we've been having!

The card was date-stamped across the postage stamp three years after Auckland City Council began to make plans for the replacement of the wooden bridge, the ferro-concrete Grafton Bridge completed 100 years ago this year. Much of the bush scene in the picture above has gone before the motorway system, nopw -- but it must have been an idyllic, if a tad exhausting walk in its day.

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