Three faces of the United Service Hotel

The three faces of the United Service Hotel, corner Queen and Wellesley Street West, Auckland.

Originally called the Rifle Volunteers Hotel from 1860 by first publican William Baker, John and George Rayner changed the name to United Service Hotel in late June 1861.

The wooden first hotel (left) was destroyed completely in the September 1873 fire, but rebuilt in brick in 1874 by John Hancock (centre).

From 1878, Henry Nathaniel Abbott took on the lease, and tied the hotel in with his Abbott's Opera House just up the road. The name of the hotel changed to that of the Civic Hotel in 1959, and the exterior (as well as likely the interior) was modernised at some point to the way it looks today (right).

The London Bar opened there in 1969. The pub closed in 2006 for a time, reopened, then finally shut down in 2009. The Maze Restaurant & Bar that has taken over the space does not appear to have survived the 2020 pandemic. 

Images: left -- 4-86, and centre -- 4-346, both Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. Right is from Google streetview.

Anton Seuffert's first Wellesley Street workshop

 4-86, Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections [detail]

The highlighted building in this c.1866 image of Wellesley Street West was Samuel Henry Webb's "Royal Harmonium and Pianoforte Saloon", with the United Service Hotel (the original wooden version, to the right, at the Queen Street corner.) But from 1860 to 1864, this was the site of the first workshop run by Bohemian craftsman Anton Seuffert, master furniture-maker.

By September 1864, despite his fame as the designer of a secretaire desk that had made it all the way to Queen Victoria, Seuffert still needed other income streams to keep his head above water. His wife ran her own fancy goods store, and his three-storey workshop became a dancing studio in the middle floor, while he retained workshops in the basement and second storey. It was when the dance studio became a warehouse for flour, let out to CA Stone & Son to store flour, that calamity struck. Too much flour was apparently loaded onto the floor -- the rear of the building gave way one day and collapsed, tumbling into the Wai Horotiu gully behind. Fortunately, there was only one injury, a Mr White who was struck by some of the timber as it came down.

Seuffert couldn't rebuild, so shifted his business across the road to around where the Bledisloe Building is today, and his lease was taken up by Webb. Webb, in turn, set up his harmonium shop, which evolved into a dance hall and exhibitions building, up until the 1873 fire which destroyed it, along with the rest of the block.

In 1879 the publican at the rebuilt United Service Hotel, Henry Nathaniel Abbott, bought the Seuffert-Webb site from Thomas Russell, along with the other two sites leading up to Elliot Street, and in 1881 built his "Wellesley Opera House", soon to be renamed "Abbot's Opera House", and known as such through to his death in 1899.

In 1909 his widow sold the opera house to the Fuller family. Fuller's Opera House was destroyed by fire in 1926, and the site was subsequently purchased by Smith & Caughey.